How medical equipment looked 100 years ago? A life inside iron lungs

Medicine has always relied on technology, whether in diagnosis, treatment or disease prevention. I visited the “Technology and health” exhibition in the Nikola Tesla museum in Zagreb. Collecting of the items lasted for several decades and most of the objects were received by private donors. I made a feature story for my TV station while talking to the museum curator Davorka Petracic.

Ms. Petracic gave us a short walking tour around the museum while explaining all those frightening looking devices. The oldest exposed object was an inhalation device from 1910.

The biggest object of the exhibition were the iron lungs, in the shape of a 750 lb metal tube. They gained the name by really holding the human lungs. They were massively manufactured in America after 1945 when a pandemic epidemic began. There iseven a story of a woman named Dianne from South Carolina who spent 60 years in this machine that kept her alive. Dianne suffered from polio and during six decades inside the iron lungs, she managed to finish college and write a few books and even became politicaly active.

If you wanted to cure migraine, this was the way.

Sterilizer of hospital equipment.

Thuberculosis curing kit.

Medicine will continue developing with the main goal of improving the quality of human life. Seeing all these devices reminds us how far the human race went with technology and curing deseases much easier than 100 years ago.