He United States Paul Alexander, who survived polio and became known as “the man with the iron lung,” has died at the age of 78.
Alexander contracted polio in 1952 when I was 6 years old and the disease left him paralyzed from the neck down.
He was also left unable to breathe independently, leading doctors to place him in a metal cylinder – or artificial lung – where he would spend the rest of his life.
Despite his disability, Alexander managed to obtain a law degree, practice law, and publish several books.
Paul Alexander learned to breathe
After years, Alexander finally learned to breathe on his own, so he was able to leave the lung for short periods of time.
Like most polio survivors placed in iron lungs, he was not expected to live long.
But he lived for decades, long after the invention of the polio vaccine in the 1950s virtually eradicated the disease in the Western world.
Alexander graduated from high school and then attended Southern Methodist University.
In 1984, he graduated with a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin.
Two years later he was admitted to the bar and practiced the profession for decades.
That year he published a memoir that reportedly took him eight years to complete with the help of a plastic stick to type on a keyboard and dictate to a friend.
Paul Alexander would have died from a coronavirus infection.