The spherical hospital
George Wall published in July 1920, in the Electrical Experimenter magazine, an article about a proposal to create a new type of hospital. At the time it was seen as futuristic and impractical but, although it may surprise, it was finally built. The graph below shows an initial proposal about this “high-pressure hospital”.
To get to the heart of the matter, here are several graphics of Orval J. Cunningham’s original patent, filed on October 25, 1920, and granted in 1923, for his hyperbaric therapy technology.
Kansas City physician Orval J. Cunningham published during the 1920s the results of research he had conducted in previous years. For him, high-pressure oxygen therapy was practically a panacea. Here is the headline of one of his articles, published in Anesthesia an Analgesia in April 1927.
Cunningham was a professor of physiology and anesthesiologist, having published between 1908 and 1913 several scientific articles on the use of various gases in anesthesia. He was a professor at the Kansas City School of Medicine, a position he held in 1916 when he designed a machine to deliver anesthetic gases. However, his experience with the 1918 pandemic flu changed the focus of his research to hyperbaric therapy. It all came from an observation: Cunningham noted that patients with lung disease seemed to improve when they changed altitude and moved from Denver to Kansas City, and from there he concluded that the improvement was due to the increase in oxygen at a lower altitude. The question did not remain a simple note, but that idea became his passion for the rest of his life. In that same year of 1918, he built a hyperbaric chamber in Kansas City, a tank in which compressed air with a high oxygen content was supplied. The success with two pneumonia patients made him start treating all kinds of diseases with his chamber: syphilis, hypertension, diabetes…
Cunningham was fortunate enough to treat in that pressure tank a rich man, a uremic patient named Henry Timken. The patient, feeling that he had been rejuvenated by that hyperbaric therapy, offered Cunningham the incredible sum of one and a half million dollars from 1926. The purpose of the donation was the construction of a large hospital in the shape of a steel sphere near a sanatorium in Cleveland. Cunningham focused on his idea of curing all kinds of ailments through the oxygen-enriched pressurized air, thought of curing patients with diabetes, hypertension, anemia, syphilis, various types of cancer, arthritis, pneumonia, and many other ailments.
That became the fashionable therapy for people with a certain economic level and, although it was strongly criticized by many other doctors and medical professional associations, nothing stopped Cunningham’s wishes. However, the adventure was shipwrecked shortly afterward, mainly because the Great Depression was responsible for the economic collapse of the sanatorium. This, together with the professional criticism, made the metal “ball” pass from one owner to another until it was dismantled. Cunningham died of a stroke in 1937 (precisely the year the spherical hospital was finally closed) and, curiously, although his original idea was too optimistic, some of his approaches were validated over time. The hyperbaric therapy has found its place in very determined and controlled applications, it was not valid to cure all ills, as the promoters of the sphere imagined.
The Cleveland Cunningham Sanitarium, completed in 1928, offered pressurized oxygen therapy to patients with a wide range of diseases. Visually, the design of the building was impressive: a five-story, 900-ton steel sphere with 38 comfortable rooms and 350 sealed windows, all situated in the middle of a beautiful landscape on the shores of Lake Erie. In 1942, the building’s steel was used by the U.S. Army immersed in the World War II.
References
US Patent: US1471144A “Therapeutic apparatus”. Inventor Orval J Cunningham.
Orval Cunningham: The Man, His Machine, His Tank in Kansas City and Cleveland.
Spanish version of this article: TecOb.
