Hand Breathing

Albert Frick lay propped on the hospital bed, languid, breathing by hand. He had felt miserable; had had a couple of teeth pulled at the dentist's. Going home to his rooming-house in Evanston, Ill., outside Chicago, muggy-minded, dazed, a motor car had hit him, hurt the back of his neck a trifle. Now he was in St. Francis Hospital, Evanston.

His legs lay straight out before him under the bed blankets. But they felt crossed and he could not move them. They were paralyzed. So was his bladder and his throat and his diaphragm. Two men whom he knew--fellow employes of the Public Service Co. of Northern Illinois (Samuel Insull, Chairman) --stood at either side of his body. With their hands they were pushing down on his chest and squeezing air out of his lungs. When they let go, a little air would whistle back into his lungs.

The arms of his friends moved up and down slowly, regularly, like the drive shafts of electric dynamos. The moving arms had hairs on them, and after a while he could see the little drops of sweat forming and making the hairs on the arms go limp. Then a new set of arms would come on duty to force his lungs, like bellows, to suck in air.

Fifty-seven men of the Public Service company took 15-minute shifts at the artificial respiration of Albert Frick. Up and down their arms went. The patient's father and mother were waiting outside the hospital room, praying that the 57 men would save the life of their son.*

The doctors said that he was suffering from Landry's paralysis, which generally kills the victim in two to 14 days. Still there was faint hope for their Albert. In 1898, at Minneapolis, a Swedish house servant had lived for 41 days under artificial respiration. And at New Haven, a year ago, one Mrs. Mary Baker, with lungs, paralyzed for 75 hours, had recovered.

The men kept working the boy's chest up and down, inflation, deflation. That was no longer a fellow human under their hot, aching hands. The ribs below their throbbing fingers became the wobbly staves of a poorly coopered barrel. Still they pushed, for 108 hours. Then they stopped. The barrel had caved in.

And this was last week's "principal news-story."

*A pulmotor was not used, because : 1) His nose and mouth would have to be sealed ; 2 ) It would have a bad psychological effect on his morale; 3) It could not be so well regulated, since there was no spark of natural respiration.