After an emergency tracheostomy operation, he was unable to breathe without the iron lung machine that now encased his small body. When he died recently at the age of 78, Paul had spent more than ...

Almost a century ago, the first iron lung was born offering new hope to polio sufferers. Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz of Harvard University devised the machine in 1927. They had a clever idea ...

doctors attempted to wean Alexander off the machine during hospital stays, but he would turn blue and pass out. As a result, Alexander's reliance on the iron lung persisted despite the ...