THE AUTUMN GHOST

This is the gripping story of how a courageous non-conformist in medicine led to the development of ventilators and modern intensive care.

During the first half of the twentieth century, polio was a plague that returned every summer, terrifying parents, leaving children dead and many more paralyzed for life. In 1952, Copenhagen's Blegdam infectious disease hospital was overwhelmed with hundreds of cases and almost thirty patients had died within a few weeks. An outsider to the hospital, Dr. Bjorn Ibsen, proposed an unorthodox experimental procedure. This is the gripping story of how a courageous non-conformist in medicine led to the development of ventilators and modern intensive care. Most medical breakthroughs take years to evolve; this one unfolds over just a few weeks. As a result of these dramatic events in Copenhagen, a new field of medicine was born, and our ability to care for critically ill patients changed forever. Hannah Wunsch is Professor of Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Toronto, and she works in the ICU at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. A Boston native, Hannah has an undergraduate degree in Biology from Harvard, a medical degree from Washington University in St Louis and a Master's degree in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The Autumn Ghost is her first book.