Medicine: Eve’s Seesaw

From England last week came word that British naval surgeons think they have a better method of artificial respiration than the familiar Schafer prone pressure method.

The system, first proposed eleven years ago by Dr. Frank Cecil Eve, consulting physician to the Royal Infirmary at Hull, England, is based on a gentle, rhythmic rocking of the patient, instead of the pressure-and-release system worked out by Sir Edward Sharpey Schäfer in 1903.

In 1932 Eve wrote: “Formerly I regarded the breathing thorax as a concertina bellows; my present work suggests that it resembles rather a cylinder and piston.” But this reverse action of the lungs, he contends, is often missing in actual cases of injury or drowning. Reason: a patient’s diaphragm is relaxed, flaccid. So Dr. Eve tried something else.

When a drowning seaman is brought out of the sea, he is immediately bound (either supine or prone) on a stretcher by gentle wrist and ankle bandages. The stretcher is placed upon a fulcrum, such as a sawhorse, if handy; if not, in a simple loop of rope secured overhead. Rocking is started, head and feet alternately down about 50 degrees, a complete seesaw every four or five seconds. British Surgeon Lieut. G. H. Gibbens suggests in the British Medical Journal: “It helps some people if they hum a tango or a slow tune, moving the stretcher at the beginning of each bar.”

The seesawing brings the abdominal organs up against the diaphragm when the head is down with enough force to push the breath out; then, when feet go down, the organs pull down the diaphragm and air is drawn into the lungs. Other advantages of the Eve rocker: wounds and burns of the trunk can be attended to while rocking is going on; anyone can teeter the board for hours on end; it is harmless—ribs and liver cannot be injured.