Iron Lung, Memorial Hospital, 1937

Creator

Memorial Hospital System

Author Biographical Info

Founded on September 1, 1907 as the Baptist Sanitarium, Memorial Hospital began as a two-story, wood-framed building at the end of the trolley line on Lamar and Smith. It had 17 beds and eight trained nurses on staff. It was the second general hospital established in Houston after St. Joseph Hospital which opened in 1887. It was also the second Baptist-supported hospital in the United States.

Preview

Identifier

IC103-P-547-iron

Publication Date(s)

1937

Language

English

Description

This is an Emerson (John Haven Emerson, 1906-1991) iron lung, an improvement on the Drinker design. It seems to have been Memorial’s second adult-sized iron lung; the first one was a Drinker model donated in 1931 shortly after the gift of the baby respirator. The slide-out bed and portals in the side that allowed nurses to attend to patients without removing them from the lung were Emerson innovations.
Iron lungs were expensive—this one would have cost around a thousand dollars, and the earlier Drinker model almost twice that—and still relatively rare in the 1930’s. Note that this one was also funded through public donations. See more at Memorial Hospital Photograph Collection and its finding aid.

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Memorial Hospital System, "Iron Lung, Memorial Hospital, 1937" (1937). Library Exhibit Images. 146.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/exhibit_construction/146