Paul Alexander
Polio survivor who practised law despite living in an iron lung
PAUL ALEXANDER, who has died aged 78, managed to attend university, publish a memoir, qualify as a lawyer and even represent clients in court, despite living for more than seven decades in an iron lung.
Paralysed from the neck down by polio at the age of six, Alexander used a long plastic wand clenched between his teeth to type, answer the telephone and wield a pen. A mirror above his face gave him a view of his interlocutors. When modern ventilators became available in the 1960s, he decided to remain in his iron lung, because he was used to it. Startled legal clients entering his office in Austin, Texas, in the 1980s would ask if he was “getting a tan”.
He taught himself to breathe independently, gulping down air with his throat as he had no control of his lungs, but this “frog-breathing”, as he called it, was draining work. At his fittest, he managed several hours a day outside the iron lung, enough to attend court hearings in his wheelchair, dressed in a three-piece suit, where he specialised in helping those filing for bankruptcy.
Iron lungs became increasingly rare and hard to maintain. (One of the parts came from a Model-t Ford.) But Alexander described his iron lung as “part of myself ”: if somebody touched the metal cylinder, he felt their hand; if the fan belt was worn out or needed grease, he breathed differently. Eventually he stockpiled four of them, which he cannibalised for parts.
He accepted that he would always be dependent on the kindness of others (when his carer failed to turn up at the University of Texas in Austin, his dormitory mates voluntarily took care of him for a month), but he maintained a strong sense of dignity, and was furious when waiters asked his dining companions: “What will he be having?”
Highly determined, he was able to carry out a surprising amount of mischief from his iron lung, persuading one of his friends to throw eggs at the door of a manager who had evicted Alexander from his flat.
Paul Richard Alexander was born on January 30 1946 in Texas to a Greek father and Lebanese mother. In the “plague year” of 1952, when the polio epidemic was at its height, Paul came indoors with a stiff neck and a temperature of 102. His mother said: “Oh God, not my child.”
Within a week, he had lost all his movement, and stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead – “This happened quite a few times over the rest of my life,” he said, drily – but was given a tracheotomy to get air into his lungs, and he regained consciousness in an iron lung. “I figured I’d gone to hell,” he said. His parents had to read his lips as he could not make a sound.
He was placed in a ward with other children in iron lungs, who communicated by smiling. Sometimes his neighbours would be moved out, which annoyed him. Later realised he that they had died.
The doctors advised that Paul had not long left, and let his parents take him home in the iron lung for Christmas. His parents slept in his room, and during power cuts would pump the iron lung by hand.
Miraculously, and sustained by his family’s Pentecostal faith, he did not die. The tube was removed and he regained speech. A physical therapist bribed him with a boxer puppy if he could breathe for three minutes outside the iron lung. It took a year, but he did it.
He was educated remotely by WW Samuell High School in Dallas, coming second in his year in 1967, with straight As apart from biology, in which he got a B because he could not dissect a rat. He attended Southern Methodist University, then moved to Austin for his law degree.
He was briefly engaged, but his fiancee’s parents objected.
In 2020, he published a memoir, Three Minutes for a Dog, and last year he was recognised as holder of the Guinness World Record for daily use of an iron lung for the longest period.
Paul Alexander, born January 30 1946, died March 11 2024