A heroic community effort at a daring hospital saved lives, led to today’s ventilators and revolutionized medicine — it holds lessons for our times.

It was the polio epidemic of August 1952, at Blegdam Hospital in Copenhagen. This little-known event marked the start of intensive-care medicine and the use of mechanical ventilation outside the operating theatre — the very care that is at the heart of abating the COVID-19 crisis.

In 1952, the iron lung was the main way to treat the paralysis that stopped some people with poliovirus from breathing. Copenhagen was an epicentre of one of the worst polio epidemics that the world had ever seen...

A heroic community effort at a daring hospital saved lives, led to today’s ventilators and revolutionized medicine — it holds lessons for our times.

It was the polio epidemic of August 1952, at Blegdam Hospital in Copenhagen. This little-known event marked the start of intensive-care medicine and the use of mechanical ventilation outside the operating theatre — the very care that is at the heart of abating the COVID-19 crisis.

In 1952, the iron lung was the main way to treat the paralysis that stopped some people with poliovirus from breathing. Copenhagen was an epicentre of one of the worst polio epidemics that the world had ever seen...