Martha Mason | Lived in iron lung, 71

Martha Mason, 71, who spent nearly 61 years living in an iron lung after being stricken with polio but who graduated at the top of her college class and wrote an autobiography, has died.

Ms. Mason died Monday at her home in Lattimore, N.C., said Mary Dalton, an associate communications professor at Wake Forest University who produced a documentary about Ms. Mason's life in 2005.

She was paralyzed from the neck down at age 11 during the polio epidemic in 1948. She was home-schooled and graduated in 1960 from Wake Forest, where she studied English. It wasn't until 1994 that a voice-recognition computer allowed her to write about her life.

Her book, Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung, was published in 2003.

She spent most of her life confined to an 800-pound, 7-foot airtight yellow tube that enabled her to breathe, though she could leave the machine for about an hour a few times a day when she was young. - AP