Louis Agassiz Shaw, Jr.

Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr. (September 25, 1886 – August 27, 1940) was an instructor of physiology at the School of Public Health of Harvard University, where he is credited in 1928 along with Philip Drinker for inventing the Drinker respirator, the first widely used iron lung. Family and early life Shaw's parents were Louis Agassiz Shaw Sr. and Mary Elizabeth Saltonstall. Both parents came from wealthy and politically influential Boston Brahmin families with roots extending back to the Mayflower. The couple's elder son was Quincy Adams Shaw III (born May 21, 1885). Louis Sr. died at home in Chestnut Hill from tuberculosis when Louis Jr. was only four years old on July 2, 1891. Shaw's father was born at 26 Mount Vernon Street in Beacon Hill in 1861, and the following year the family moved to Jamaica Plain. He attended George Washington Copp Noble School in Boston, and graduated from Harvard University in 1884. He married Mary Elizabeth Saltonstall on June 30, 1884, in Newton, right after the graduation ceremony.