07/14/2026
A bit long but enlightening story of the last American living with polio, dependent on the lifesaving antique known as the iron lung.
On the morning polio took her, Martha Lillard woke to sunlight, went to sit up, and could not lift her head from the pillow. She was five years old, and it was June of 1953. Within four days she had lost consciousness, and when she came back she could not move her arms or her legs or draw a breath on her own -- so a machine breathed for her instead, and it would go on breathing for her, in one form or another, for the next seventy-three years. Lillard died on June 26 at her home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, at the age of 78, the last American who still depended on an iron lung.
The vaccine was two years away. Jonas Salk's was licensed in April of 1955, but Martha was infected in the summer of 1953, a year after the worst polio epidemic in American history, when some 58,000 people fell ill, more than 21,000 were paralyzed, and over 3,000 died. It was the disease that frightened American parents above all others, in part because no one could tell them where it came from. "All the mothers were just terrified because people were just getting it right and left," she remembered. "They didn't know if it was a virus or bacteria or how you caught it."
For Martha, polio was devastating, and much of the damage was permanent. She was paralyzed from the neck down, and though therapy eventually restored the use of her legs and part of her left arm, her right arm never moved again. In the early years she lived inside the iron lung almost entirely, leaving it only for an hour or two a day; it would be years before she could spend her days outside it and return only to sleep.
She would recall the hospital wards of that era, rows of iron lungs with children inside them, and the storms that terrified everyone -- because if the power failed, the machines had to be cranked by hand, and there were never enough nurses. The wait was interminable, she said, because during it you simply were not breathing.
"You just laid there and you could feel your heart beating and it was just terrifying." Without air, the only sound a person can make is a click of the tongue, and so that dark room, full of children who could not call out, sounded to her like a barn full of clucking chickens.
The doctors told her family she would not live to see twenty, and she lived to seventy-eight, and she did not spend those years waiting. Her grandfather rebuilt the iron lung with a second motor so that she could open the hatch herself from the inside, which meant that from her teens onward she could get in and out of the machine alone -- and so she lived alone, cooked her own meals, and for a time drove a car. Her family built a childhood around the machine, hauling it to Missouri in a custom trailer while her father telephoned hotels ahead of them to ask whether the doors were wide enough to admit it. "To me, it was just normal," her younger sister, Cindy McVey, told the Associated Press.
Before she got sick, Martha had wanted to be a ballerina. It was her great wish, and she had started walking on her toes at the age of one. Afterward she painted, wrote poems, and composed music for the left hand; she volunteered at the Humane Society, at a daycare, and on a crisis line; she rescued dogs, and loved beagles above all. And the girl who had wanted to dance came to feel she had never entirely stopped. "I think now of my life as a ballet," she said. "I have to balance so many things."
Love arrived by an improbable road. After the attacks of September 11th she went online trying to understand what had happened, and in a chat room she met a man in Egypt named Baha Seleh. They talked for more than twenty years, and eventually he moved to Oklahoma to be with her. When a tornado cut the power to her iron lung, he breathed into her mouth until help arrived. They married this past February, four months before she died.
The last years were the hardest. She caught COVID twice and then developed long COVID, and a body already reduced to less than a quarter of its lung capacity had nothing to spare. For the final five years she could not leave the house, and for the final two she was inside the iron lung nearly around the clock.
The machine was failing as well -- an antique running on parts no one had manufactured in decades, with almost no one left alive who knew how to fix it -- and days before her death she let a local television reporter into her home because she was desperate to find someone who could. Over the years she had tried every modern ventilator that came along, and not one could reach the pressure she needed to breathe. "I tried all of them," she said. She was never sentimental about the thing that kept her alive; she would rather, she said, not have needed it at all.
Polio has not spread in the United States since 1979, and Martha Lillard was among the last Americans who remembered it firsthand. But it has not been eradicated. It remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the World Health Organization still classes it as a global emergency, and the virus has lately surfaced in wastewater in London and in Hamburg. Meanwhile American children are being vaccinated against it at a lower rate than at any point in more than a decade, and vaccine exemptions have reached an all-time high.
Martha knew what those numbers meant, and she said it broke her heart to meet people campaigning against vaccines. "I would just do anything," she said, "to prevent somebody from having to go through what I have." And then she said the thing that should be the last word on it: "I mean, my mother, if she had the vaccine available, I would have had it in a heartbeat."
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To watch the final interview with Martha, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR_xkwI1_qY
Martha's family is running a GoFundMe campaign to help cover funeral and probate costs at https://www.gofundme.com/f/honoring-martha-ann-lillards-legacy
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For a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the polio epidemic in America, we highly recommend "Polio: An American Story" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780195307146 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/33ipYad (Amazon)
For children who have never seen what polio can do, we highly recommend "Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio," the true story of a twelve-year-old girl paralyzed in 1949 and the long year of her recovery, for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/small-steps
There's also an excellent story about a girl who contracts polio when an epidemic strikes her town, "Blue," for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/blue
For a powerful biography for adult readers about Judith Heumann, the famous disability rights leader who became paralyzed by polio as a toddler, we highly recommend at https://www.amightygirl.com/being-heumann -- her memoir is also available in a new Young Readers Edition for ages 10 to 15 at https://www.amightygirl.com/rolling-warrior
To introduce children to several extraordinary women whose lives were changed by polio, check out "Wilma Unlimited: How Wilma Rudolph Became The World's Fastest Woman" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/wilma-unlimited), "Splash! Ethelda Bleibtrey Makes Waves of Change" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/splash-bleibtrey), "Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/joni-the-lyrical-life), "Dorothea's Eyes: Dorothea Lange Photographs the Truth" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dorothea-s-eyes), and "Jubilee: The First Therapy Horse and an Olympic Dream" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/jubilee-therapy-horse)
