Martha Lillard, Last U.S. Polio Patient in Iron Lung, Dies at 78

Martha Lillard spent over 70 years dependent on an iron lung due to polio infection, unable to breathe independently until her death at 78.

Martha Lillard, the last American to live inside an iron lung, died at seventy-eight in Oklahoma, closing a chapter of medical history that most of the living world had already forgotten. She contracted polio in 1952 as a child and spent more than seven decades breathing by machine — a solitary, enduring witness to an epidemic that vaccination campaigns have since nearly erased from the earth. Her death is not only the passing of a person of remarkable resilience, but a quiet reckoning with what societies owe to the last survivors of catastrophes the young will never know.

Martha Lillard, Last U.S. Polio Patient in Iron Lung, Dies at 78

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