For more than 70 years, Paul Alexander — who died aged 78 this week — was kept alive with the help of ‘iron lungs’.
The spooky contraption, created in the 1920s, allowed him to breathe after he was completely paralysed as a child by polio.
It saw him lay flat on his back, with his head resting on a pillow and body encased in the metal cylinder from the neck down.
Polio, known medically as poliomyelitis, does not directly damage