The Inspiration Machine: Positive Pressure and the Boundaries of the Breathing Self

This paper traces a long-standing-- and perhaps surprising-- resistance to forcing air into the body. Brain death, organ transplantation, and complex life support all depend on positive pressure ventilators only developed post-war. But, already by the end of the nineteenth century, such machines were regularly breathing for a veritable Noah’s Ark of German laboratory animals. A century earlier, in a pitch that failed, late eighteenth-century Humane Societies had attempted to promote positive pressure resuscitation, the forcing of air into an unconscious body against its natural pressure gradient, as modern; the ancients admitted no space between breathing life and unbreathing death, while moderns did. One of many protesting voices was Harvard Medical School founder Benjamin Waterhouse who replied in 1811 that the “bizarre and pernicious practice” of blowing breath into the lungs could never give life to “dead matter.” From this time forward, every introduction of the seemingly ordinary (and perhaps urgent) act of forcing air into the lungs was rejected as soon as it was suggested. It was not until 1957 that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation completely replaced long-used and studied methods that involved compressing the chest to change its shape, causing air to passively flow in and out of the body. Why was there such persistent resistance to introducing ostensibly life-saving air into a dying body? What changed, allowing new kinds of ventilation technologies? And what did it have to do with changing boundaries of the self?