The modern ICU, or Intensive Care Unit, was born out of a time of crisis. It was 1952, and polio was raging in many places — especially the city of Copenhagen. Patients poured into the hospitals, many of them gasping for air, turning blue, and eventually dying. Then a brilliant doctor tried a radically different approach — pumping air directly into patients’ lungs. It was an idea that would require intensive manpower, but save many lives. And it led to the birth of a new kind of medicine: intensive care.
Seventy years later, ICUs sit at the cutting edge of modern medicine. They’re the destination for the sickest patients — including those who’re hovering at death’s door — and home to some of medicine’s most profound interventions. ICUs can be a place of pain and healing, of comfort and dying, a laboratory for innovation, or a sanctuary for grieving families.
On this episode, we take a look at intensive care — its roots, what it’s like to work there, and how the coronavirus pandemic has changed it.
Also heard on this week’s episode:

Journalist Daniel Semo tells the story of anesthesiologist Bjorn Ibsen — the brilliant doctor who ushered in a new era in medicine.
We talk with Haney Mallemat, a critical care physician at Cooper Medical Center at Rowan University, about what drew him to intensive care, making life-and-death decisions, and dealing with the lingering trauma of Covid.
Reporter Jad Sleiman talks with Nirav Shah, an ICU doctor at the University of Maryland Medical Center, about the strange, sometimes one-sided relationships doctors develop with their unconscious patients … and one patient he will never forget.