Polio Wars (111 page)

Kenny's status as a celebrity, admired and feted by movie stars, largely disappeared with her death as well. Buffeted by the disruption of the Hollywood studio system and the
growing popularity of television, movie attendance dropped significantly.
²⁸
McCarthyism also convulsed the Hollywood community with attacks on politically and sexually suspect people. As allegiances made decades earlier were used to insinuate political suspicions, movie stars were wary of the controversy surrounding Kenny and her work. Thus, screenwriter Mary McCarthy assured a journalist in 1953 that while Kenny had been a liberal and supported the Labor Party in Australia she had always “hated Communism.”
²⁹

During the 1950s Rosalind Russell was still a member of the KF board, but a second stage of her career in which she moved from Hollywood to Broadway allowed her to move away from Kenny-related activities.
³⁰
Although Russell spoke of Kenny's importance to American and global medicine immediately after Kenny's death, she waited until the end of her life to discuss her own support of Kenny's work in any detail. Her autobiography
Life Is a Banquet
appeared in 1977, a year after her death from breast cancer. In a brief but not apologetic section on Kenny, Russell fondly recalled meeting her for the first time at an airport in California as she “stepped off that plane wearing that Aussie hat and a sad-looking black dress, which was half of her wardrobe.” Russell had never forgotten the ways that some jealous and suspicious doctors had tried to trick her, although, she maintained, “good doctors liked Sister Kenny.” Like the other commentators in this period Russell linked Kenny to the Salk vaccine: “If she hadn't gone stamping through the world, stirring people up, we'd have been a whole lot longer getting the Salk vaccine.”
³¹

Fittingly, Kenny's legacy fared best in the literature of the group she devoted herself to most: children. “Just before she died she prayed … first, that her treatment might spread throughout the world; and second, that someone might find a vaccine to abolish polio forever,” wrote the author of
Lives to Remember
(1958), a children's series that included Louis Pasteur and Helen Keller.
³²
She lived on in other children's books as well. In
The Girl Book of Modern Adventures
as “The Nurse from Australia” Kenny proudly recalls the moment when President Roosevelt (still the most celebrated polio survivor) invited her to lunch at the White House and thinks “If only I could have treated him … he need never have suffered!”
³³
Her oddity as not exactly a nurse meant that some children's writers ignored her.
Nurses Who Led the Way
(1957) featured Edith Cavell, Mary Breckenridge, and Lillian Wald, but not Kenny.
³⁴
But she stayed visible in books such as
Six Great Nurses
(1962) and
Heroic Nurses
(1966) in which she appeared along with Florence Nightingale, Mary Breckenridge, Clara Barton, and Edith Cavell.
³⁵

A few years after Kenny's death, science writer Victor Cohn, who had covered Kenny's story many times when she lived in Minneapolis, decided that he would write a book about her. A 1941 graduate of the University of Minnesota and a war veteran fascinated by science and its possibilities, Cohn felt that he knew her story well. In 1953 he wrote “Angry Angel,” a series about Kenny for the
Minneapolis Tribune
, which was widely
syndicated.
³⁶
Then, like other science writers of his time, Cohn got caught up in one of the biggest science stories of the 1950s: the Salk polio vaccine. In 1955 he wrote a series of articles on the March of Dimes leading to its funding of the Salk vaccine. The
Tribune
published the series under the title
Four Billion Dimes
.
³⁷
The response to both series convinced Cohn that a full-length study of Kenny would engage a wide audience.

Cohn had already interviewed 2 of the leading figures in this story: Morris Fishbein and Basil O'Connor. Fishbein, no longer the general secretary of the American Medical Association (AMA) or the editor of
JAMA
, had become a productive editor, writer, and lecturer. He was eager to put Kenny in her proper place as a fraud. One of his file cabinets, he wrote in a letter to O'Connor with whom he remained friends, had “a big fat special folder dealing only with Sister Kenny.”
³⁸
Fishbein told Cohn that most of Kenny's claims were “pure poppycock.” Her methods had been given “a thorough trial” and been rejected. Fishbein had long experience fighting antivivisectionists, cancer entrepreneurs, and left-wing physicians who promoted government health insurance. Women, in Fishbein's view, were the worst of these: sentimental about animals and children, dramatic in their horror of the routine work of the laboratory and the clinic, and hysterical enough to be able to sway public opinion for patently false causes. Thus, he dismissed Kenny as having “the drive and the enthusiasm of a woman like [Christian Science founder] Mary Baker Eddy,” an analogy he considered a serious insult.
³⁹

O'Connor bluntly described Kenny to Cohn as a publicity seeker. In his opinion, “she had no more use for the crippled children than for a broken-down elephant.” Her constant use of the term Sister, he believed, had created the impression that she was a Catholic. And her gender had fooled otherwise hard-boiled commentators. Early on, O'Connor recalled, he had asked Basil “Stuffy” Walters, the executive editor of the
Minneapolis Tribune
, why he was so easy on her. In the earthy slang of a newspaper man, Walters had replied that “she's a skirt and we're afraid of a skirt.” In the 1940s the March of Dimes had tried in vain to evaluate her method; now, O'Connor said, “we know not to evaluate anybody's method.” Asked whether he had snubbed Kenny at a reception at the 1951 Copenhagen polio conference, O'Connor admitted he had and added “and I'm proud of it.”
⁴⁰

Cohn took a leave of absence from the
Tribune
in 1955 to give himself time, as he told potential informants, “to be set straight on any points that were wrong in my previous articles.”
⁴¹
He first traveled to California where he talked to lay supporters and sympathetic physicians who had established the El Monte Kenny Hospital. Orthopedist Robert Bingham assured Cohn that he had always accepted Kenny's theory that polio was a systemic disease and that the virus “affected all tissues.” Bingham had “never known a physician anywhere in the world” who had understood polio so thoroughly. With her keen observation Kenny could tell just by watching a child breathe how much paralysis there would be in the chest wall and how much in the neck and throat. She could predict whether a child would recover without use of an iron lung and was “very, very seldom wrong.” She had “a tremendous native intelligence” and was independent and resourceful. Her ideas, Bingham stressed, had been based on what was “probably the most careful examination” of patients in the history of polio.
⁴²
While Cohn was somewhat interested in clinical issues he was already convinced that Kenny had made no sense scientifically. He confirmed his belief by conducting a phone interview with John Enders who assured Cohn that no researcher had shown that the polio virus attacked the muscles or had “any local action of any sort.” Enders also denied that he had been influenced by
Kenny's theories, declaring that her statements “certainly had no effect on the work in my laboratory.”
⁴³

John Pohl, whom Cohn considered “strong looking” with a Yankee face and “deep good manners,” tried to place his own loyalty to Kenny in a wider medical and cultural context. Her concept of polio, he told Cohn, made sense to her and to physicians in Minneapolis, but she “just couldn't get it across to anyone else.” There was much she did not know, he conceded; when she said that spasm came from the spinal cord, “that was wrong.” Cohn tried to push his argument that Kenny was not properly trained, but Pohl was not convinced. He agreed Kenny had probably not been a graduate nurse, reflecting that when she talked about her past she “never got down to cases” and never talked about her training “as a nurse will.” But, Pohl stressed, the most crucial issue was her clinical acumen: Kenny “saw the spasm, the doctors did not.” She was a fine diagnostician, clever enough to see whether a muscle “was or [was] not in spasm.” If she could see a little movement in a muscle she could get a child to use his or her belly muscles and sit up, which Pohl felt was how she had first impressed Miland Knapp.
⁴⁴

Then Cohn organized a 5-week trip to Australia. With an eye to history he warned Mary and Stuart McCracken that the topic of Kenny might soon lose public interest for “polio, as a disease, is on the way out.” While he did not mean to minimize the current problems with paralyzed children, in his opinion “the next few years is the time when the history of polio is going to be written.”
⁴⁵

Cohn's “Angry Angel” series had alienated Julia Farquarson, one of Kenny's sisters, who warned Cohn that she had advised her relatives not to cooperate with him.
⁴⁶
In vain did Cohn protest that he believed Kenny “was a
great
woman” who had made a great contribution. When he tried to convince Farquarson that his “impartial” investigation would show the “human” side of Kenny in contrast to the
Sister Kenny
movie “which presented only the sugar-coated side,” he found himself in another morass.
⁴⁷
The movie, Farquarson retorted, had “very truthfully portrayed the Sister Kenny of those earlier years,” and neither Cohn nor any other American had “the slightest knowledge of … [the] charming personality of the Sister Kenny of those days,” for she had been “loved and trusted by all whom she ministered for.”
⁴⁸

Farquarson and her side of the family remained uncooperative, but other relatives and friends in Australia agreed to be interviewed. A number of Australian physicians who had known Kenny were eager to set the record straight.
⁴⁹
Cohn's typed summaries of all of these interviews are in the Minnesota Historical Society. To each summary Cohn added his own comments, relating each informant to a type familiar to him from his newspaper work. Just as he asked each man and woman to assess Kenny's character, so he judged their own character and tried to assess the extent of their bitterness, nostalgia, and honesty.

Many of his Australian informants defended Australia's tepid reception of Kenny as the result of Australian reserve. Some praised the appropriately conservative attitude of the Australian medical profession. Nonetheless, Cohn discovered, almost every physician claimed that he had played a major role in Kenny's career. An exception was University of Queensland pathologist James Duhig who called Kenny “a liar and impostor” compared to “really great” innovators such as Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale who were “scrupulously honest.”
⁵⁰
But in Cohn's assessment, Duhig was “a very vindictive and unreliable man, given to broad unscientific statements.” Cohn had also heard from others
that he was temperamental, a communist sympathizer, and had been arrested for drunk driving.
⁵¹

Already knowledgeable about Raphael Cilento's past support of fascism, Cohn listened skeptically when Cilento claimed to have given Kenny her hot-packing and muscle exercises in the 1930s and to have suggested that she go to America in 1940. Cilento, Cohn concluded, “is rather a sad character these days—can't get a good job and is above a small one” and “nobody trusts him.”
⁵²
Brisbane physician Jarvis Nye, whom Cohn found a “lovely gentleman,” said he had suggested that Kenny go to America, and Cohn was “much more inclined to trust him.”
⁵³
James Guinane, who had helped to write Kenny's first textbook, now felt that Kenny had not been “absolutely honest” and had known nothing about pathology. Although Cohn's book later reiterated both these points, Cohn disliked Guinane whom he saw as an “aging Irishman with dirty nails” who had “gone downhill.”
⁵⁴

While Cohn kept the notes of all of his interviews, his project was twice seriously interrupted: first in 1960 when the Kenny Foundation was rocked by scandal and again in 1968 when he moved to Washington to become science editor of the
Washington Post.
The book did not come out until the mid-1970s.

In 1958 Marvin Kline went on a nationwide tour with Al Capp, creator of “Li'l Abner” and the KF's new featured celebrity. As part of its role as a research philanthropy, the KF awarded 19 research grants to American scientists to study neuromuscular diseases including arthritis, amputation, and cerebral palsy.
⁵⁵
In 1959, in a strange bookending moment,
Reader's Digest
published an article by Kline describing Kenny as the most unforgettable character he had ever met. Illustrated by a sketch based on Yousuf Karsh's photograph of Kenny in pearls and a cape, Kline placed her firmly in the past. In an “imperious feminine voice” she had demanded he and other city officials open wards for her child patients and then had brow-beaten doctors until they agreed to move their patients into her Institute. Her assertive attitude was the result of the “vast misfortune of being both a woman and a non-doctor who had discovered a vital medical truth.” He also praised her as a healer who “knew that she had a sublime gift, and that crippled children needed her.” Kline noted almost casually that there was no solid evidence that Kenny had “ever graduated from a formal nursing course.” This did not mean she was not well informed or without professional standing, however: she had attended nursing school and for many years had “studied medical books voraciously and sought out doctors in their free moments to ask them questions.” The KF had been established, he claimed, to deal with the financial problem of so many patients coming to the Institute and in response to Kenny's declaration that she would “not permit anyone to pay for this treatment.” The Kenny method—“one of the most effective treatments for polio”—was still flourishing, Kline continued, and both clinical and vaccine research were part of the KF's ongoing program. Indeed, the KF had helped to finance testing of a new live-virus vaccine that “may eradicate polio once and for all.” In a tone of self-sacrifice, perhaps reminiscent of Kenny's own, Kline described devoting himself to this cause. He had “rid myself of my remaining business interests, to devote all my energies [to the KF] … remembering her, I could not do otherwise.”
⁵⁶
Within a year of his
Reader's Digest
paean, however, the legacy that Kenny had tried so fiercely to shore up and Kline's own reputation were in tatters.