Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals' blood.
Oxygenating the blood by bypassing the lungs in this way could save the lives of people with impaired breathing or obstructed airways, says John Kheir, a cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital Boston in Massachusetts, who led the team.
and then takes a stranger turn when discussing other methods of oxygenating blood which have been tried in the past:
In the late nineteenth century, for example, US doctor John Harvey Kellogg experimented with oxygen enemas — an idea that has been revived in recent decades in the form of bowel infusers2, says Mervyn Singer, an intensive-care specialist at University College London.
Oddly enough, Googling "bowel infusers" mainly comes up just with links to this article: it seems a topic rarely searched. Hardly surprising, I guess.
Anyway, the Googling did lead me to this more detailed article on the rabbit experiment, and oxygenating blood generally, if you're interested. The suggestion seems to be that it might work on humans who can't breath for 20 - 30 minutes, tops. Maybe it would have been handy for the astronaut trying to get back into the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey to be able to inject himself with a 10 minute supply of oxygen. I wonder if this has already featured in a science fiction novel somewhere.
This has also put me in mind of the funny sequence in QI in which Stephen Fry and guests discussed the curious 18th (I think) century idea that it was important to have, um, anal smoke blowing devices, along the River Thames to help revive any drowning person pulled from the river. Could it be that the oxygen content in that process may have actually helped someone by accident? It's a curious thought. I am happy to see that the video of this segment is available on line. I'll save you the effort of clicking on a link:
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