NMAH | Polio: The Iron Lung and Other Equipment

What Is an Iron Lung?
No device is more associated with polio than the tank respirator, better known as the iron lung. Physicians who treated people in the acute, early stage of polio saw that many patients were unable to breathe when the virus’s action paralyzed muscle groups in the chest. Death was frequent at this stage, but those who survived usually recovered much or almost all of their former strength.

Nothing worked well in keeping people breathing until 1927, when Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw at Harvard University devised a version of a tank respirator that could maintain respiration artificially until a person could breathe independently, usually after one or two weeks. The machine was powered by an electric motor with two vacuum cleaners. The pump changed the pressure inside a rectangular, airtight metal box, pulling air in and out of the lungs.

Inventor John Emerson had refined Drinker’s device and cut the cost nearly in half. Inside the tank respirator, the patient lay on a bed (sometimes called a “cookie tray”) that could slide in and out of the cylinder as needed. The side of the tank had portal windows so attendants could reach in and adjust limbs, sheets, or hot packs.

	The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis began mass distribution of tank respirators in 1939.
	In the 1930s, an iron lung cost about $1,500—the average price of a home.
	In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States; in 2004, there were 39.

“There was a tremendous psychological element at work in all of us in our relationship to the lung. The metal respirator assumed an almost animate personality and became a symbol of protection and security…. We were incomplete embryos in a metal womb.”
—Larry Alexander, 1954

Right photo. Man in an iron lung looking into the mirror mounted above

Left: This blue iron lung is the first one made by John Emersonís company. He tested it by spending the night in it. It was first used in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1931 to save the life of a priest with polio.
Right: Man using an Emerson tank respirator equipped with a mirror, 1950s Courtesy of Post-Polio Health International

“Breathing”

Grasping for straws is easier;
You can see the straws.

“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,”
Presses down upon me
At fifteen pounds per square inch,
A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean,
Supporting the weight of condors
That swim its churning currents.
All I get is a thin stream of it,
A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life
As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection.

Water wouldn’t be so circumspect;
Water would crash in like a drunken sailor,
But air is prissy and genteel,
Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity.

The vast, circumambient atmosphere
Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters
Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky.

I inhale it anyway,
Knowing that it will hurt
In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.
—Mark O’Brien, 1988

Patents for the Benefit of All
In the 1930s, Philip Drinker and Harvard University (where Drinker was a faculty member) took John Emerson to court, claiming he had infringed on patent rights by altering Drinker’s iron lung design. Emerson defended himself by making the case that such lifesaving devices should be freely available to all.

Years later, when Jonas Salk was asked whether he would patent his polio vaccine and make a fortune, he replied that the vaccine belonged to everyone, making the comparison, “How could you patent the sun?”