Henry Heimlich

Doctor who invented famous manoeuvre Born: February 3, 1920; Died: December 17, 2016 HENRY Heimlich, who has died aged 96, was the American doctor who invented the famous medical procedure that has been used to help hundreds of thousand of victims of choking. Using a series of abdominal thrusts to clear a person’s airway, it is believed to have saved the lives of more than 100,000 people in the US alone.

Dr Heimlich invented the technique in 1973 while director of surgery at the Jewish Hospital in New York. He was concerned by the fact that accidental choking was one of the leading causes of deaths in the US and thought that there might be a better technique for tackling it than slaps on the back, which was then the recommended response.

After experiments on anaesthetised dogs, Dr Heimlich came up with the technique that would come to bear his name and published a paper in the journal Emergency Medicine calling on readers to try the technique and report back to him.

Quite quickly, stories start to come in of people who had been saved using the new procedure but at first much of the medical community was reluctant to embrace the change and it took several years for organisations such as the American Red Cross to change their official advice.

Dr Heimlich was bitter about the reaction and became an ambassador for the technique, making public appearances and also publishing a book, Dr Heimlich’s Home Guide to Emergency Situations. He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and studied for a BA and an MD at Cornell University. After military service during the Second World War, he worked in various New York hospitals.

His invention of the new anti-choking technique made him famous, but also controversial. Those said to have been saved by the Heimlich manoeuvre include former President Ronald Reagan, who choked on a peanut, pop star Cher, and Hollywood actors Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Carrie Fisher, Jack Lemmon and Marlene Dietrich. In 2014 Clint Eastwood was also credited with saving the life of a golf tournament director in California who was choking on a piece of cheese.

The anti-choking manoeuvre was not Dr Heimlich’s only success though. In 1962 he developed the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve which was credited with saving many soldiers’ lives in the Vietnam War and is still used for patients undergoing chest surgery.

He also used the technique himself. In 2000, he used it when a man began to choke in a restaurant where he was having lunch. And in May this year, to save a woman at his retirement home, he dislodged a piece of meat with a bone in it from the airway of an 87-year-old woman, telling the BBC: “I didn’t know I really could do it until the other day.”

For the rest of his life after inventing the technique, Dr Heimlich said he was regularly told about people whose lives had been saved by it. Speaking in 1989, he said: “I don’t think a week goes by when someone doesn’t send me a newspaper article about someone saved in a drowning or a choking.”

However, his work in other areas was more controversial. His research into anti-malaria therapies, which involved injecting patients with malaria, were widely condemned, including by his own son Peter.

Dr Heimlich died at a hospital in Cincinnati following complications from a heart attack.

In a statement, his family said he had been a hero to people around the world. “From the time Dad began his medical career in New York City, to the time he practised as a thoracic surgeon in Cincinnati, he was committed to coming up with simple, effective ideas that helped save lives and significantly improved people’s quality of life,” it said.

He was pre-deceased by his wife Jane and is survived by their four children.