Martha Lillard, the last known American polio survivor dependent on an iron lung, died June 26 at 78 — a woman who was told she wouldn't see 20, in a machine built by a country that still knew how to conquer disease instead of inventing new ones.

Lillard contracted polio at age five in Oklahoma. The disease paralyzed her from the neck down and left her reliant on the negative-pressure ventilator that encased her body, forcing air in and out of her lungs while she slept. Doctors gave her 15 years. She gave them 73 more.

"They told her she wasn't supposed to live past 20 years old," her younger sister Cindy McVey told the Associated Press. "She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life."

Lillard attended school two hours a day, completed the rest through tutoring, and used an intercom phone system to stay connected with classmates from home, according to Fox News. Her father built a custom trailer to transport her iron lung on road trips and called hotels ahead to make sure the doors were wide enough. Through therapy, she regained use of her left arm and legs, drove a car for a time, and lived independently for years. She wrote poetry, volunteered at the Humane Society, and this year married a man from Egypt she'd corresponded with for two decades after he finally obtained a visa.

"They were really soul mates," McVey said. "He's extremely brokenhearted."

Lillard described the first time she was placed in the iron lung as "a relief" in a 2013 interview with NBC News. "It feels wonderful, actually, if you're not breathing well. It makes all the difference when you're not breathing."

Her death certificate lists chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome as causes. McVey said she believes long-haul COVID contributed. Lillard contracted COVID twice during the pandemic and had just 25% lung capacity before the first infection, Fox News reported. After COVID, she was confined to the iron lung nearly 24 hours a day.

The iron lung was never meant for long-term use — it was a stopgap that saved thousands during annual polio epidemics that paralyzed mostly children. Then Jonas Salk built a vaccine, and the country deployed it. The CDC confirms annual U.S. polio cases dropped below 100 in the 1960s and below 10 in the 1970s. By 1979, polio was declared eliminated in the United States.

That is what American medicine looked like when it was focused on solving real problems. Lillard's generation survived iron lungs and witnessed the conquest of a virus that terrorized every family in the country. Now the same public health establishment that can't keep parasites out of produce or run a competent clinical trial insists on pumping hormones into confused teenagers and calls anyone who objects a threat to science.

Lillard's death comes two years after Paul Alexander, another iron lung patient, also died at 78. Alexander earned a law degree, wrote a memoir, and painted with a brush held in his mouth — another life that refused to accept the diagnosis.

The machines are gone now. So are the people who needed them. What remains is the question of whether the country that built them still has the nerve to face a real crisis — or only the appetite for manufacturing fake ones.