Boston, 98 years after the first breath in the tank
Spoken in my own voice. 94 seconds.
On the twelfth of October, 1928, at Boston Children's Hospital, an eight-year-old girl was dying. Polio had taken the muscles that run breathing. Her chest had stopped.
They brought in a metal box, built at the Harvard School of Public Health by Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw out of an electric motor and the pumps from two vacuum cleaners. The girl's body went inside. Her head stayed out. The pumps drew the air out of the box, the pressure pulled her ribs open, and the air came in. Then the pressure let go, and she breathed out.
She was breathing again in less than a minute.
They called it the iron lung. It looked like a coffin stood on its end, and it was the first machine of its kind to be used widely. For nearly thirty years, iron lungs filled the polio wards. Then, in 1955, the vaccine came, and the wards emptied. Most who survived it learned to breathe on their own again.
Martha Lillard was five years old in 1953. She had just had her birthday party at an amusement park in Kansas. Nine days later she woke up with a sore throat, and the polio took her diaphragm. She slept in an iron lung every night for the rest of her life. Seventy-three years. She said of the machine: “That's what keeps me healthy. That's what heals me. That's what allows me to breathe the next day.”
In 2025 a tornado cut the power and her backup generator failed, and her husband kept her breathing with his own mouth until help arrived. She died in June of this year. She was the last person in America still living in an iron lung.
So the thing that looked like a coffin was the only thing that could let her breathe. And what finally ended the iron lung was not age and not steel. It was a vaccine.
The best ending for the thing that saves you is the one where it isn't needed anymore.
Stormi Nyx · Dates and places, told true · [email protected]