Could you imagine what it would be like to live your entire life confined in a mechanical box one that’s just big enough to fit your body into? What if you couldn’t move, eat, or even breathe without it? Sounds like a waking nightmare, right? Well, for Paul Richard Alexander, that wasn’t a bad dream, but the stark reality of his life! From 1952, Paul spent every waking moment trapped inside a machine, until his death in 2024. Let's investigate the life of a man who was locked in a machine more than 70 years.
Polio
To understand Paul’s predicament, first we need to understand Polio the virus that Paul contracted at the age of just six. Polio, short for poliomyelitis, is a life-threatening disease that can infect a person’s spinal cord. In severe cases, that causes paralysis, where sufferers can’t move parts of their body and become incredibly weak.
That terrifying condition affects about 1 in every 200 sufferers, leaving many with progressive muscle weakness, irreversibly withered limbs, and joint deformities. Scary as it sounds, those people are the lucky ones, as paralysis that extreme can affect muscles to the point where sufferers can no longer walk, eat, or even breathe on their own. And, sadly, that is where
Paul comes in.
He caught the virus in 1952 when the US and Europe were going through the worst polio epidemic on record. In that year alone, more than 57,000 people were infected in the US for perspective, that’s about the same as the entire population of Greenland!Although Polio had been around for a long time before 1952, and it could be traced back all the way to Ancient Egypt! On an ancient Egyptian stone tablet that was carved around 3400 years ago, for instance, there was a man with a terribly withered leg. That’s a tell-tale symptom of Polio.
However, it wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that the invasive infection really started to cause problems. In 1916, 36 years before Paul would catch polio, over 27,000 cases were reported in New York City alone, and, sadly, at least 6,000 people didn’t make it. Widespread panic gripped the city, with the government urging families to quarantine inside their homes. Movie theatres, pools, and amusement parks all closed down, and people fled to live in less populated areas. Does that sound familiar at all? Even though you might be getting vivid flashbacks of 2020, unlike the COVID epidemic, it wasn’t the elderly who were most vulnerable to catching polio but the children. That is because the virus is sickeningly spread when the feces of an infected person is introduced to the mouth of a healthy person.That can be through infected water or food, or from someone just not washing their hands. And considering young children rarely think to wash their hands before they go shoving them and anything they can grab in their mouths, it’s no surprise they were so badly affected.
But, if polio had been panicking the world since 1916, why was there still no cure by 1952 when Paul caught the disease? Well, medicine and science were a lot less advanced back then, and much of what we know today we still hadn’t figured out.So, without a solid answer for how to treat or protect against polio, people turned to strange remedies that were often suggested by frauds trying to cash in on people’s fear. But even legitimate, respected experts frequently suggested cures based on false reasoning.
In 1916, leading biomedical inventor John Haven Emerson recommended sufferers take regular baths in almond meal, and even insisted that electrocution of their lower extremities would help alleviate symptoms. Though if you think that sounds uncomfortable, other treatments included injecting lethal substances straight into the patient’s spine like adrenaline and even disinfectant!
Unsurprisingly, many of those so-called “treatments” actually made the condition worse. In 1916, Samuel Meltzer, a respected American physiologist, championed injecting adrenaline into the spines of ill children based on successful experiments he’d carried out on monkeys. But the method turned out to be a complete failure with humans. And sadly, out of the 105 children tested, 45 didn’t make it through the process.Those children lucky enough not to befall that frightful fate often had their bodies covered in plaster casts or metal braces for weeks, months, or even years. Though heavy and cumbersome, the casts and braces were vital to supporting polio-weakened body parts.While they helped the kids recover, being confined to those casts and having to spend weeks alone and paralyzed in a hospital was an understandably scary experience. One five year old boy, who was paralyzed from the neck down, recalled a particularly terrifying encounter with a wasp!Lying in his hospital bed, and unable to move, he suddenly heard a buzzing sound coming from the far side of the room. He couldn’t run away or even move a sheet over his head. He just had to watch as the wasp buzzed closer, and closer.
Iron Lung
In 1928, hygienist Philip Drinker and physiologist Louis Shaw teamed up at Harvard University to form a polio-fighting supergroup. Together, they created the first machine to effectively treat the most severely affected polio sufferers or at least keep them alive long enough to recover. In the worst cases of polio, like Paul Alexander’s, patients would be paralyzed to such a degree that they couldn’t even use their lungs.
But Drinker and Shaw’s device inflated and deflated polio sufferer’s lungs for them. The first machine they made used two vacuum cleaners, powered by an electric motor, to suck air out of a sealed metal box that was just big enough for one patient.That lowered the air pressure inside, forcing the patient’s chest cavity to expand to fill the vacuum, and flooding their lungs with air. Then, the vacuum cleaners were reversed, pumping air back into the box and raising the air pressure, forcing the lungs to deflate and push the air back out.
That miraculous machine was called a “Drinker Respirator”, but it was more simply known as an Iron Lung. After some tweaks, the original design was improved by using a set of bellows instead of vacuum cleaners. Drinker also experimented with the concept of a multi-person ventilator by turning an entire room into one large iron lung. It could hold up to four patients, and had enough room inside for a nurse to move around and take care of the children.Later, in 1931, John Haven Emerson, the same man who’d recommended electrocution and bathing in almond meal to cure the disease surprisingly made improvements to the iron lung. Emerson’s machine was quieter, more efficient, and cheaper at just $1,000. That was less than half the cost of a Drinker Respirator, but it was still a lot of money, costing roughly $17,500 today!
Because they were so expensive, hospitals had trouble buying enough iron lungs to support the sheer number of children affected by the virus. Some hospitals were forced to make their own improvised machines, in the 1940’s which had bellows that were pumped by hand.
A handful of generous people did their best to help out though. Take Sir William Morris for example; an English car manufacturer. In 1938, he promised to manufacture and donate as many iron lungs as he could to any hospital that asked for them. In total, he donated over 5,000 machines, that’s about $95 million worth of equipment in todays money.
The Life Of Paul Richard Alexander
Let's jump ahead to 1952 the year the most cases of polio were ever recorded in the US. As thousands of children were being sent to hospital with the deadly disease, six year old Paul Alexander was outside his home in Dallas, Texas, playing happily in the summer rain. One second everything was perfectly fine; the next, he began to feel sick and ran inside to complain to his mother of head and neck pains.
Within seconds, Paul’s mother recognized the tell-tale feverish symptoms of early-stage polio and rushed her son to bed. The family doctor was called out, but because the hospitals were overcrowded with other polio patients, he recommended Paul stay at home despite his worsening condition. After just five days though, the boy had deteriorated to the point that his parents had to take him into hospital despite their doctor’s advice.By that time, Paul could hardly hold a crayon, and was so weak that he couldn’t even cough to clear his lungs. When a doctor finally examined him, he devastatingly told Paul’s parents that nothing could be done. But, thankfully, a second doctor thought differently. Heroically, that doctor performed an emergency tracheotomy on Paul, creating a small hole in his throat and using a tube sucked out all the congestion from his lungs.
When Paul eventually woke up, he was still unable to move, but his body was confusingly encased in a loud machine. At first, he thought he was in some sort of strange dream, but he soon learned he’d been confined to an iron lung. Though he’d beaten the initial infection, polio had left him permanently paralyzed from the neck down.So, for the next 18 months, that is where he would stay. The hospital ward was full of children just like him, but as the months passed, Paul saw more and more of them slowly recover. Or, more often than not, pass away. He, however, remained unchanged; glued to his bed with the machine breathing for him.
To help overcome his inability to breathe naturally, the doctors spent time teaching Paul to frog breathe. And no, that doesn’t mean Paul learned how to breathe underwater! Rather, frog breathing is a technique that involves sucking in a mouthful of air, then raising your tongue to the roof of your mouth. That movement pushes air down your throat, forcing it into your lungs. Without practice, it’s very difficult especially for a small child.
Although he hated doing the breathing exercise, through sheer willpower and perseverance, Paul mastered frog breathing by the age of just eight. That allowed him to breathe outside of the iron lung by himself for the first time in nearly two years! Finally, Paul had some of his independence back, and even though he still needed to sleep in the iron lung every night, he felt alive again.Determined to accomplish his goals despite his affliction, Paul adapted to his new life. A mirror was fixed to the top of his machine so he could look around the room without craning his neck. His father made him a special stick he could hold with his mouth and use to play with toys; he also learned how to paint and write with a paintbrush or pencil in his mouth. But as Paul grew older, he knew he had to get an education to succeed in life because even though his body was paralyzed, his mind was still sharp as a knife.By the age of 21, Paul unbelievably became the first person to graduate from a Dallas high school without physically attending any lessons. Not only that, but he graduated at the top of his class. After completing high school with flying colors, Paul then applied to Dallas’ Southern Methodist University, but they wouldn’t accept him, deeming him ‘too disabled to study’.Paul was understandably furious. But it would take more than that to make him give up! He called the university countless times and fought tooth and nail for a course placement for two long years. Eventually, the university caved, and he was accepted to study economics and finance.
After overcoming that hurdle, he began to dream bigger, and successfully transferred over to the University of Texas. At his old college, Paul had been living at home, but to the horror of his parents he was now moving out to live on the campus full time. It can’t have been easy getting the massive 660 pound iron lung into his new dorm room, but not even that challenge could stop Paul.
After seven long years, Paul graduated from the University of Texas in 1978, but even that wasn’t enough for him. As soon as he had finished one degree, he decided to dive right into another. And not just any other, but one of the toughest degrees available at the time: Law.Despite his professors telling him he would never pass, in 1984, a full 17 years after he graduated high school, Paul got his law degree. Two years later, against all odds, he kickstarted a successful career as a lawyer, smashing through every obstacle in his way. Now, that’s what you call a success story and it doesn’t stop there!
In July 2022, Paul Richard Alexander will have been reliant on his iron lung for an astonishing 70 years. At the grand old age of 76, he’s once again confined to the machine full-time. From the iron lung, he eats, drinks, sleeps, and even works but he refuses to let the situation get him down, to the point where he’s become a global inspiration. In 2014, he was honored to be accepted into the Rotary Club, a global service organization who are working on projects to help end polio once and for all.
As happy as he looked, his life does come with its fair share of challenges. His original machine began to fail back in 2015, spare parts have been out of production for decades because no one expected that someone who needed an iron lung would ever live as long as Paul has!Luckily, one heroic engineer came to the rescue, and supplied Paul with everything he needed to keep on living his best life. Since then, Paul has amazingly gone on to achieve even more. While working as a lawyer, he recently finished an eight year long venture to write his memoir, called Three Minutes for A Dog, which was released in 2020. But what’s even more amazing is that he typed out the whole thing by using a rod in his mouth to tap away at his keyboard!
Este hombre ha vivido durante siete décadas dentro de una cápsula metálica para poder respirar by Primer Impacto
Polio Vaccine
Although Paul isn’t the only person to kick polio’s butt and live to tell the tale! More famously, America’s 32nd President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was diagnosed with polio in 1921, when he was 39 years old. He was unable to walk without the use of braces or crutches and sometimes used a wheelchair to get around.
Much like Paul Alexander though, he didn’t let his disability stop him. He was elected in 1933 and is the only US president to have served more than two full terms in office! And he didn’t let that time go to waste. In 1938, he spearheaded America’s movement to fight back against polio by founding the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. And by doing that, he actually helped develop the world’s first polio vaccine!
Using his presidential power, Roosevelt appealed to the public for donations to research a polio vaccine. Then, famous TV personality Eddie Cantor jokingly told the nation to send just one dime each to the White House to help the cause. To Roosevelt’s surprise, The White House was then flooded with mail, and they received a whopping 2,680,000 dimes!
That’s over $5 million in today’s money, which Cantor cleverly coined The March of Dimes. But for all that money, nobody seemed to be able to get any closer to producing the fabled polio vaccine. Years passed, the Second World War came and went, the Cold War began, and yet every year polio remained a constant threat. But the March of Dimes kept going, raising more and more money to find a vaccine with every year that passed.People were so determined to beat the deadly virus that one fundraiser, by the name of Mr O’Connor, tirelessly raised half a billion dimes for the cause. That’s so many dimes that if you lined them all up, you would have to walk, swim, and climb the entire circumference of the Earth 2 and a quarter times before you ran out! That’s exhausting just to think about.But when 1952 rolled around, and the world was in the midst of the worst polio epidemic ever recorded, people were fed up. Donation after donation had been made for the last fourteen years and still no cure had been found. But that’s when Jonas Salk walked into the picture. He’d been leading research on The March of Dimes effort since 1949, but in 1952 he had a major breakthrough! While conducting tests on monkeys, he found that those he had injected with a new formula were suddenly immune to the virus!
Wasting no time, Salk started testing his vaccine on a group of 43 children and, after that went well, in 1953 he vaccinated his own children too. He was obviously pretty confident in himself! Sadly, the vaccine came just a few months too late to help poor Paul Alexander, but it did go on to save countless lives.
In 1954, Salk rolled out the biggest vaccine test of all. Huge field trials were held across the US involving the vaccination of 1.8 million school children against the deadly disease. Those children were known as the polio pioneers and became a beacon of hope for the whole world.On April 12th, 1955, the results were announced and it was revealed, to worldwide praise, that the vaccine was safe and effective. After decades of research, millions of dollars, and countless lives lost, the end of polio was finally in sight. People queued in droves to get vaccinated and, what’s more, Salk’s vaccine was then improved upon by researcher Albert Sabin.By 1961 an oral version of the vaccine was put into circulation that just needed to be squirted onto a spoon, making it easier than ever to administer! The results were astonishing. In the two years before the vaccine was widely available, the average number of polio cases in the US was over 45,000; by 1962, that number had dropped to just 910, and by 1979 it had been eradicated completely.As of October 7th, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported there were just 441 cases of polio worldwide. However, the impact of that vile virus is still felt across the globe. It’s estimated that there are 300,000 polio survivors living in the US alone, and about 10 to 20 million survivors worldwide. Iron lungs went out of production long ago as the world got vaccinated, but Paul Alexander was one of the very few still entombed by the bulking machines up until his death in March 2024.
For him, and so many others, polio has been a tough, life changing disease. But Paul story stands as a testament, proving that no matter how many hardships might come your way, you can always overcome them if you have the determination to do so.
