Suddenly, respiratory failure was not a death sentence. Their version of a negative pressure breathing machine caught on in the medical community. Other hospitals started using the machines, and The New York Times and other papers began reporting on individual patients cared for in the new respirator and giving details on how they fared. The machine captured the public’s imagination.
The Drinker and Shaw respirator became the Drinker-Collins respiratory, often shortened to the Drinker respiratory, leaving poor Shaw out of the limelight. Referred to as a “mechanical lung” and then a “metal lung” in The New York Times, the name that ultimately stuck was the “iron lung,” a term that suddenly appeared in the U.S. on October 1, 1930, when a number of newspapers carried the Associated Press article about the “drinker respirator, commonly known as the ‘iron lung,’” that was rushed by truck from Harvard up to Maine, and “was credited with saving the life of Norman Hibbard of Bridgton.”
The monster metal device was about to become synonymous with the treatment of polio. The relationship between human and machine had been irrevocably changed.
While the iron lung was a marvel of technology, Wilson noted that caring for large patients encased within, such as Barrett Hoyt, was particularly difficult. The patient was laid out on a narrow table and slotted into the tube like a tray of pastry into the oven. At this point, with their head sticking out one end, they were fully enclosed to create the necessary seal, giving carers no easy access to the patient’s body.
It took six people to bathe a patient. The clinical team had to stop the machine, slide the person out, and move as quickly as possible to complete the task before the patient turned blue, slowly asphyxiating before their eyes. As soon as they were done, they’d shove the patient back in and start the machine again.
And then there was the noise. The pumps that powered the respirators, supplied by the Electric Blower Company, were reliable, but “their noise is a drawback in hospital work,” Drinker and Shaw noted in their first paper.