Bjørn Ibsen
Books
- Breathing by Hand The Copenhagen Polio Epidemic and the Birth of Intensive Care · Liszt Think
In August 1952, Copenhagen’s Blegdam Hospital faced catastrophe as fifty paralyzed polio patients arrived daily with only one iron lung available.
- The City and the Hospital…s as the natural severity of the disease, not as a failure of treatment. The virus is the enemy; medicine provides what comfort it can. Dr. Bjørn Ibsen, thirty-five years old, works in a different building of the same complex. An anaesthetist trained in Sweden and the United States, he has…
- The First Paralysed Breath…ued, the pressure gauges held steady—yet the patients were dying. Bjørneboe consulted with the hospital’s anaesthetist, a younger man named Bjørn Ibsen who had trained in neurosurgery and brought an unusual combination of skills to the ward. Ibsen had spent the war years in Sweden, then ret…
- A Theory of Poisoned Air…Emerson iron lung and some cuirass-type ventilators, and was already overwhelmed by paralytic polio patients, many of them young children. Bjørn Ibsen watches the Emerson iron lung hum through its cycle. The machine functions exactly as designed. Negative pressure surrounds the girl’s body…