Martha Lillard needed a large respirator called an iron lung to recover from polio, which she caught in 1953. She still uses a form of the device at nights.

Paul Alexander, one of the last surviving people in America to live in an iron lung, passed away in early 2024 at the age of 78. After contracting polio in 1952 as a child, Alexander relied on the ...

DALLAS — Confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child, Paul Alexander managed to train himself to breathe on his own for part of the day, earned a law degree, wrote a book about ...

DALLAS (AP) — A Texas man who spent most of his 78 years using an iron lung chamber and built a large following on social media, recounting his life from contracting polio in the 1940s to ...

An Arroyo Grande, California whose son was diagnosed with polio writes about the disease, which can result in paralysis and be treated with an iron lung. Poliomyelitis can be prevented with vaccines.

Both polio and the iron lung are nearly obsolete now — the U.S. declared polio eradicated in 1979, and Alexander was one of the few people in the country to still rely on a machine that’s ...

DALLAS (AP) — A Texas man who spent most of his 78 years using an iron lung chamber and built a large following on social media, recounting his life from contracting polio in the 1940s to ...