How Life Support Technology Changed American Death

FAIN: DOI-299637-24

University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)
Christine Dianne Wenc (Project Director: October 2023 to present)

Research and writing of a work of public scholarship, a monograph on the history of life support technology and its impact on American culture.

My project is a history of life support technology in the United States and how it changed American death in the 20th century. It will take the form of a book manuscript focused on the history of the ventilator and its use in the intensive care unit between 1950 and 2000, telling the story of how both medicine and society created, responded to, and interacted with this technology. I will also look at how two early 20th-century devices—the pulmotor resuscitation machine in the 1910s–20s and the iron lung in the 1930s–50s—played foundational roles in this history, not only in technological development but in the broader medical, cultural, and popular discourse about the use of technology at the end of life. The book will be aimed at both an academic and general audience and will use methods and approaches from the academic history of medicine, science and technology studies, and literary journalism.