Last American in iron lung dies at 78, marking end of polio era

One individual who lived with severe polio-related paralysis for decades has died, ending a unique medical survival story.

For more than half a century, one man breathed only because a machine the size of a coffin breathed for him — a living remnant of the polio epidemics that once paralyzed a nation's children and its collective sense of safety. He died at 78, and with him the last direct, embodied link to that era of iron lungs and hospital wards humming in unison has quietly closed. His life was not a tragedy of stasis but a testament to adaptation, to the strange intimacy between a human being and the technology that sustains him, and to how long the consequences of a single historical catastrophe can echo thr

Last American in iron lung dies at 78, marking end of polio era

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