Paul Alexander has died after living inside a machine for 72 years. From the age of 6 to 78, his condition did not prevent him from studying a career or practicing as a lawyer. He was so used to it that he didn’t know how to live any other way. It all started when he was a child in Dallas, United States.

At the age of 6, he contracted polio, a potentially fatal disease that affects, above all, children under 5 years of age and that spread throughout the country in the 1950s. In fact, it became a true epidemic. Between 1952 and 1953, 350,000 infections were quantified in the United States, when the average until then in the country was about 20,000 a year. Tremendously contagious, a vaccine was not developed until 1962. Thanks to it, now Poliomelitis is a disease that has been eradicated in a large part of the world.

Paul’s lungs were paralyzed by the disease and caused him to have to live inside a machine for the rest of his lifesince it is one of the consequences left by polio, which directly attacks the spinal cord causing paralysis.

With the death of Paul Alexandre, it is now just Martha Lilliard, another American woman, the only one who lives thanks to this machine (known as the ‘iron lung’ and which works with bellows that suck air from the cylinder, forcing the lungs to expand and suck air through the nose) that saved the lives of hundreds and hundreds of children.