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Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, inventor of life-saving maneuver, has passed away at the age of 96. The NY Times has the following:
It is called the Heimlich maneuver – saving a choking victim with a bear hug and abdominal thrusts to eject a throat obstruction – and since its inception in 1974 it has become a national safety icon, taught in schools, portrayed in movies, displayed on restaurant posters and endorsed by medical authorities.
It is also the stuff of breathless, brink-of-death tales, told over the years by Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Walter Matthau, Halle Berry, Carrie Fisher, Jack Lemmon, sportscaster Dick Vitale, television newsman John Chancellor and many others.
Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, the thoracic surgeon and medical maverick who developed and crusaded for the anti-choking technique that has been credited with saving an estimated 100,000 lives, died Saturday at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati after suffering a heart attack at his home Monday, his family said. He was 96 and lived in Cincinnati.
More than four decades after inventing his maneuver, Heimlich used it himself on May 23 to save the life of an 87-year-old woman choking on a morsel of meat at Deupree House, their senior residence in Cincinnati. He said it was the first time he had ever used the maneuver in an emergency, although he had made a similar claim in 2003.
Patty Ris, who had by chance sat at Heimlich's table in a dining hall, began eating a hamburger. "And the next thing I know, I could not breathe I was choking so hard," she said later. Recognizing her distress, Heimlich, 96, did his thing. "A piece of meat with a little bone attached flew out of her mouth," he recalled.
While best known for his namesake maneuver, Heimlich developed and held patents on a score of medical innovations and devices, including mechanical aids for chest surgery that were widely used in the Vietnam War, procedures for treating chronic lung disease and methods for helping stroke victims relearn to swallow. He also claimed to have invented a technique for replacing a damaged esophagus, but later acknowledged that a Romanian surgeon had been using it for years.
A professor of clinical sciences at Xavier University in Cincinnati and president of the Heimlich Institute, which he founded to research and promote his ideas, Heimlich was a media-savvy showman who entered the pantheon of medical history with his maneuver but in later years often found himself at odds with a medical establishment skeptical of his claims and theories.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:16PM
Every person who comes up with something useful for the medical field recently rejects the mainstream as fools. Just look at Heimlich, Mullis, Damadian, etc. Yet, the army of null hypothesis testing researchers parroting textbooks marches on, wasting tens of billions each year.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:59PM
Then why, precisely, are you an absolute bootynude devoid of all that makes a man's tingle?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:49PM
Every person who comes up with something useful for the medical field recently rejects the mainstream as fools. Just look at Heimlich, Mullis, Damadian, etc. Yet, the army of null hypothesis testing researchers parroting textbooks marches on, wasting tens of billions each year.
1) This is not true. Many new advances are through straight standard research and development? How many new drugs have come out in recent past by following standard science processes? GMOs, among other stuff, is straight diligent work.
2) It stands to reason that "crackpots" would be overrepresented in major breakthroughs. If it were obvious based on current understandings of science, it would be obvious and everybody would be doing it already. It is only those who reject it and try new things that new groundbreaking discoveries are found. However, what your statement fails to note is the extremely high false-positive rate of these theories. For every germ-theory, there are probably tens-of-thousands-of perpetual motion machine patent applications.
I will thank you for pointing out something non-obvious to me, though. I always thought Heimlich (and Einstein) had "gone off the deep end" after their early successes. I see now it is more that they were always "off the deep end," but just happened to be right in several key places. (Note: both of them are far more intelligent than I am, and being a bit crazy doesn't make them any less geniuses.)