Polio Wars (11 page)

By November 1940 Kenny began to give talks to women's clubs and developed a group of influential allies whose allegiance became increasingly clear to NFIP officials in New York City. One local woman supporter, responding to Kenny's complaints about the tardiness of NFIP funding, noted that many local people had offered to provide funds, but Kenny refused to accept “aid from anyone outside the Foundation… as her country wrote you and she presented her introduction to you.” In a criticism that would be repeated many times in subsequent years, the supporter complained that “millions of dollars” had been contributed by the American public “for the express purpose” of alleviating polio, yet the NFIP had ignored “countless testimonials to be had from patients, parents, doctors, general hospitals, and scores of other people to bear witness to the positively miraculous results she has obtained.”
¹²⁵
This letter sounded themes that would become very familiar to O'Connor: the sense of the NFIP as a national civic organization, Kenny as the unwitting victim of unpleasant policies that left her without proper funding to continue her work, and the worth of the work itself proven by “testimonials”—all ideas that gained greater political force by the mid-1940s.

Kenny's work at Station K, her ward at the Minneapolis General Hospital, was not easy. During her first 6 months she and Mary struggled to overcome the resistance of members of the hospital staff who saw her methods as dangerous and irrational. Kenny argued that traditional ways of testing muscles exacerbated muscle spasm, but physical therapists ignored this argument and during the night while she was away from the hospital would test the muscles of her patients.
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In other instances individual physicians paid no attention to Kenny's claim to clinical authority. One of her patients recalled that his physician prescribed arm and leg splints saying “you're my patient, so I'm going to do what I think is right.” When Kenny came back she cut off the splints and threw them on the floor. To horrified patients and nurses she said reassuringly “he's just a young doctor; I'll have a talk with him.”
¹²⁷
In a single ward she could hope to counteract such actions, but how would her work manage to transform institutional practice and professional resistance across the country?

Money was always central in Kenny's American career, partly because she made much of presenting her work as a “gift.” In Australia she had been paid as a private duty nurse, supplemented by her Army war pension and royalties from the Sylvia stretcher she had designed and patented.
¹²⁸
She had expected to be able to draw on some of her Australian savings in America, but during the war Australia had followed Britain's lead by restricting the amount of currency that could leave the country.
¹²⁹
Increasingly anxious that the NFIP was not fulfilling its promise to pay her expenses Kenny wrote a number of times to O'Connor reminding him that the NFIP had agreed to “be responsible for my expenses during this demonstration.” She was also becoming annoyed with the NFIP's funding arrangement, whereby she had to request money from Cole who then contacted the NFIP's head office in New York before giving her a check.
¹³⁰

It is at this point that Mary became a more central figure. After Kenny's mother had died in 1937 Mary continued her training as a Kenny technician by moving to Brisbane to work at the outpatient clinic.
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By the time she and Kenny arrived in America, Mary was crucial in Kenny's life, providing emotional ballast and balancing Kenny's pride and temper with a softer, more pragmatic approach. Kenny had brought her to America partly as a companion and clinical assistant and partly as a servant. In Kenny's 1943 autobiography Mary appears as a wide-eyed child, amazed at America's scenic beauty and technological marvels like automats, but it is clear that Mary's less combative attitude helped Kenny to achieve her goals. Thus, when their funds were dwindling after 3 months in the United States, Kenny phoned Henry Haverstock's parents and told them that she had to return to Australia. Haverstock's father immediately contacted Kenny at home and offered her money, which Kenny refused to accept. It was Mary to whom the father then addressed an envelope containing $40 that he left in their mail box. And, according to Kenny, it was Mary who “pleaded with me to stay.”
¹³²
Kenny does not mention whether she allowed Mary to keep this money, but she certainly encouraged the Haverstock family to pressure physicians at the medical school and Minnesota's Republican Senator Henrik Shipstead, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to contact the Australian ambassador.
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Not long after this encounter Cole phoned Kenny to say that the NFIP had sent $400 for her expenses.
¹³⁴

Minnesota's local NFIP officials had been initially skeptical of the New York office's decision to fund Kenny's work. In September 1940 Arthur Reynolds, a prominent Democrat and the chairman of the state chapter, warned the NFIP's New York office about divisions among local physicians “as to her worth and her proper place.” To Reynolds Kenny seemed “more or less of a publicity hound” and he wondered whether O'Connor wanted local officials “to treat her nice and send her on her way as quickly as possible?”
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O'Connor explained that in 6 months, after a full report from Minneapolis physicians at the medical school, the NFIP would be able “to appraise the value of Miss Elizabeth Kenny's methods of treatment.”
¹³⁶
A few months later Reynolds' attitude had softened and he told O'Connor that among most “medical people” the “consensus of opinion is favorable” about the value of Kenny's work. The state chapter began to pay for 16 patients under her care at the city hospital. The money question continued to fester, however, and Reynolds was outraged to hear that Kenny had said during a talk at a women's club in Minneapolis that she “
was paying her own personal expenses.
”
¹³⁷
The question of who deserved credit for funding Kenny's work later became a publicized and politicized issue.

Nor did Kenny consider that her needs should be in any way secondary, even to the concerns of the nation's President. In September 1940 she wrote to Roosevelt, explaining that she was an “official visitor” with an “official visa” who for the past 3 months had “given lectures and demonstration to a class of medical men and physiotherapists and nurses.” Despite assurances to “defray her personal expenses” the NFIP had not yet done so, and “owing to war conditions, it is impossible for me to receive sufficient money from my own Country.”
¹³⁸
After Cole paid her with NFIP funds, Kenny wrote to Roosevelt again, reminding him that almost a third of the cases of crippling in the United States were caused by polio. Since “this enemy knows no frontiers,” she wrote, “I consider the question is of national importance to your country.” Without explicitly asking for money, she complained that the NFIP funds did not cover her expenses, which she estimated at
$180 a month to cover rent, telephone, gas, electric light, food, and transportation to and from the hospitals she visited.
¹³⁹

All letters from the public about the NFIP and polio, whether directed to Roosevelt, his wife, or other prominent figures, were forwarded to O'Connor and his staff. Annoyed at Kenny's audacity at approaching Roosevelt directly, O'Connor contacted Cole, whom he saw as her formal supervisor. Her second long letter, O'Connor reported, which described “somewhat in detail the remarkable cures she has been effecting [sic] in your area” without NFIP funding was incorrect, for the NFIP had already sent her funds. Thus, “one could hardly say that Sister Kenny's statement to President Roosevelt was playing cricket.”
¹⁴⁰
Cole apologized to Kenny, explaining that he had been away for a month before all the necessary forms were filled in and argued that the NFIP was not “in any way… to blame in this matter and if there has been any delay it should be placed only at my door.”
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Later Kenny praised “the great, humane and unbiased attitude of men” like Cole, Knapp, and Pohl, but in day-to-day affairs she clearly saw such delays as slights.
¹⁴²
Going to the top and using local and national political connections were techniques she had developed during her years in Australia when she sought to gain government support for clinics despite opposition from Brisbane specialists.

Kenny then sent what she called a “brief report” to Cole and O'Connor “to place before you the evidence I have produced during the past three months.” In 9 typed pages she compared the Minneapolis physicians to the Queensland Royal Commission and the London County Council, arguing that their “unbiased attitude” had led them to provide “the material I so much desired to demonstrate and prove my ideas to be correct, although so much opposed to orthodoxy.” She also praised “the open mindedness of the members of the American medical profession who have listened and granted me the privilege of demonstrating my ideas under their personal observation” and the NFIP for its “financial assistance.”
¹⁴³
In a letter to Chuter she boasted of her successes at a university that was “the largest in the U.S.A. in one campus” and described with delight a formal dinner at the University Club during the Northwestern Pediatric Conference where she had been seated between the president of the pediatric society and the chief orthopedic surgeon of the General Hospital.
¹⁴⁴

1940 was not an epidemic year for polio in Minnesota, and between June and December Kenny treated only 24 acute patients. The Minneapolis physicians knew that this number of cases was not sufficient for a convincing conclusion about her work, as improvement might also have resulted from spontaneous recovery. Kenny had initially been asked to stay only for 6 months, but Cole and Knapp wanted to retain her as both teacher and clinician. They therefore asked the NFIP to allow her to stay during another polio season so that doctors, nurses, and physical therapists could become better acquainted with her methods.
¹⁴⁵

Most crucially, these physicians began to publish clinical reports that linked their careers with Kenny and her work. Cole and Knapp wrote a preliminary study of her first patients that was presented at a NFIP meeting in New York that December. Their report, cautious but positive, convinced O'Connor and the NFIP's advisory committee to continue funding Kenny at the University of Minnesota, and when she announced that she would have to return to Australia for a few months, the NFIP agreed to pay her travel expenses.
¹⁴⁶
Kenny was going to Australia ostensibly to help her Brisbane staff deal with a polio outbreak but she intended to return to Minnesota with 2 Australian technicians.
The NFIP agreed to pay their expenses as well. Kenny later recalled that she had suggested to Mary that she also return to Australia but that Mary wanted to stay with the Minneapolis patients and continue training local physical therapists and therefore “begged to remain and for me to return.” Mary stayed behind not only to supervise the work in Minneapolis but also as a quiet symbol of the power of the work without its most vocal and at times refractory proponent.
¹⁴⁷

By the time Kenny returned the dynamics of the relationship among the Australian nurse, NFIP officials, and University of Minnesota physicians had become established. It was an uneasy relationship in which Kenny refused to be easily slotted into the role of subservient nurse. She appeared neither grateful nor amenable; she was difficult, ambitious, easily irritated, and defensive. Yet she was also good company, telling stories of her war experiences and her bush nursing in an era when social graces of participants before and after professional meetings were crucial parts of a medical professional's reputation. NFIP officials and Kenny's medical supervisors hoped that they could extract what was good about her methods and then send her back to Australia. They would be disappointed.

1.
Elizabeth Kenny with Martha Ostenso
And They Shall Walk: The Life Story of Sister Elizabeth Kenny
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943), 201, 206; “For Poliomyelitis Test: Australian Nurse Leaves Coast to Discuss New Treatment Here”
New York Times
April 18 1940; William Forgan Smith to Dear Sir [Basil O'Connor], March 11 1940, Series A981/1, United States 148, Australian Archives, ACT Regional Office, Canberra, ACT, Australia (hereafter AA-ACT).

2.
Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 206.

3.
Kristian Gosta Hansson “After-Treatment of Poliomyelitis”
JAMA
(July 1939) 113: 32–35. For a reference to this article “where it admitted, that nowhere in the world is there a treatment for this disease in the acute stage,” see Kenny to Sir [Charles Chuter], January 19 1940, Home Secretary's Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1941–1949, A/31753, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane (hereafter QSA).

4.
Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 207.

5.
Richard Casey to John McEwen, June 5 1940, cited in W. J. Hudson
Casey
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 116–117.

6.
Marvin L. Kline “The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met”
Reader's Digest
(August 1959), 75: 204.

7.
Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 17.

8.
Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 12–13, 62; Wade Alexander
Sister Elizabeth Kenny: Maverick Heroine of the Polio Treatment Controversy
(Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2002), 17–30. For examples of efforts to assess how much nursing training Kenny had, see Alexander
Maverick
, 23–24; Victor Cohn
Sister Kenny: The Woman Who Challenged the Doctors
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 37. McDonnell (1864–1939), the son of Irish immigrants and a graduate of Sydney's medical school, became a general surgeon after traveling to Japan, England, and the United States, and set up practice in Toowoomba in the 1890s; by the 1930s he was a member of the state medical society, the Australian Trained Nurses Association Council, and a medical examiner for Toowoomba's Nurses Board; see Alexander
Maverick
, 20–21; Cohn
Sister Kenny
, 27–29, 43–45.