In 1928, doctors sealed an eight-year-old girl inside a metal chamber called the Drinker respirator — and her breathing steadied within a minute. You know it as the iron lung, and for nearly fifty years it was the only thing standing between tens of thousands of polio patients and suffocation. This is the full story: the Harvard engineer who built it, the patent fight that made it affordable, the hospital wards packed with rows of tanks during the 1950s epidemics, the vaccine that emptied them out almost overnight, and the small handful of survivors who kept living inside their machines for decades afterward — one of them until 2024.
Shop the styles/items featured in this video:
- Book: “Polio: An American Story” by David M. Oshinsky
- Book: “Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung” by Paul Alexander
- Anatomical human lung model (educational replica)
- Book: “Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases” by Paul Offit
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