
Life and Breath: The human story of how ventilators came to breathe for us - tintinnabula
https://aeon.co/essays/the-human-story-of-how-ventilators-came-to-breathe-for-us
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simplify
> For thousands of years, living people breathed, dead people didn’t, and no
> one knew why. The explanations that passed for medicine during that time
> sound absurd now. The early Greeks, most notably Homer, believed that humans
> had two souls – one immortal, in the head, and one mortal, in the chest –
> and that a baby’s first breath drew in that mortal soul. The last exhale
> released it.

The biblical view is also noteworthy. When man was created, God took "dust of
the ground" and gave it "the breath of life", thus creating a "living soul".

Interestingly enough, a soul is defined this way as is a living, breathing
creature – and not a ghost, as most people believe.

