Catapulted to national fame
tion.” Peter Heimlich, who had referred to his father as “a spectacular con man and serial liar,” was not mentioned.
But Heimlich did acknowledge making enemies with his unorthodox medical theories. In his book, he likened his critics to the neighborhood kids who sank a raft he built from boards and oil cans when he was 10.
“Sadly, people with new ideas are often attacked, sometimes for no reason other than the critics do not like someone else getting credit,” he wrote.
“Just as the boys tried to destroy my invention by throwing stones, my future naysayers would also try to sink my ideas.”
Born Feb. 3, 1920, in Wilmington, Del., Henry Judah Heimlich grew up in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y. His father, Philip Heimlich, was a social worker.
After graduating from Cornell University and Cornell Medical College, Heimlich joined the Navy, and in 1945, he was sent to China. When a mortally wounded Chinese soldier lay on his operating table, blood was surging into the man’s torn chest and Heimlich had no effective way to drain it.
“It tore me up,” Heimlich recalled, vowing to one day make amends.
About 20 years later, he came up with the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve — a simple device that sprang, Heimlich wrote, from “a Japanese noisemaker that made a sound we used to call a ‘raspberry’ or a ‘Bronx cheer.’ ”
Battlefield medics used the valve to help wounded soldiers in Vietnam, and it was adopted for use in hospitals as well.
Returning from China, Heimlich settled in New York City. In 1951, he married Jane Murray, daughter of dance studio owners Arthur and Kathryn Murray. Jane Murray Heimlich, who became a writer advocating homeopathic remedies, died in 2012.
In the 1950s, Heimlich spoke widely about his procedure to bypass patients’ damaged esophagi by rebuilding a portion of their stomachs. The operation allowed people who had been unable to swallow to “eat steak and French fried potatoes 10 days after the surgery,” the New York Times reported.
Heimlich later was taken to task for failing to reveal that a Romanian surgeon had performed the groundbreaking procedure several years before he did. He said he had not known of Dr. Dan Gavriliu’s work at the time.
When Heimlich was head of surgery at Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, he developed the maneuver that made him famous. Convinced that lives would be lost if he conducted “timeconsuming studies,” he wrote an article for the journal Emergency Medicine and had it sent to syndicated medical columnist Arthur J. Snider of the Chicago Daily News.
Soon, word of the technique spread. Stories appeared about diners, both ordinary people and celebrities, saving others or being saved.
On a campaign plane in 1976, Ronald Reagan was choking on a peanut when his aide Michael Deaver wrapped his arms around the future president, thrusting his fists inward and upward to dislodge the potentially lethal nut. At NBC’s New York headquarters, newsman Tom Brokaw did the same in 1979, when his colleague John Chancellor was choking on a piece of Gouda cheese.
Heimlich was hailed for his maneuver but ran into resistance from the American Red Cross. He contended that people were “dying needlessly” because the organization taught rescuers to treat choking by sharply slapping victims between the shoulder blades.
Heimlich was among the physicians who believed that back slaps — which he called “death blows” — could drive objects even deeper into the throat. As of 2014, the Red Cross recommended using cycles of five back blows followed by five “abdominal thrusts” for choking victims.
Heimlich also took criticism for insisting that his maneuver be the first choice for first-aid providers in near-drowning cases. The American Heart Assn. called the idea “potentially dangerous.”
Ellis & Associates, a company that trains lifeguards across the U.S., tried it for five years and in 2000 withdrew its endorsement of the technique. Lifeguard organizations condemned the maneuver.
“Dr. Heimlich is a legend, someone who’s responsible for saving thousands of lives,” B. Chris Brewster, the head of San Diego’s lifeguard service and president of the Americas region of the International Lifesaving Federation, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “I just wish that were enough for him.”
But for Heimlich, heroism wasn’t the issue.
“If I have something that I think is good,” he told The Times in 1994, “how can I let people die?”