Museum exhibit depicts ‘creative responses to epidemics’
Iwas born more than a decade after Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in the mid-1950s, but family memories of the dreaded disease filtered down to me.
Myth and reality conflated in tales of distant relatives or friends who had caught the deadly virus, some who recovered, others who were paralyzed and yet others confined to iron lungs. I don’t know how many of these stories were true, but the fear was real, and fear is perhaps one of the most powerful drivers of how we think about our bodies and health and larger questions of public health.
Nothing about polio was more terrifying than the iron lung, a negative pressure ventilator — a sealed chamber that encapsulated the body from the neck down and used variations in air pressure to expand and contract the lungs.
A photograph of one these is on display in the small but potent exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics, presented by Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum, and curated by MASS Design Group, a Boston-based firm that just won the American Institute of Architects 2022 top award.
In the photograph, a smiling woman holds a book above the head of an iron-lung patient, helping them read. For all the fear associated with the device — large tubes of metal often arrayed in long rows, their bulk dwarfing the heads of those encased — they had certain advantages over their contemporary replacement, the ventilator. The patient didn’t need to be intubated or anesthetized and could interact with others while using the machine.
During the coronavirus pandemic, some medical practitioners began taking a new look at the old iron lung.
In the same gallery at Cooper Hewitt, there’s a contemporary version of a negative pressure ventilator, designed in Bangladesh and made not of metal, but fiberglass, and designed to cover only the chest.
It is smaller than its forebear, and much cheaper than the modern ventilator.
In Bangladesh, which has only about 1,500 ventilators for 160 million people, and where imported ventilators can cost $25,000 to $50,000, this $1,000 machine could save lives, not just from COVID-19 but also other respiratory ailments. Suddenly, iron lung 2.0 doesn’t seem so terrifying as the old polio-age models.
The exhibition focuses on moments of resiliency and invention in response to pandemics, past and present. Planning for the show began just before the COVID-19 crisis.
It opened Dec. 10 as MASS Design Group’s founder, Michael P. Murphy Jr., with Jeffrey Mansfield and the MASS Design team, published a substantial new treatise on health care design, The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity.
The exhibition shows dignity in practice, from cooperative efforts to address urgent needs created by the current pandemic, to the design of new hospitals for treating such diseases as cholera, Ebola and tuberculosis, which still ravage large parts of the world. The book raises deeper questions about design, science and architecture.
It also charts a history of hospitals from their origins within religious establishments, which provided basic hospice care and religious succor to the dying, to modern mega-hospitals, which seem to be constantly expanding as new specialties are developed and new techniques mainstreamed.