New Lungs for Old

Infantile paralysis last week pursued the course of what medical men still described as a ''mild epidemic." In Chicago, where there were 228 cases, health and education officials still refused to open schools. In Philadelphia, an 11-year-old sufferer was brought to a city hospital from Williamsport and in the ensuing scare, Philadelphia's mayor forbade any hospital to accommodate out-of-town cases. But the biggest infantile paralysis news of the week lay in two new artificial lungs, cheaper and simpler than the $1,000 to $2,450 big steel boxes now in use.

One of the new respirators consists of a copper hood which fits over the patient's abdomen from hips to ribs; the other of an aluminum hood which covers the entire torso from hips to collar bone. Intermittent air suction in the abdominal hood expands and contracts a patient's lungs by forcing his diaphragm up and down. Similar suction in the torso hood compels breathing by moving both the diaphragm and the chest wall.

Inventor of the abdominal hood is Bernard Liebel, 22, a summer student at Toronto's Banting (insulin) Institute. The torso hood is a Swedish device modified by Dr. Claude Ellis Forkner. the doctor who transported paralyzed Frederick B. Snite Jr. from Peiping to Chicago in a standard "iron lung" (TIME. June 14). This week, as cinema photographers record the scene, young Snite expects to change over to the new torso respirator. If all goes well, he will be able for the first time in a year to sit propped up in bed, to have a tub bath.

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