Respirator Fight

Harvard's retiring President Lowell tried to curb young John Haven Emerson last year. "Stop making respirators," said President Lowell in effect. "I will like hell!" roared young Emerson, long, lean son of long, lean Public Health Man Dr. Haven Emerson of Manhattan, and strode out of the presidential mansion. He loaded a respirator on the rear end of his rebuilt Buick, and with his wife went peddling respirators in competition with Harvard's long, lean Professor Philip Drinker. Professor Drinker, through Warren E. Collins Inc., the cautious Boston manufacturers to whom he assigned patents on the respirator which has saved hundreds of chest paralyzed cases, sued rambunctious John Haven Emerson for patent infringement.

Mr. Emerson, who runs a small shop near Harvard Square with Maxfield Parrish Jr. (son of the artist) and David Garrison as associates, counter-claimed that Mr. Drinker, assistant professor of ventilation & illumination in Harvard's School of Public Health, appropriated certain Emerson inventions for the famed Drinker respirator. Indignant Mr. Emerson has roused a faction of Harvard's Medical School to similar indignation, over the fact that Mr. Drinker drew fat royalties ($300 alleged) on every Drinker respirator sold by Warren E. Collins Inc. Builder Emerson claims that $1,500 for a Drinker machine is "robbery," sells his similar machines for $1,000 each, admits that if he had enough orders to build them in quantity he could sell them for far less.

With the stench of the law suit getting stronger, with Medical Dean David Linn Edsall getting angrier, with President Lowell getting sadder--the Harvard Corporation, hoping to quash the suit, last week pinned up this notice in the Medical School and School of Public Health: "No member of either of these schools should take out for his own profit, or make any profit on, a patent upon any invention or discovery that affects the health of individuals or the public. That if, to protect the public against misuse of the invention or discovery, it is necessary to control it by means of a patent, that should be applied for in such a name and under such conditions as the Corporation may determine."

Meanwhile a frustrated old country doctor, Dr. Charles Morgan Hammond, 64, moped. Dr. Hammond practices in Memphis, lives across the Mississippi River at rural Hulbert, Ark. In his garage is a respirator similar to the ones Philip Drinker and John Haven Emerson are selling & fighting about. Dr. Hammond built his first respirator in 1903, applied for a patent in 1910 through Orson Desaix Munn, the patent attorney who owns the Scientific American. The Patent Office refused him because his machine was considered too slow to be of value in acute narcoses and too limited in its field for general purposes. Nonetheless, the Hammond machine has saved lives. It is the only one, says Dr. Hammond, "so far as I know, that has ever saved a life from pneumonia."

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