19th century pioneers of intensive therapy in North America. Part 2: Joseph O'Dwyer

ABSTRACT

Dr Joseph O’Dwyer’s principal distinction lies in his dedication and achievements in battling laryngeal diphtheria among children at the New York Foundling Asylum, where he was a physician from 1872. He was also active at the Presbyterian Hospital of New York and in private practice. Some of his pioneering work anticipated methods of intensive care medicine. His achievements included: XXX Introduction of a practical system of intralaryngeal intubation, including designs of tubes and a technique for inserting them, after many years of careful study and experimentation — always “without borrowed inspiration”. XXX Use of his tubes in children with diphtheritic pseudomembranes in the larynx, to substantially increase their survival chances at a time when tracheotomy for this problem still had a high failure rate. The first intubated patient recovered, November 1882, only after change to prolonged wearing of a tracheotomy tube, so O’Dwyer did not date his first intubation success until 21 May 1884. XXX Introduction of his tubes into the Fell method of forced respiration, with the resultant Fell–O’Dwyer apparatus supplying practical instrumentation for intermittent positive pressure ventilation. XXX Demonstration that this apparatus, primarily used for saving lives after acute opiate poisoning, was also useful with some intracranial disasters, 1894. XXX Provision of a system, which others then applied, enabling surgeons to overcome the great “pneumothorax problem” of intrathoracic operations, and thereby conduct safe surgery inside the chest, 1898. XXX Development of an intubating method using successive short-term dilatations for treating chronic laryngeal stenosis, usually syphilitic, in adults, 1885. Throughout his medical lifetime, O’Dwyer was held in the highest regard as an altruistic, compassionate person of “sincere simplicity and frank goodness of character”.

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