Philip Drinker

Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker;^[1] his siblings included lawyer and musicologist Henry Sandwith Drinker, Jr., pathologist Cecil Kent Drinker,^[2] businessman James Drinker, and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen.^[1] After graduating from St. George's and Princeton University in 1915,^[1] Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh University for two years.^[1]

Drinker was hired to teach industrial illumination and ventilation at Harvard Medical School^[1] and soon joined his brother Cecil and colleagues Alice Hamilton and David L. Edsall on the faculty of the nascent Harvard School of Public Health^[2] in 1921^[2] or 1923.^[1] He studied, taught, and wrote textbooks and scholarly works on a variety of topics in industrial hygiene;^[2] the iron lung itself was originally designed in response to an industrial hygiene problem—coal gas poisoning^[2]—though it would become best known as a life-preserving treatment for polio. Charles Momsen credited Drinker "and his friends" for their assistance with gas-mixture experiments that ultimately made possible the rescue of the survivors of the USS Squalus in 1939.^[3]

During World War II, Drinker directed the industrial hygiene program for the United States Maritime Commission.^[1] He also arranged and participated in a survey of four shipyards in 1945 to evaluate exposure to asbestos dust during the installation of asbestos-containing insulation. The study had many limitations: 1) The investigators used a non-standard means of collecting and quantitating asbestos dust, key details of which were not disclosed, and 2) Almost all of the shipyard insulators studied were recent hires, 95% had worked as insulators for less than 10 years, many for less than 5 years.^{[citation needed]} Asbestosis, the disease they were concerned with, typically takes 15-20 years of exposure to asbestos dust to manifest. Despite these limitations, the key conclusion of the "Fleischer-Drinker" study was that "...pipe covering is not a dangerous occupation."^[4]

Thus, for the next twenty years, the Navy failed to effectively protect its shipyard workers from asbestos, leading to tens of thousands of cases of asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma.^{[citation needed]} Only in the mid-1960s did the Navy and others start to repudiate this defective conclusion.^[5] Subsequently, this report has been used by many attorneys^{[by whom?]} to argue that nobody could have known that asbestos insulation work was dangerous^{[citation needed]} until further studies finally appeared in 1964-5.^[6]

After the war, Drinker advised the Atomic Energy Commission.^[1]

Drinker served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Industrial Hygiene for over thirty years^[1] and, in 1942, as president of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, to which he had belonged since its inception.^[2]

He retired from Harvard in 1960^[2] or 1961.^[1] Drinker received the Donald E. Cummings Award from the American Industrial Hygiene Association in 1950.^[7] He was later inducted into the US National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2007.

He and his wife Susan^[8] had a son, bioengineer Philip A. Drinker,^[9] and 2 daughters, Susan Drinker Moran (1926-2010), author, and Eliza Scudder, educator.

• Shaw, LA; Drinker, P (1929). "An Apparatus for the Prolonged Administration of Artificial Respiration: I. A Design for Adults and Children". J Clin Invest. 7 (2): 229–47. doi:10.1172/JCI100226. PMC 434785. PMID 16693859.
• Shaw, LA; Drinker, P (1929). "An Apparatus for the Prolonged Administration of Artificial Respiration: II. A Design for Small Children and Infants with an Appliance for the Administration of Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide". J Clin Invest. 8 (1): 33–46. doi:10.1172/JCI100253. PMC 424606. PMID 16693884.

• Wunsch, Hannah (2023). The Autumn Ghost: How the Battle Against a Polio Epidemic Revolutionized Modern Medical Care. Greystone Books.