Paul Alexander, man who lived with an iron lung for 70 years, dies at 78

A man who had spent about seven decades using an iron lung chamber has died at the age of 78.

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Paul Alexander’s death was confirmed by a longtime friend of his, Daniel Spinks, according to The Associated Press. Spinks said that Alexander, 78, recently had been hospitalized after he was diagnosed with COVID-19. Spinks did not know Alexander’s cause of death.

His death was also announced in a statement from his brother, Philip Alexander, according to The Washington Post.

“So many people were inspired by Paul,” Philip Alexander wrote. “I am just so grateful.”

Alexander contracted polio in 1952, according to the Post. He was about 6 years old at the time. Days later, he was paralyzed fully and was unable to breathe by himself. That was when a doctor performed an emergency tracheotomy on Alexander. When he woke up, he was inside an iron lung.

Alexander was paralyzed from the neck down, according to the AP.

“My life was a combination of one … adventure, miracle — whatever you want to call it — after another,” Alexander once said, according to the Post.

The iron lung did not seem to get in Alexander’s way. He learned how to breathe on his own over time, a profile by The Guardian said in 2020, according to People magazine. He was also able to graduate from high school when he was 21 years old in Dallas. He then attended the University of Texas at Austin where he studied law.

He graduated with a law degree in 1984, the AP reported.

An iron lung is a device that helps patients breathe after they become paralyzed, When polio cases were high in the 1940s and 1950s, many hospital wards had a bunch of iron lungs, the Post reported.

Vaccines for polio became available in 1955 which helped drop the number of cases in the United States to less than 100 in the 1960s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, according to the AP. After that in the 1970s, the number of cases went down to less than 10. Eventually, by 1979, polio was declared to be eliminated in the U.S.

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