Last U.S. Iron Lung Polio Survivor Martha Ann Lillard Dies at 78

Martha Ann Lillard, who died at 78, was the last known American to live inside an iron lung — a machine that breathed for her every day for more than seven decades after childhood polio stole that ability in the 1950s. Her life was a living bridge between an era of mass paralysis and the age of vaccination that made such suffering rare. She did not retreat from that position; she used it to speak for disability awareness and the stakes of preventable disease. With her passing, the final human thread connecting America to polio's most devastating chapter has quietly come to an end.