Bjørn Aage Ibsen, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetBjørn Aage Ibsen
Danish anesthetist
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark
About Bjørn Aage Ibsen
- Bjørn Aage Ibsen (August 30, 1915 – August 7, 2007) was a Danish anesthetist and founder of intensive-care medicine.
- He graduated in 1940 from medical school at the University of Copenhagen and trained in anesthesiology from 1949 to 1950 at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
- He became involved in the 1952 poliomyelitis outbreak in Denmark, where 2722 patients developed the illness in a 6-month period with 316 suffering respiratory or airway paralysis.
- Treatment had involved the use of the few negative pressure ventilators available, but these devices, while helpful, were limited and did not protect against aspiration of secretions.
- After detecting high levels of CO2 in blood samples and inside a little boy's lung, Ibsen changed management directly.
- He instituted protracted positive pressure ventilation by means of intubation into the trachea, and enlisting 200 medical students to manually pump oxygen and air into the patients lungs.
- In this fashion, mortality declined from 90% to around 25%.
- Patients were managed in 3 special 35 bed areas, which aided charting and other management. In 1953, Ibsen set up what became the world's first Medical/Surgical ICU in a converted student nurse classroom in Kommunehospitalet (The Municipal Hospital) in Copenhagen, and provided one of the first accounts of the management of tetanus with muscle relaxants and controlled ventilation.
- In 1954 Ibsen was elected Head of the Department of Anaesthesiology at that institution.
- He jointly authored the first known account of ICU management principles in Nordisk Medicin, September 18, 1958: ‘Arbejdet på en Anæsthesiologisk Observationsafdeling’ (‘The Work in an Anaesthesiologic Observation Unit’) with Tone Dahl Kvittingen from Norway.
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