Career
Beginning in 1914, his research focused exclusively on physiology. Shaw and his family moved into the brownstone building located at 6 Marlborough Street in the Back Bay in 1917, having acquired the property upon the death of his grandmother, Pauline Agassiz Shaw. The building had a long history, having served as a private day school (1885 – 1893), later as headquarters of the Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Association (1904 – 1915), and then as headquarters of the Women's Municipal League of Boston (1915 – 1917).
From late 1917 until early 1919, Shaw and his research team conducted investigations in his home laboratory on the physiological effects of poisonous gases and other problems related to the ongoing war in Europe. In the spring of 1919, he joined the faculty at the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers in the department of industrial hygiene. The Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers was a joint venture between Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that began in 1913. The joint venture ended in 1922, when the Harvard School of Public Health was formally established.
Shaw and his family continued to live at 6 Marlborough Street at least until 1927. Shaw was a member of the Tennis and Racquet Club, located on Boylston Street not far from his house. In that year, Shaw was arrested for the distillation of alcohol, which was illegal in the United States during Prohibition, in effect from 1920 to 1933. Shortly after that event, the house was demolished and replaced by a five-story, 21-unit apartment house.
Shaw was an instructor in physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he is credited in 1928 along with Philip Drinker (1894 – 1972, associate professor of industrial hygiene) and his brother Cecil K. Drinker (1887 – 1956, later dean of the Harvard School of Public Health) for inventing the first widely used iron lung. The machine was powered by an electric motor with air pumps from two vacuum cleaners. The air pumps changed the pressure inside a rectangular, airtight metal box, pulling air in and out of the lungs.
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