FORCED TO BREATHE
Patient’s Six-month Ordeal Doctors at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in London, are., testing a machine sent to them from the United States which battles with death and is sometimes able to snatch a patient back to life when all else has failed. It is believed to be the only apparatus which will compel a patient to breathe automatically even when his vitality has sunk so low that there is no effort on his part to breathe at all (says the “Sunday Dispatch”). Placed in this machine he must continue to inhale, and he cannot stop breathing. Dr. Kenneth Hartley, the house surgeon at a recent .inquest on a seven-year-old girl, told Dr. Waldo, the London city coroner, that the child’s heart failed after an operation. The heart was massaged, and she began to breathe again. She was then placed in the Drinker machine, as the appliance is known, and she lived for four hours more.
The machine is boat-shaped, is about 6ft. long, and has complicated electrical and other fittings. The record case reported from the United States is of a patient who was in the machine for six months and then recovered.
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Bibliographic details
Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 81, 30 December 1931, Page 10
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195FORCED TO BREATHE Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 81, 30 December 1931, Page 10
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