On June 26, 2026, Martha Ann Lillard died at 78 in Shawnee, Oklahoma — the last American who relied on an iron lung to breathe. With her passing, a chapter of medical history quietly closed.
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Infectious Diseases in Focus →On June 26, 2026, Martha Ann Lillard died in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She was 78 years old. She was the last known American who depended on an iron lung — the tank respirator that once crowded hospital wards across this country — to breathe.
With her death, a machine that was once ubiquitous in American medicine became fully historical. And a woman who had lived inside it for more than seven decades became the final embodiment of a disease that most people alive today have never had to fear.
This is the story of polio, the iron lung, and the life of Martha Ann Lillard.
Poliomyelitis — caused by the poliovirus — has been present in human populations for thousands of years, but it reached epidemic proportions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as improved sanitation paradoxically reduced childhood exposure and left older children and adults more susceptible to severe disease when they did encounter the virus.
The worst year in American history was 1952. There were 57,628 reported cases. Nearly 3,200 people died. Thousands more were left permanently paralyzed. Summer — the peak season for poliovirus transmission through contaminated water — became a season of fear. Public pools, movie theaters, and playgrounds were avoided. Parents warned their children away from anything that might carry the invisible threat.
In 1928, engineers Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw at Harvard developed the tank respirator — the machine that would become known as the iron lung. Their device was large: a sealed metal cylinder, roughly the length and diameter of a small car, that enclosed the patient's entire body from the neck down. The head remained outside the cylinder, through a tight rubber collar.
The mechanism used negative pressure — the opposite of how modern ventilators work. A motor changed the air pressure inside the sealed cylinder. When the pressure dropped below atmospheric pressure, the pressure difference caused the patient's chest to expand, drawing air into the lungs in the normal direction of spontaneous breathing. When the pressure was gently raised, air was expelled. The cycle repeated continuously, maintaining a breathing rhythm the patient's own muscles could no longer sustain.
The iron lung did not cure polio. It did not repair the damaged motor neurons. What it did was buy time — keeping patients alive through the acute phase of the disease while the body's immune response ran its course and whatever residual nerve function could recover, did recover. Many patients eventually regained enough breathing capacity to leave the machine. Others needed it for months, years, or for the remainder of their lives.
On April 12, 1955, the results of the largest clinical trial in American history were announced: Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was safe and effective. The announcement was received as a national celebration. Church bells rang. People wept in the streets.
What followed was one of the most dramatic public health interventions in history. The CDC reports that a national vaccination campaign reduced annual US polio cases from tens of thousands to fewer than 100 by the 1960s, and to fewer than 10 by the 1970s. In 1979, the United States declared polio eliminated — the virus was no longer circulating locally.
As the epidemic receded, the iron lungs that had filled hospital wards were gradually decommissioned. Modern positive-pressure ventilators — smaller, lighter, more portable, and far more sophisticated — replaced them for most patients who still required respiratory support. The iron lung became a historical artifact for most people who had used it. For most. But not all.
Martha Lillard's life was one of extraordinary adaptation. She did not live inside the iron lung in the way that phrase might suggest to someone who has never seen one — as a passive prisoner of a machine. She negotiated with it, worked around it, and at times seemed to transcend it.
She tried every modern ventilator that became available over the decades.
Her grandfather modified the iron lung so she could open it herself. She spent years living alone and preparing her own meals. She was, her sister Cindy McVey recalled, someone who had a relationship with the machine that went beyond dependency — it gave her something she described, when asked about going into it for the first time, as relief: "When I got in it, I was tired. Always getting in there felt wonderful."
In her final years, aging and COVID-19 compounded the effects of seven decades of post-polio syndrome. She could no longer leave her home. The iron lung, itself aging, began to fail. In the last weeks before her death, she invited a local news crew to her Shawnee home — not for pity, but because she needed help finding someone who could repair the machine.
She died on June 26, 2026, with her husband Baha beside her. She was the last.
Martha Lillard's sister Cindy McVey put it simply: "They told her she wasn't supposed to live past 20 years old. She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life."
The iron lung was not a triumph of medicine in the way we typically think of medical triumphs. It did not cure. It did not prevent. It was a bridge — between the moment when breathing failed and the moment when, for many patients, breathing could return. It bought time. And for the people who lived inside it, it bought decades.
The Salk vaccine, announced 27 years after the iron lung was invented, was the actual triumph — the intervention that made the iron lung unnecessary for the vast majority of people who might have needed it. Today, polio is on the verge of global eradication, with only a handful of countries where transmission still occurs. Most people alive in the developed world have never had to fear it — have never seen a ward full of metal tanks keeping children breathing.
We owe that to vaccines. And we owe something else to the people like Martha Ann Lillard — the ones who lived through the era that made the case for why vaccines matter.