When I arrived home after the seven-hour
Yu’s film, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, is about a man in an iron lung. The iron lung helped people like O’Brien, an artist and writer, breathe after their neuromuscular systems had succumbed to polio. Invented in 1928, the iron lung saved lives, but it also confined its paralyzed users to mostly horizontal lives in a metal tube, sealed around their extremities, that created and released a partial vacuum inside to force air into and out of their lungs.
The iron lung was a typical halfway technology—an improvement over what had been but nothing really close to what you’d truly want. That would be the Salk-Sabin vaccine. But for some, like O’Brien, halfway was the only way. They survived—and some like O’Brien did so creatively, with “an illusion of self-sufficiency” as he says in the film—in their postpolio years, as people in metal blankets.
