Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr.

Both parents came from wealthy and politically influential Boston Brahmin families with roots extending back to the Mayflower.

Shaw's father was born at 26 Mount Vernon Street in Beacon Hill in 1861, and the following year the family moved to Jamaica Plain.

[7] Shaw's great grandfather, for whom he was named, was Louis Agassiz, noted professor of zoology at Harvard University.

Shaw continued to study for a couple of years after graduation, taking classes in botany, geology, and zoology.

[9] From late 1917 until early 1919, Shaw and his research team conducted investigations in his home laboratory on the physiological effects of poisonous gases and other problems related to the ongoing war in Europe.

[9] Shaw was an instructor in physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he is credited in 1928 along with Philip Drinker (1894–1972, associate professor of industrial hygiene) and his brother Cecil Kent Drinker (1887–1956, later dean of the Harvard School of Public Health) for inventing the first widely used iron lung.

An Emerson iron lung. The patient lies within the chamber, which when sealed provides an oscillating atmospheric pressure. This particular machine was donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum by the family of polio patient Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana , who had used the device from the late 1950s until his death in 2003.