Martha Lillard, widely recognized as the last surviving polio patient dependent on an iron lung, died on June 26 in Shawnee, Oklahoma, at age 78. Her death marks the end of an era for a medical technology that once sustained thousands of polio sufferers worldwide.
Lillard was diagnosed with polio on her fifth birthday in 1953 and spent the final eight months of her life inside the machine around the clock. In her last years she contracted Covid-19 twice, followed by shingles and post-polio syndrome, and the device itself began to fail, with replacement parts too old to source. During a tornado last year, a power outage caused her backup generator to fail, and her husband performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Paul Alexander, another prominent iron lung user, died in March 2024, also at 78, leaving Lillard as the last known patient reliant on the apparatus.