Polio Wars (15 page)

147.
Kenny to Dear Dr. Diehl, June 21 1943, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, 1941–1944, MHS-K.

On polio in Australia see Kerry Highley “Mending Bodies: Polio in Australia,” Ph.D. thesis in History of Medicine, 2009, Australian National University, ACT; Anne Killalea
The Great Scourge: The Tasmanian Infantile Paralysis Epidemic 1937–1938
(Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1995); Milton J. Lewis
The People's Health: Public Health in Australia, 1950 to the Present
(Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 37–42; Barry Smith “The Victorian Poliomyelitis Epidemic 1937–1938” in John C. Calwell et al. ed.
What We Know About [the] Health Transition: The Cultural, Social and Behavioural Determinates of Health: The Proceedings of an International Workshop, Canberra, May 1989
(ANU Printing Service, Canberra, [1990], vol. 2), 866–881; John Smith “The Polio Epidemics in Australia 1895–1962 With Specific Reference to Western Australia,” Ph.D. thesis in History, 1997, Edith Cowan University, Perth.

On polio in North America see Tony Gould
A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); David M. Oshinsky
Polio: An American Story
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); John R. Paul,
A History of Poliomyelitis
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); Naomi Rogers
Dirt and Disease: Polio before FDR
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Christopher Rutty “Do Something! Do Anything! Poliomyelitis in Canada, 1927–1962,” Ph.D. Thesis, 1995,
University of Toronto; Rutty “The Middle-Class Plague: Epidemic Polio and the Canadian State, 1936–1937”
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
(1996) 13: 277–314; Jane S. Smith
Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine
(New York: William Morrow, 1990); Daniel J. Wilson
Living with Polio: The Epidemic and its Survivors
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

On nursing in Australia see Elizabeth Burchill
Australian Nurses since Nightingale 1860–1990
(Richmond: Spectrum Publications, 1992); Angela Cushing
A Contextual Perspective to Female Nursing in Victoria, 1850–1914
(Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1993); Mary Dickenson
An Unsentimental Union: The NSW Nurses Association 1931–1992
(Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1993); Judith Godden and Carol Helmstadter “Woman's Mission and Professional Knowledge: Nightingale Nursing in Colonial Australia and Canada”
Social History of Medicine
(2004) 17: 157–174; Rupert Goodman ed.
Queensland Nurses: Boer War to Vietnam
(Bowen Hills: Boolarong Publications, 1985); Helen Gregory
A Tradition of Care: A History of Nursing at the Royal Brisbane Hospital
(Brisbane: Boolarong Publication, 1988); Ruth Lynette Russell
From Nightingale to Now: Nurse Education in Australia
(Sydney: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1990); Bartz Schultz
A Tapestry of Service: The Evolution of Nursing in Australia
(Melbourne: Churchill Livingstone, 1991); Glenda Strachan
Labour of Love: The History of the Nurses Association in Queensland 1860–1950
(St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996).

On nursing in North America see Patricia D'Antonio
American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Kathryn McPherson
Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900–1990
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996); Barbara Melosh
The Physician's Hand: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Susan M. Reverby
Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

There is no complete history of the National Foundation but see Angela N. H. Creager
The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001); Scott Cutlip
Fund Raising in the United States
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965); Tony Gould
A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Sydney A. Halpern
Lesser Harms: The Morality of Risk in Medical Research
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Lawrence Friedman and Mark McGarvie eds.
Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Stephen E. Mawdsley “ ‘Dancing on Eggs': Charles H. Bynum, Racial Politics, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, 1938–1943”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
(2010) 84: 217–247; David M. Oshinsky
Polio
:
An American Story
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); John R. Paul
A History of Poliomyelitis
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); David W. Rose
March of Dimes: Images of America
(Charleston: Arcadia, 2003); Jane S. Smith
Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine
(New York: William Morrow, 1990); Olivier Zunz
Philanthropy in America: A History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

On Kenny see Wade Alexander
Sister Elizabeth Kenny: Maverick Heroine of the Polio Treatment Controversy
(Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2002); Victor Cohn
Sister Kenny: The Woman Who Challenged the Doctors
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975); Philippa Martyr
Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia
(Paddington N.S.W.: Macleay Press, 2002); Philippa Martyr “ ‘A Small Price to Pay for Peace': The Elizabeth Kenny Controversy Reexamined”
Australian Historical Studies
(1997)
27: 47–65; Evan Willis “Sister Elizabeth Kenny and the Evolution of the Occupational Division of Labour in Health Care”
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology
(1979) 15: 30–38; John R. Wilson “Sister Elizabeth Kenny's Trial by Royal Commission”
History of Nursing Journal
(1992–1993) 4: 91–99; John R. Wilson “The Sister Kenny Clinics: What Endures?”
Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing
(1986) 3: 13–21; John R. Wilson
Through Kenny's Eyes: An Exploration of Sister Elizabeth Kenny's Views about Nursing
(Townsville: Royal College of Nursing Australia, 1995).

On American medicine and consumerism in the early to mid-twentieth century see Deborah Stone “The Doctor as Businessman: The Changing Politics of a Cultural Icon”
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
(1997) 22: 533–556; Nancy Tomes “The Great American Medicine Show Revisited”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
(2005) 79: 627–663; Nancy Tomes “Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900–1940”
Journal of American History
(2001) 88: 519–547; James Harvey Young
The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

On homogenization of the American medical profession see Robert B. Baker, Arthur L. Caplan, Linda L. Emanuel, and Stephen R. Latham eds.
The American Medical Ethics Revolution: How the AMA's Code of Ethics Has Transformed Physicians' Relationships to Patients, Professionals, and Society
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Barbara Barzansky and Norman Gevitz eds.
Beyond Flexner: Medical Education in the Twentieth Century
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992); Gert H. Brieger “Getting Into Medical School in the Good Old Days: Good for Whom?”
Annals of Internal Medicine
(1993) 119: 1138–1143; James G. Burrow
AMA: Voice of American Medicine
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963); Jonathan Engel
Doctors and Reformers: Discussion and Debate over Health Policy 1925–1950
(Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Michael R. Grey
New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Susan E. Lederer
Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in American before the Second World War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Kenneth M. Ludmerer
Time to Heal: American Medicine from the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Dan A. Oren
Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Elton Rayak
Professional Power and American Medicine: The Economics of the American Medical Association
(Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1967); Janet Tighe “Never Knowing One's Place: Temple University School of Medicine and the American Medical Education Hierarchy”
Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
(1990) 12: 311–334.

On the history of Warm Springs and disability politics in this period see Daniel Holland “Franklin D. Roosevelt's Shangri-La: Foreshadowing the Independent Living Movement in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1926–1945”
Disability & Society
(2006) 21: 513–535; Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History”
Journal of American History
(2000) 87: 888–922; Naomi Rogers “Polio Chronicles: Warm Springs and Disability Politics in the 1930s”
Asclepio: Revista de Historia de la Medicine y de la Ciencia
(2009) 61: 143–174; Naomi Rogers “Race and the Politics of Polio: Warm Springs, Tuskegee and the March of Dimes”
American Journal of Public Health
(2007) 97: 2–13.

WORKING UNDER THE
auspices of the University of Minnesota and funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) Kenny made the Twin Cities her base. Along with her Australian assistants she treated patients in local hospitals, taught local nurses and physical therapists, and lectured to physicians. The Minneapolis health department received floods of letters from people who had read that Kenny had “demonstrated cures in 17 out of 36 cases” and came with their children hoping for a similar result. The University of Minnesota's hospital opened a special polio clinic for patients from outside the state, while the city hospital continued to treat local patients.
¹
In June 1941
JAMA
published the first serious study of Kenny's patients by physicians from the university's medical school praising her methods and defending her new symptoms. After this publication in the nation's most prominent medical journal augmented by stories in the popular press Kenny's work in Minneapolis began to attract wider attention. Kenny began to travel to medical societies and hospitals lecturing and demonstrating her methods.

Not willing to base its assessment of her credibility solely on the authority of sympathetic local physicians, the NFIP sent a group of skeptical physical therapists to Minneapolis, a meeting destined to end disastrously. The visiting therapists were intrigued and yet also irritated by this usurper. They debated not only her practices and theories but also her personality, especially her shocking lack of deference. The meeting left 2 Baltimore therapists convinced that both Kenny and her work were irrational and probably harmful while the other 3 remained willing to be impressed. Even though the 2 critical therapists sent the NFIP a report rejecting Kenny's methods and her attacks on standard polio therapy, the NFIP nonetheless continued to support her work and began to urge its local and state chapters to send doctors, nurses, and physical therapists to learn this new method. Simultaneously the NFIP assured skeptics that its medical advisors were still evaluating its value. Basil O'Connor sent his medical director and a few
other physicians to Minneapolis to get additional reports and kept in close touch with Morris Fishbein, the American Medical Association's (AMA's) powerful general secretary. Behind the scenes Fishbein not only shaped the first formal publications by Minnesota physicians but also edited and censored journalists' stories of Kenny and her work to make sure they did not exaggerate her achievements. In her own effort to gain national attention and public sympathy, using skills well honed in Australia, Kenny cooperated with the
Reader's Digest
for an article that made her into a heroic figure and also compiled her lectures into a textbook that was published by a local publisher. Efforts by the NFIP and Fishbein to try to rein her in were in vain.

Although NFIP officials hoped Kenny's work would be a major step toward achieving victory over polio, they hesitated. Like many other American disease philanthropies, the NFIP had been established by people outside the medical profession, and its local and state chapters were still mostly directed by members of the public. All research funding, however, was supervised by nationally recognized physicians who met once or twice a year to assess worthy applications. Led by the conservative virologist Thomas Rivers, the NFIP's advisory committee on scientific research funded mostly laboratory investigations of the characteristics of the polio virus.
²