Archie Brain
| Archie I J Brain | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 2, 1942 Kobe, Japan |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Anaesthesia |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Known for | Inventor of laryngeal mask airway |
Archie Brain (born 1942) is a British anaesthetist best known as the inventor of the laryngeal mask . The LMA™ has been used over 300 million times worldwide in elective anaesthesia and emergency airway management.
Archie Ian Jeremy Brain, born in Kobe, Japan, July 2, 1942. Brain's father, Henry Norman, came from a middle-class family, studied at Oxford University and went on to work for the Foreign Office. Brain's father was a gifted musician and linguist (fluent in Japanese, Italian, French and Spanish) and spent 13 years in Japan, first as an interpreter and later as British Consul in Kobe. The family was interned at the outbreak of war, but in mid-August 1942, when Archie was only 6 weeks old, they were released and evacuated via a ship operated by the Red Cross. After the war, Henry Brain was promoted to British Ambassador to Cambodia (1957) and then to Uruguay (1961). Archie Brain's mother, Nuala Gertrude, was an Irish painter. Thirty years later, Henry Brain was still using his skills as a linguist and host, but this time to entertain Japanese anaesthetists visiting London who were interested in his son's curious invention. Henry Brain was knighted in 1961. Archie Brain had one brother, Quentin, who in addition to having muscular dystrophy, contracted polio in Singapore in the late 1940s and died in 1962.
At school, Archie Brain had a reputation as an athlete and a poet with little or no scientific ability. Nevertheless he found physics fascinating, and after being taught about electromagnetic fields, designed from scratch a schematic for an electric motor. Brain's ability for construction was apparent at an early age when, as a 14-year-old, he built his own guitar. He was not the first member of the family to invent anything. His Uncle Beric, who died of pneumonia in his twenties, invented one of the first radio valves.
...
Wikipedia