Medicine: Electric Lung

Two years ago. a young medical researcher assisting at an operation near the phrenic nerve (which runs from the brain to the diaphragm), got a new idea from watching a well-known reaction. When stimulated, the phrenic nerve makes the diaphragm contract, causing abdominal breathing. Why is it not possible, Dr. Stanley J. Sarnoff asked himself, to stimulate the nerve rhythmically, perhaps electrically, to provide artificial respiration for patients whose breathing apparatus has been upset?

Last week, the Harvard School of Public Health, which in 1929 developed the Drinker respirator (iron lung) for victims of spinal polio, announced that a device based on Dr. Sarnoff’s theory is now helping to save the lives of victims of bulbar polio.

In this form of the disease, rarer but far deadlier than spinal polio, the virus attacks the bulb or brain stem. The iron lung often will not work on bulbar polio because the patient’s breathing is jerky. with an irregular rhythm; his intake and release of air cannot be synchronized with the iron lung’s regular beat. But bulbar polio has one feature which fitted in well with Dr. Sarnoff’s theory: it generally leaves the phrenic nerve undamaged.

To help Sarnoff translate his theory into practice, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis put up research funds. Then, in the School’s machine shop, Sarnoff,* with the help of Dr. Leslie Silverman, began assembling transformers and rheostats. Soon they had a machine which could deliver regular pulses of an electric current. It was too small to produce a shock. But, applied to the phrenic nerves of monkeys, cats and dogs, the current made the breathing muscles work rhythmically.

Sarnoff still had to find the exact spot on a human neck where the current would hit the “motor point” of the phrenic nerve. For this, his Swiss-born wife Charlotte (who is also his laboratory assistant) served as a human guinea pig. When they found the spot, after hours of probing her neck with the electrode, her diaphragm contracted forcefully and she took a gusset-popping deep breath. Dr. Sarnoff had proved his device. Last year, he and his team of coworkers* called in a manufacturer to make technical improvements in the machine and turn out a pilot model. As now perfected, it is no bigger than a portable radio, can be plugged into ordinary house current.

One of the first human patients treated with the electrophrenic respirator was nine-year-old Bruce Plater, of Ottawa, Ont., who developed bulbar polio while on vacation in New England. In July, at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Bruce’s breathing was electrically controlled for six days before the disease receded. Six machines are now ready for use. By New Year’s they will be generally available, at about $275 each.

Besides its value in bulbar polio, the electrophrenic respirator will be just as useful, its developers believe, in treating cases of electrocution, drowning, brain tumors and overdoses of sleeping pills.

*Brother of Singer Dorothy (Rosalinda) Sarnoff; no kin to RCA Chairman David Sarnoff. *Drs. James L. Whittenberger, Esther Hardenbergh and James V. Maloney Jr.