“I tried to move, but I couldn’t move. Not even a finger. I tried to touch something to figure it out, but I never could. So it was pretty strange.”

The machine, invented in the late 1920s, was the first to ventilate a human being. It was often referred to in the early days as the “Drinker respirator” the device is hermetically sealed from the neck down and creates a negative pressure in the chamber that draws air into the patient’s lungs. If it generates overpressure, the air is forced out of the lungs again, and the patient exhales.

Paul spent 18 months inside the metal canister recovering from the initial infection. And he wasn’t alone. The year Paul was infected by the virus, 1952, was a very dark year looking at the statistics.