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Paul Richard Alexander (January 30, 1946 – March 11, 2024) was an American paralytic polio survivor, lawyer and author. He contracted polio in 1952 at the age of six and spent the vast majority of his life in an iron lung for more than 70 years.
In 2015 his iron lung he’d lived in for most of his life started to break, but spare parts for the machine - which hadn’t been widely in circulation since the 1960s - were not readily available.
The last man to live in an iron lung died in Dallas on Monday. Paul Alexander, 78, spent more than 70 years confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child in 1952.
Paul Alexander, the man who lived inside an iron lung for over 70 years after contracting polio, died Monday after being hospitalized for Covid last month, his friends and family said. He was 78.
An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator, a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space to stimulate breathing. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It assists breathing when muscle control is lost, or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. [ 1 ]
Martha Ann Lillard [1] (born June 8, 1948) is an American polio survivor who lives in an iron lung. After Paul Alexander's death, she became the last known person to still live in an iron lung. She contracted polio in 1953, when she was five years old. [2]
The polio survivor spent more than 70 years being kept alive by the medical device.
An Emerson iron lung. The patient lies within the chamber, which when sealed provides an oscillating atmospheric pressure. This particular machine was donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum by the family of polio patient Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana, who had used the device from the late 1950s until his death in 2003.