Respirator Gift

Infantile paralysis last week continued to subside in communities along the northern Atlantic coast, continued to rise slightly elsewhere. No nation-wide epidemic seemed likely.

At Glen Cove, L. I., Mrs. Henry Pomeroy Davison, American Red Cross central committee member, widow of the late great banker, mother of the Assistant Secretary of War and of a Morgan junior partner, made an exemplary gesture against infantile paralysis' second worst ravage.

Next to swift death, the worst effect of infantile paralysis is inability to breathe. The rib-raising muscles which cause the lungs to expand are paralyzed. The victim soon suffocates.

Professor Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw of the Harvard School of Public Health three years ago invented the Drinker Respirator, at the suggestion of Consolidated Gas Co. of New York City. The gas company wanted a device to resuscitate asphyxiated persons. The Drinker machine does that (TIME, Sept. 8, 1930). It is a metal box weighing 700 Ib. A person unable to breathe voluntarily is sealed in the chamber, all except his head. An electric pump creates a mild, interrupted vacuum in the sealed box. The vacuum is sufficient to pull up the victim's chest. That action pulls air into his lungs through his mouth which remains exposed to the free air. When the chamber vacuum is released, his chest falls, air is squeezed out of his lungs. The interrupted vacuum thus makes him breathe at a normal rate, keeps him alive until he can breathe again by himself.

Like many another institution, the North Country Community Hospital at Glen Cove thought it could not afford a Drinker Respirator.* Mrs. Davison gave a lesson in how to get one. She solicited her neighbors, quickly collected the $2,000 a Drinker Respirator costs.

*In three years Warren E. Collins Inc. of Boston, sole maker, has sold 130 respirators for adults, 41 for infants; has orders for nine adult, one infant sizes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.