Martha Ann Lillard was five years old and at her own birthday party when polio paralyzed her body. It was 1953, two years before Jonas Salk’s vaccine reached the United States. She spent six months hospitalized learning, once again, something as basic as breathing.
From then on she lived with barely 25% of her lung capacity, scoliosis, and a paralyzed right arm. In her best years she only needed the iron lung nine hours a day, to sleep. But that noisy, gigantic machine from the 1950s ended up being her lifelong companion.
She died on June 26, 2026 in Shawnee, Oklahoma, at the age of 78, from complications of long covid. She was a painter, a poet, and composed piano music with her left hand. She became the last known American who depended on an iron lung after the death of Paul Alexander in 2024. With her, an entire chapter of the country’s medical history comes to a close.
