Martha Lillard, Last American Using Iron Lung, Dies at 78

Martha Lillard spent 78 years living with severe polio paralysis, requiring continuous mechanical ventilation through an iron lung from childhood until her death.

Martha Lillard, who died at seventy-eight in Shawnee, Oklahoma, was the last American known to depend on an iron lung — a machine that had breathed for her since childhood, when polio stole the use of her lungs. Her passing does not merely mark the end of one life, but the closing of an entire era in which mechanical ingenuity stood between thousands of Americans and death. She outlived the epidemic, outlived the machines, and outlived the public memory of the disease itself — becoming, in her final years, a living archive of a catastrophe the world had chosen to forget. Her death is both a qu

Martha Lillard, Last American Using Iron Lung, Dies at 78

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