Henry Heimlich was born in 1920 in Wilmington, Delaware, led the Cornell marching band as drum major and earned his medical degree at 23. Sent by the US Navy to the Gobi Desert in World War II, he treated a trachoma epidemic by grinding sulfadiazine powder into shaving cream so it would stay on patients’ eyelids. In 1962 he developed the chest drainage flutter valve, patented in 1969, a rubber sleeve that let a collapsed lung drain while patients walked and that is credited with saving soldiers in Vietnam. His assistant from the China camp, Frederick Webster, later said the dying soldier Heimlich cited as inspiration never existed.

In 1974 he described abdominal thrusts in Emergency Medicine under the title Pop Goes the Cafe Coronary. Retired restaurant owner Isaac Piha read a newspaper column about it and used it days later, and JAMA named it the Heimlich maneuver. The Red Cross and American Heart Association later adopted it as the sole choking treatment, then in 2005 the Red Cross restored back blows and dropped his name. From the 1980s Heimlich promoted malaria therapy for cancer, Lyme disease and HIV, and trials linked to the Heimlich Institute ran in Ethiopia without notifying its health ministry.

• Why critics said infecting HIV patients with malaria would fuel the virus
• The American Heart Association’s warning against abdominal thrusts for drowning
• Edward Patrick’s 2003 claim to be the uncredited co-developer of the maneuver
• His son Peter’s years exposing him as a con man
• The 2016 rescue at age 96 that contradicted a 2003 BBC interview, months before his death