Dr. Henry Heimlich dies at 96

Dr. Henry Heimlich, namesake of the maneuver that has saved the lives of an estimated 100,000 potential choking victims, died early Saturday morning. The famed Hyde Park physician, who became a focus of controversy in his later years, was 96.

Dr. Heimlich died at Christ Hospital, where he had been a patient after suffering a heart attack earlier this week, his son Phil said. "My father was a great man who saved many lives," said Phil Heimlich, a lawyer and former Hamilton County commissioner. "He will be missed not only by his family but by all of humanity."

Heimlich was director of surgery at Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati in 1974 when he devised the treatment for choking victims that made his name a household word.

“He regularly dazzled me with his vitality, even at his age, and his commitment to making sure things were done the right way,” recalled Patrick Ward, former executive director of the Deaconess Associations Foundation and a collaborator in the Heimlich Heroes program creating a classroom curriculum for teaching the maneuver to sixth graders. “His passion for helping people never wavered.”

Heimlich, who published his autobiography in 2014, faced criticism in the last decades of his life for his research into using malaria to cure people with the HIV virus. The idea was to use malaria, a treatable illness, to boost the immune systems of those with HIV. “We did some research in China on HIV patients, because we weren’t allowed to conduct studies here in America, and published it in a Chinese medical journal in 1999, but the work stalled,” he told a Boston Globe reporter during an interview about the autobiography. “I think it’s still worth researching to see if it works for other diseases.”

He noted that studies conducted in Austria in 1922 using malaria as a way to treat patients with syphilis resulted in that researcher winning the Nobel Prize. “How can those who have no results themselves attack someone with a new idea?” Heimlich asked an Enquirer reporter in 1993. “At least I have proven results.”

At the age of 92, Heimlich renewed a long-running battle with the American Red Cross. He objected to the Red Cross’ first-aid recommendation that choking victims first receive five back slaps and then the Heimlich maneuver’s five abdominal thrusts.

He emphasized that while he objected to the recommendation, the Red Cross’ procedure did not make him angry.

“It leaves me horrified,” he declared in a 2013 Enquirer interview. “Black slaps lodge the object further in the breathing passageway and lead to deaths from choking. I want to see the research proving that back slaps help choking victims. As far as I know, none exists.”

Ward noted that Heimlich’s fight with the Red Cross “showed the spirit of his personality. The Red Cross is an icon. But, when Dr. Heimlich felt he was right, he was not going to back down to anyone until he was proven wrong. He’s been that way all of his life, not just since he came to Cincinnati.”

Heimlich, his wife, Jane Murray Heimlich, a writer, and their four children moved to Cincinnati in 1969. The thoracic surgeon came to the Queen City from New York to be Jewish Hospital’s director of surgery and teach at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Medicine. During his fifth year at the then Avondale-based hospital, the doctor and his team of researchers developed the maneuver which bears his name and made him world famous.

Before coming to the Queen City, the Wilmington, Delaware native – “I left there at the age of one and took my family with me to New York” – showed an early interest in inventions, contemplative problem solving and as he often admitted, “daydreaming.” At the age of five, he fashioned a sword from a battered umbrella. At the same age, he would sit for hours fishing at a stream by his parents’ house in New Rochelle, New York. With a paper clip for a hook, he never got a bite. But, his late sister, Cecelia

Rosenthal, noted that he never minded coming up empty. As she liked to say: “He was too busy thinking.”

Heimlich decided to become a doctor, as he related in 2013, “when I was a child. We had a female physician, Dr. Belle Jacobson, who came to the house. A female doctor was a rarity back then. And female doctors were viewed with great prejudice. But having her for my doctor seemed normal to me.”

Dr. Jacobson served as calming influence in the Heimlich household. “When someone was sick or injured in the house, there was a feeling of terror,” he recalled. “But, when she walked into the house, everybody calmed down. They knew everything would be taken care of.”

His decision to become a doctor, “someone who cared for people,” followed the life paths of his parents. Heimlich’s father was a prison social worker in New York’s state corrections system. His mother was a strong, independent woman who raised her siblings, on her own, after the death of their mother.

After graduating from Cornell Medical College in 1943, Heimlich enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Before he could be assigned to a ship, he volunteered to go to China on a mission with five other sailors and six Marines. They were part of an advance weather station in the Gobi desert of Inner Mongolia. Heimlich’s assignment: “To take care of the local population and keep them on our side. It was either do that or my next choice of assignment might be on a beach during an invasion,” he said in 2013. “So, I went to China.”

He treated Chinese civilians and soldiers. “One night as the war was coming to an end in 1945, a Chinese soldier was brought to me with a chest wound,” Heimlich said. “I operated on him. But he died in my hands.

“The next day, I was feeling terrible.” Hoping to lift his spirits, he went for a ride on one of the horses assigned to the 12 American GIs. As he rode toward a nearby town, the Navy surgeon crossed paths with an oxcart.

“The cart was carrying the remains of that Chinese soldier,” Heimlich said. His voice quaked with emotion 68 years after the first seeing that cart.

“I never forgot that sight,” he said. “And, I never forgot how he died in my hands.” He wondered if he could have done more. He worried that if he had known more about draining chest wounds, the man might have lived.

In 1962, 17 years after that soldier’s death, the doctor invented the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve – employing a piece of tubing purchased from a novelty store and designed to deliver a Bronx cheer – to drain fluid from chest wounds. Unlike other drains, Heimlich’s invention was highly portable. Used to great effect on wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War, the valve with his name on it can still be found in battlefield as well as hospital settings.

In Vietnam, that valve spread his name by being used on thousands of wounded American troops. A decade later, Heimlich would begin work on a maneuver whose name is now known to millions.

The Heimlich maneuver is based on a simple, fist-fueled, abdominal thrust. The first-aid provider, or even the person choking, makes a fist, placing it just above the navel, but below the ribs. The thrust quickly goes in and then up. This action lifts the diaphragm and forces air from the lungs to expel items lodged in breathing passages.

From data complied by the Cincinnati-based Heimlich Institute, the procedure has saved the lives of more than 100,000 choking victims in the United States since the maneuver’s inception in 1974. The institute, however, appears to be barely functioning today. The last federal tax return that could be found for it was filed in 2015, when the institute only spent $1,345 to put out 86 posters describing the maneuver.

While speaking to a class of 11- and 12-year-olds at Glendale’s Bethany School in April 2012, Heimlich described how the maneuver came to be.

He had read several accounts in 1972 about diners choking in restaurants. “Unfortunately,” he told the students, “many of them died.”

Heimlich believed that deadly outcome could be avoided. So, he experimented by inserting a tube down the throat of a laboratory dog.

“We didn’t hurt the dog,” he assured the students. “He was just sleeping.”

One of his assistants fetched a piece of meat from the hospital kitchen. Notoriously tough, hospital food is the perfect stuff for getting stuck in the throat of man or beast.

The leathery meat jammed the tube. Heimlich balled up his fists and pressed into the dog’s stomach and up against his diaphragm. This depressed the canine’s lungs. They acted like two bellows. Out came the hunk of meat. The Heimlich maneuver was born.

The maneuver and its inventor were not immune to controversy:

• The American Red Cross has gone back and forth for years about recommending the procedure. Current Red Cross first-aid protocol for someone who’s choking calls for five back slaps first. Then, if needed, follow with five of the maneuver’s abdominal thrusts. The Red Cross’ inclusion of the back slaps offended Heimlich. So, in 1976, he asked the organization to remove his name from their first-aid literature for choking. That’s why the term “abdominal thrusts” is used.
• Dr. Edward A. Patrick, a former Heimlich associate, claimed in 2003 to be the maneuver’s uncredited co-inventor. That was 29 years after research documenting the procedure was first published. Patrick died in 2009. The procedure is still called the Heimlich maneuver.
• Heimlich theorized that the maneuver could also be used to keep people from drowning and help asthma sufferers. People in and out of the medical community cast doubts on those theories. Among the doubters: Heimlich’s estranged son, Peter, of Duluth, Georgia. Since 2002, the younger Heimlich has called his father, “a spectacular con man and serial liar” and “arguably one of history’s most successful – and destructive – medical humbugs.” Peter Heimlich has also claimed: “The only thing my father ever invented was his own mythology.”

Dr. Heimlich’s work on the maneuver received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award in 1984. The Lasker Awards, dubbed, “America’s Nobels” recognize scientists, “who have made major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure and prevention of human disease.”

The maneuver also resulted in Dr. Heimlich being inducted into two halls of fame: Engineering and Science in 1985 and Safety and Health in 1993. The former is an international organization based in Dayton, Ohio and includes such inductees as George Washington Carver and the Wright brothers. The latter is run by the National Safety Council.

Heimlich’s greatest honor comes from the 100,000 choking sufferers the maneuver has prevented from being victims and kept alive to become survivors.

“All I need,” he said in the 2013 interview, “is just for the people whose lives have been saved by the Heimlich maneuver to remember my name.”

In May 2016, Dr. Heimlich performed his namesake medical procedure on a live choking victim.

The doctor said that his encounter with Patty Ris at the Deupree House senior living facility in Hyde Park, where they both lived, was the first time he ever performed it on a person needing immediate aid. However, several published reports in the early 2000s from news outlets ranging from the BBC to the Chicago Sun-Times show interviews with Heimlich describing himself using the maneuver. In one interview, he said he helped a man at the former private dining club, the Banker's Club, in Downtown Cincinnati in 2001.

Dr. Heimlich was preceded in death by his wife of 61 years, Jane Murray Heimlich. Survivors include, in addition to his sons, Phil and Peter, his twin daughters, Elisabeth Heimlich of Hyde Park, and Jan Heimlich of Austin, Texas.

Phil Heimlich said a private family service and burial is planned soon. The family hopes to arrange a public memorial, he added, that will give his father's friends and admirers a chance to pay their respects.

The Associated Press contributed.

Correction: This report initially included mention that Heimlich received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award in 1984. It continued: The Lasker Awards, dubbed, “America’s Nobels” recognize scientists, including the Wright Brothers and George Washington Carver, “who have made major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure and prevention of human disease.” Dr. Heimlich did receive the award but a spokesman for the awards said neither the Wright Brothers nor George Washington Carver were recipients.