The ventilator prevents the accumulation of carbon dioxide so that the lungs don't collapse due to the low pressure.
[12][13] Diaphragm pacing is a technique used by persons with spinal cord injuries who are on a mechanical ventilator to aid with breathing, speaking, and overall quality of life.
[14] Historically, this has been accomplished through the electrical stimulation of a phrenic nerve by an implanted receiver/electrode,[15] though today an alternative option of attaching percutaneous wires to the diaphragm exists.
[16] The Greek physician Galen may have been the first to describe artificial ventilation: "If you take a dead animal and blow air through its larynx through a reed, you will fill its bronchi and watch its lungs attain the greatest distention.
[18] It wasn't until 1773, when an English physician William Hawes (1736–1808) began publicizing the power of artificial ventilation to resuscitate people who superficially appeared to have drowned.
For a year he paid a reward out of his own pocket to any one bringing him a body rescued from the water within a reasonable time of immersion.
In the summer of 1774, Hawes and Cogan each brought fifteen friends to a meeting at the Chapter Coffee-house in St Paul's Churchyard, where they founded the Royal Humane Society.
Or the use of bellows with a flexible tube for blowing tobacco smoke through the anus to revive vestigial life in the victim's intestines, which was discontinued with the eventual further understanding of respiration.
It was the standard method of artificial respiration taught in Red Cross and similar first aid manuals for decades,[21] until mouth-to-mouth resuscitation became the preferred technique in mid-century.
He collaboratied with Dr. Joseph O'Dwyer to invent the Fell-O'Dwyer apparatus, which is a bellows instrument for the insertion and extraction of a tube down the patients trachea.
In 2020, the supply of mechanical ventilation became a central question for public health officials due to 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic related shortages.