Last US iron lung polio patient Martha Lillard dies at 78

Martha Lillard, the last known polio survivor in the United States dependent on an iron lung, died on June 26 in Shawnee, Oklahoma, at age 78. She had lived with the disease since 1953, when polio struck just after her fifth birthday and left her reliant on the machine to breathe.

Her sister, Cindy McVey, said Lillard had been told she would not live past 20, but kept building a life around a condition that narrowed almost every ordinary choice. For the last two years of her life, Lillard was in the iron lung nearly 24 hours a day. She died after a lifetime shaped by a negative-pressure ventilator that once defined the most severe phase of the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s.

As a child, Lillard went to grade school for only two hours a day and was tutored for the rest of the day. She later attended Shawnee High School, where a phone and intercom system allowed her to speak with teachers and classmates from her classroom. Those small adaptations let her stay connected to school, even as polio kept her bound to the machine that helped her survive.

Lillard became the last known person in the United States reliant on an iron lung after Paul Alexander died on March 11, 2024, following more than 70 years in one. Their deaths mark the end of a generation whose bodies carried direct memory of a disease that once filled wards with rows of steel cylinders and terrified families across the country.

The history that made Lillard’s survival possible also shows how public health can be forgotten once its victories become routine. The Salk polio vaccine was announced safe and effective in 1955, and nationwide immunization campaigns followed in the United States. That campaign changed the country’s relationship to polio, but Lillard’s life is a reminder of what vaccination prevented: childhoods organized around respirators, classrooms adapted for breathing machines, and adulthood measured in years borrowed from medicine.

Cindy McVey said Lillard had the enthusiasm and drive to keep living and make the best of her life. Her death closes the story of the last known American patient living with an iron lung, but the public-health lesson remains visible in the machine that carried her through 73 years after polio first took hold.