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 in 1915,[1] Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh 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] After the war, he 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.[4] He was later inducted into the US National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2007.

A Drinker iron lung

He and his wife Susan[5] had a son, bioengineer Philip A. Drinker,[6] 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.