Martha Lillard, Last American in Iron Lung, Dies at 78

Martha Lillard spent decades dependent on an iron lung for breathing, requiring constant mechanical support until her death at 78.

Martha Lillard, the last American to live inside an iron lung, died at seventy-eight in Shawnee, Oklahoma — closing a chapter of human history that most of the world had long since turned past. Stricken by polio as a child before vaccines could reach her, she spent more than seven decades in a mechanical embrace that breathed for her, becoming an unwilling but enduring witness to medicine's greatest triumph over the very disease that had claimed her lungs. Her death is not merely the loss of a person, but the quiet extinguishing of a living memory — the final human thread connecting the presen

Martha Lillard, Last American in Iron Lung, Dies at 78

Related Coverage

Get The Register in your inbox