Last U.S. polio patient dependent on iron lung dies at 78

Martha Lillard spent 78 years dependent on an iron lung after childhood polio infection, representing decades of physical limitation and medical dependence.

With the death of Martha Lillard at seventy-eight in Shawnee, Oklahoma, the last living chapter of America's iron lung era has quietly closed. For more than seven decades, she breathed inside a steel chamber built for an epidemic that the rest of the country eventually vaccinated itself free of — becoming, in her endurance, both a testament to human adaptation and a monument to what polio once cost. Her passing does not merely mark the end of a medical technology; it marks the fading of a living memory that kept one of medicine's greatest victories honest. The disease that made her life what i

Last U.S. polio patient dependent on iron lung dies at 78

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