Martha Lillard, believed to be the final American still living with polio and dependent on an iron lung, has died at 78. She passed away on June 26 in Oklahoma after spending nearly her entire life inside the cylindrical metal machine that kept her breathing.
Lillard contracted polio at age five, a diagnosis that doctors said would not allow her to survive past her twentieth birthday. Instead, she lived seven decades, defying medical expectations through what her sister described as sheer determination.
The iron lung, a device that enclosed her body and used changing air pressure to inflate and deflate her lungs, became her constant companion. Yet Lillard refused to let it confine her life completely. She attended grade school for two hours each day before pursuing the remainder of her education through tutoring. Her family built a custom trailer equipped to transport the machine, and her father even contacted hotels ahead of family road trips to ensure doorways were wide enough to accommodate his daughter and her apparatus.
"She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life," her younger sister Cindy McVey told the Associated Press, recalling the doctors' dire predictions from childhood.
Lillard even drove herself for a period of time and described her experience with the iron lung in a 2013 NBC News interview as liberating rather than limiting. "It feels wonderful, actually, if you're not breathing well," she said. "It makes all the difference when you're not breathing."
Her death certificate listed chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome as causes of death. McVey believed that effects from a prolonged case of Covid-19 may have also contributed.
Lillard's passing closes another chapter in America's polio era. Just two years earlier, Paul Alexander, a Texas resident who became internationally recognized as the world's longest iron lung patient, died at the same age after spending most of his life in the machine following polio infection at six. Alexander had paralyzed from the neck down but earned a law degree, wrote a memoir, and created paintings using a brush held in his mouth.
Before vaccines became routine, polio terrorized the nation each year, leaving thousands paralyzed. Iron lungs saved countless lives during those epidemics, though they were never intended for long-term use. Once vaccination campaigns accelerated in the late 1950s, the machines faded as newer breathing technologies emerged that could be inserted directly into the throat.
The CDC credits widespread vaccination with reducing annual cases from thousands to fewer than 100 by the 1960s and under 10 by the next decade. The United States declared polio eliminated in 1979, meaning the disease no longer spread routinely within the country.
Author James Rodriguez: "Lillard's story belongs in the same breath as Alexander's, a quiet refusal to accept a death sentence that became a life fully lived."
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