The Last Known Iron Lung Patient in the U.S. Has Died

One woman’s death inside a 1940s iron lung is a stark reminder that America still lets ordinary people fall through the cracks of a powerful, slow-moving health system.

Story Snapshot

Polio survivor Martha Ann Lillard, 78, the last known American using an iron lung, died in Shawnee, Oklahoma.
She caught polio at age 5 in 1953 and spent 73 years depending on the same negative-pressure machine to breathe.
She died from complications of long COVID-19, after months needing the iron lung almost around the clock again.
Her story exposes how medical “progress” often forgets the people living with old devices, chronic illness, and rising costs.

A life shaped by polio, before there was a vaccine

In 1953, five-year-old Martha Lillard went to a birthday party near Shawnee, Oklahoma, and came home with a fever that changed her life. Doctors soon found she had polio, a virus that can paralyze muscles used to walk or even breathe. At that time, the polio vaccine was not yet widely available in the United States, so children like Martha had no real protection. She spent six months in a hospital, learning to stay alive with the help of an iron lung.

The iron lung that kept Martha alive was a large metal tube built in the 1940s, long before today’s ventilators. Her body lay inside the chamber, with only her head sticking out; changes in air pressure around her chest pulled air in and out of her lungs. At first, she lived inside it almost full time, spending about twenty-three hours a day in the machine and one hour outside for therapy. That hour was used to slowly strengthen her weak and partly paralyzed limbs.

Choosing the “old” machine over modern technology

As Martha grew older, doctors offered newer breathing machines, including modern ventilators that use tubes in the throat. She refused those options, saying the iron lung was more comfortable for her body and gave her the best chance to rest. For many years, Martha was able to live outside the iron lung during the day, using it mainly at night while she slept. She built her daily routine around this huge, aging device that most hospitals had not used for decades.

Over time, the iron lung itself became a symbol of how progress can leave people behind. The device used parts dating back to the 1940s, and replacement pieces were hard to find or fabricate. Repair work often depended on small networks of volunteers and tinkerers, not any formal support from large medical companies or the federal government. While politicians argued over health care and budgets, this one woman’s life still rested on a machine made before many of them were born.

COVID-19, long-term illness, and a final setback

In her later years, Martha caught COVID-19 and developed what doctors call long COVID-19, with lasting breathing and fatigue problems. According to her obituary, those ongoing complications are what finally led to her death on June 26, 2026, at age seventy-eight in Shawnee. As her health worsened in the last months, she returned to spending almost all day inside the iron lung again. For about eight months, she reportedly needed the pressure chamber twenty-four hours a day, just to stay alive.

Martha Lillard contracted polio at age 5 during her 1953 birthday party and became the last known American using an iron lung after Paul Alexander's death in 2024.

— Nyx 夜。 (@KL_MAMBA) July 9, 2026

News of her death did not break right away, spreading first on social media and through niche outlets before larger national reports. Many posts called her the last known American to rely on an iron lung, a status she gained after the earlier death of another user, Paul Alexander. That “last” label is based on what reporters and advocates know, not on any complete government list of patients, because such records do not really exist. Still, no agency or expert has stepped forward with any other known iron lung users in the United States.

What her story says about medicine, power, and ordinary people

Martha Lillard’s life highlights how medical success stories and real human lives can pull in different directions. On paper, America beat polio long ago through vaccines, yet Martha lived with its damage every day for more than seventy years. Her aging iron lung shows how our health system tends to chase new drugs and high tech, while people with rare conditions often rely on outdated tools, small charities, and personal grit. Many readers on both the left and right see that gap and feel the system is serving itself first.

Her death from long COVID-19 also connects two eras of public health failure: the time before routine vaccines, and a modern pandemic marked by deep mistrust and political fighting. Both times, ordinary families carried the cost while leaders argued, delayed, or focused on their own careers. People who fear “deep state” elites or distant medical bureaucracies can see those worries reflected in Martha’s story, even though she herself was not a political figure. She was an American who did everything she could to survive, inside a machine that outlived the promises of many politicians.