iron lung

Lane spent the next several months in an iron lung.

After an emergency tracheostomy operation, he was unable to breathe without the iron lung machine that now encased his small body.

After he was paralyzed by polio at age 6, Paul Alexander was confined for much of his life to a yellow iron lung that kept him alive.

Alexander was 6 when he began using an iron lung, a cylinder that encased his body as the air pressure in the chamber forced air into and out of his lungs.

The polio survivor known as "the man in the iron lung" has died at the age of 78.