Category: Life Support

• The Iron Lung Horror

  The Iron Lung Horror was a rumor complex that attached itself to the earliest years of mechanical negative-pressure ventilation and later deepened during the polio era. In its most extreme form, the theory claimed that people placed in iron lungs were not being maintained solely for therapeutic purposes but were being preserved as passive biological resources—kept alive in states of dependency, observation, or extraction. The historical iron lung, first clinically used in 1928, was a real lifesaving machine that transformed the treatment of respiratory paralysis. Yet from early on it also produced fear, because it visually enclosed the body, mechanized breathing, and appeared to suspend death without restoring autonomy. Those features made it a natural object of technological horror and speculative misuse.