The polio survivor known as ‘The Man with the Iron Lung’ has died at the age of 78.
Paul Alexander contracted polio when he was six years old in 1952, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.The disease left him unable to breathe on his own, so his doctors placed him in a metal cylinder where he would spend the rest of his life.He then obtained a law degree, practiced law, and published papers.
Paul Alexander the man with Iron Lung passed away yesterday;During this time, Paul attended college, became a lawyer, and published as a writer.`Paul was a great role model.”When he became ill in 1952, a doctor in his hometown of Dallas operated on him and his life was saved. But due to polio, his body was no longer able to breathe on its own.
The answer was to put him in a so-called “iron lung”, a metal cylinder that surrounded his body up to his neck What is polio and how is it spread?
Thanks to his lungs, which he called “old iron horses”, he was able to breathe. The bellows sucked air out of the cylinder, forcing the lungs to expand and take in air. When I gave the air back,
the reverse process caused my lungs to deflate.After many years, Alexander was finally able to breathe on his own, allowing him to leave his lungs for short periods of time.Like most polio survivors placed in iron lungs, he was not expected taht he was live long. But he lived decades after the invention of the polio vaccine in the 1950s nearly eradicated the disease from the Western world.
He graduated from high school and then attended Southern Methodist University. He received his law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Two years later, he was admitted to the bar and practiced for several decades.
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“I knew that if I wanted to do something in life, it had to be spiritual,” he told the Guardian in 2020.He published his memoir this year, which he says took eight years, typing on a keyboard with a plastic pen and dictating to a friend.Medical advances made the iron lung obsolete in the 1960s and it was replaced by ventilators. But Alexander continued to live inside the cylinder. Because, as he said, he was used to cylinders.
He was recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who lived the longest in an iron lung.