Iron lung
Pulmón de acero
- Date
- 1928 · confidence high
- Place
- Harvard School of Public Health / Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr.
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
Drinker and Shaw, professors of industrial hygiene at Harvard, built a negative-pressure respirator -a sealed cylinder from which only the patient's head protrudes- that forces breathing when the respiratory muscles fail. It was first used on a patient on 12 October 1928, at Boston Children's Hospital.
Wikidata dates the milestone to 1927, the year of the first prototypes and tests; the first clinical use on a person was on 12 October 1928.
What it led to
- Mass treatment of polio-induced respiratory paralysis (1940s-1950s)
- Later development of positive-pressure ventilators