Polio Wars (33 page)

A physician also present at this visit who openly embraced Kenny's work was Ethel Calhoun. A 1925 medical graduate from the University of Michigan, Calhoun had worked as a private practitioner in Detroit before marrying and having a child. Now in her forties she found a new direction in her life as a passionate supporter of Kenny and her work.
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In her own letter to Ghormley, Calhoun was appalled by Key and McCarroll's “ ‘chip on their shoulder' attitude.” They had “started asking one question after the other in rapid fire order without waiting for Miss Kenny to finish an explanation” and were so “very rude” that Calhoun “could no longer keep silent.” She told them that she had just finished a week's course and that as it “takes most doctors two days at least before they understand some of the basic principles of the Kenny concept” they should “stay long enough to know what she [Kenny] is talking about.” One of them got “very red in the face” and retorted “you don't know what you are talking about or why we are here.” Calhoun told Ghormley her own child “would never get anything but Kenny treatment, at least not until some one can show me something better.” She regretted that any prejudiced physicians who felt that they “must continue their opposition as a ‘face saving' method” should have been appointed to this committee.
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Back in Michigan she introduced the Kenny method to the polio wards of the infectious disease hospital in Pontiac and gained the support of her local NFIP chapter.
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The one orthopedist who admitted that the visit had profoundly altered his views was Herman Charles Schumm.
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He had come to Minnesota from Milwaukee, he admitted to Ghormley, “very anti-Kenny” but he left convinced that “our ideas as to what muscles were paralyzed were all wrong.” Her method “certainly gives better results than I have seen in the past, or have been able to obtain.” She also convinced him that most patients “need no type of appliance or brace whatsoever and that they do much better without it.” Schumm was not put off by Kenny's manner. He found her clinical results powerful and may even have become more sympathetic watching her battle with Key and McCarroll. “I have apologized to myself several times since my trip to Minneapolis for making up my mind that her treatment was no good before I had made an adequate investigation,” he concluded his report.
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Kenny somehow obtained a copy of these reports. While she told Ghormley she would “overlook the unkind and hateful personal reference[s] … in the interests of humanity” she did protest the therapeutic and professional attacks. She had not been discourteous or “turned my back.” Her demonstrations had taken place before the opening of the spacious Institute. Forced to show her patients while her visitors stood in a circle around 2 tables, she had had to “keep turning from one table to another.” Kenny was not surprised by her visitors' initial skepticism for she had shown them “a disease with which [each doctor] … was unfamiliar and had no idea existed.” But she was frustrated that her demonstration of mental alienation had not altered their skepticism and that her environment, supervised by a medical school, had not effectively shielded her from accusations that her recovered patients had not really had polio. Thus, when “Dr. McCarroll had doubted the diagnosis and asked me who had diagnosed the cases,” Kenny had replied with great satisfaction that “the pediatric staff was responsible.”
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At a meeting of the Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons a few
months later she learned that Key and McCarroll remained antagonistic. Although during a visit to Wesley Memorial Hospital they had congratulated the hospital's Kenny technician on her patients' “splendid condition,” at the Academy meeting McCarroll declared that if the patients “had belonged to him he would hang his head in shame.” He later phoned the technician and “apologized for passing this remark,” adding that he had been “to use his own expression, ‘just mad.' ”
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A private phone call to one technician, Kenny feared, would hardly counter the profound impact of this public denigration of her work.

Key remained one of Kenny's most prominent critics. In “The Kenny Versus the Orthodox Treatment” in
Surgery
he argued that the Kenny treatment of spasm was harmful for it rejected crucial therapies such as immobilization and rest. He defended “orthodox” treatment as “the result of the accumulated experience of many physicians” and “well standardized throughout the civilized world.” Not only was rest “probably the most important therapeutic measure in our armamentarium,” but patients also required well-padded and fitted plaster molds or padded metal splints in order to protect paralyzed muscles from stretching and to hasten “the disappearance of hyperesthesia, muscle tenderness, and contractures.” Despite Kenny's claims, such apparatus “do not interfere with circulation nor are they left in place constantly.” Nor was there any evidence that the polio virus “attacks the muscles” or that the Kenny method would prevent “paralyzed muscles from stretching.” In any case, Key argued, none of her claims could be properly assessed for without records “it is not possible to verify the exorbitant claims of cures.”
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Despite the brutal attacks of these critics, the Institute grew in public acclaim, a brick and mortar emblem of Kenny's contribution to American medicine. Kenny's methods—or at least key parts of them—were embraced by hospitals throughout the country. Publicity from
Reader's Digest
,
Life
,
Time
, and other magazines confirmed Kenny as a celebrity. The Minnesota Public Health Association gave her a plaque for Outstanding Service to Humanity and
Parents Magazine
awarded her the magazine's annual medal for Outstanding Service to Children, following former recipients such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Walt Disney, and Surgeon-General Thomas Parran.
¹⁵⁷
The Variety Clubs of America, a group of show business philanthropies focused on the needs of poor children, gave her its Humanitarian Medal for 1942, which was presented to her in Sacramento “in the presence of Governor Earl Warren of California and other people of note.” In her speech which was broadcast across the country by radio she compared her work's results to those of patients treated “under orthodox methods from the orthodox concept.” Her contribution—“the result of lonely research [in] … the bush land of Australia”—was “an entirely new concept of the disease, with an entirely new treatment based on that concept.”
¹⁵⁸

Kenny enlarged on these arguments in her 1943 autobiography
And They Shall Walk
, which brimmed with tales of sacrifice and justified outrage. The book described an outsider who moved from the Queensland bush to the city of Brisbane, and then from the exotic nation of Australia to the modern United States in order to obtain medical respect. Descriptions of wattle, black swans, koalas, and other distinctive flora and fauna gave this work the flavor of a travelogue. To remind readers that she was contributing to a global health problem—not one specific to Australia—there were descriptions of her
extensive international traveling to treat patients. Her experiences in the United States were shown as the culmination of a life's work of struggle and sacrifice.

In the book, almost all negative examples of professional opposition take place in Australia or England. In the United States, physicians—although at first cautious and quizzical—are wonderfully open-minded and free of prejudice against either Kenny's training or gender. “Such recognition, though late in coming, did much toward healing the wounds that had been left by scurrilous criticism and by the even more humiliating experience of being loftily ignored. It helped me to forget the bitter tears I had shed in solitude.”
¹⁵⁹
Positioning herself as a female medical pioneer, Kenny stresses her impatience with orthodoxy, the restrictive conventions of gender roles, and the inflexibility of medical thinking and professional ethics. Perhaps reflecting commercial pressure to add a love interest, a few pages present the story of Dan, a local farmer. Big and bronzed with kind blue eyes, Dan believes “a woman's place was ‘in the home' ” and he tells Kenny she “must give up this nursing nonsense if I were to take the place for which my Creator had ordained me.” When she chooses to attend a woman in labor instead of a dance, “we quarreled our last quarrel,” and she delivers the baby “fighting back the tears.”
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Nowhere, other than on the book's title page, was there a reference to Kenny's co-author Martha Ostenso. Ostenso, a prize-winning novelist, later claimed that Kenny sometimes yelled when Ostenso altered her overblown phrases, but that she was delighted with the final version. The Dodd, Mead contract gave Ostenso 5 percent of the book's profits, and she seems to have been willing to have the publisher advertise the book without highlighting her name as co-author.
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Despite the numerous descriptions of exotic places,
And They Shall Walk
has only 3 illustrations, all photographs of Kenny in America. The first 2 reinforce the image of Kenny as a clinician capable of training other professionals. In the picture captioned “Sister Kenny demonstrates her revolutionary treatment,” Kenny is pointing to the strong legs of a boy on a treatment table as skeptical nurses look on. In “Training nurses to carry on the Kenny treatment,” eager nurses and physical therapists watch her wrap a child's legs. The third photograph features Kenny with the world's most famous polio survivor. The caption “President Roosevelt greets Sister Kenny” ignores the third person in this image: Basil O'Connor, the most powerful person in polio philanthropy. Yet in her introduction Kenny thanks the NFIP along with the citizens of Minneapolis and Cole, Knapp, and Pohl, “without whose support and encouragement wider recognition might have been indefinitely postponed.” She concludes with her declaration that “to the medical men of the United States of America I pass the torch.”
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But her growing stridency in response to critics belied this statement. And her new textbook published a few months later went further, arguing that only those experts who accepted her contribution would be able to guide the progress of polio science.

Physicians who adopted Kenny's work tried to express enthusiasm mixed with caution. “Our physiologists and pathologists must, and eventually will, give us the basis for these newer clinical manifestations,” Robert Bennett argued in the
Southern Medical Journal
.
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In the
Archives of Physical Therapy
he praised the patient, intelligent guidance of men such as Miland Knapp who had enabled Kenny to develop her techniques and, he was sure, equally keen and devoted researchers would now “support [or] … if necessary … intelligently alter that which she and other serious investigators have given us.”
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Importantly Arthur Steindler, one of the nation's leading orthopedic researchers and teachers,
declared in the
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery
that he and his staff had accepted many of the “Kenny technics” to treat pain and spasm. Experiments in his department at the University of Iowa using novocaine on nerves affected by polio suggested, like the Kenny concept, that the cause of spasm “is peripheral and not central.” Thus, Steindler argued, “tendons, ligaments, and capsular reinforcements are involved in pathological changes, as are the muscles.”
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These physicians were aware that many British professionals would see their support of Kenny as an unfortunate example of naive American enthusiasm. At the end of 1942, affecting the more objective perspective of a nation of great orthopedists, the editor of the
British Medical Journal
reminded readers that in the 1930s a London County committee had reviewed Kenny's methods sympathetically but had concluded that they were of unproven value. In those days, the editor pointed out, “little was heard of any revolutionary ideas about the pathology.” The editor excoriated the “confusing and uncritical” ways in which physicians like Stimson, Pohl, and even the editor of
JAMA
were trying to rationalize Kenny's theories. While there was certainly room for improvement in polio treatment, American physicians did not seem to be pursuing “critical inquiry upon strictly neurological lines.” Schwartz and Bouman's study did not support “Miss Kenny's theories,” and Lewin was wrong to claim in the
Illinois Medical Journal
that Kenny's method was the last word in acute polio care. In any case many of Kenny's ideas were hardly new. She had given “new names for old ideas” and inspired American proponents to give “extravagant credit to her work,” which was “detracting from traditional American orthopedics.” Physicians should properly seek a “road of conduct, free from orthodoxy and from radicalism.” Still, Kenny had “stimulated many of our American friends to favor heat” and along with “modification and development” this work would contribute to the proper understanding of polio.
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Here Kenny's methods were not new and her ideas not good; her proponents in the United States were also sadly mistaken in their praise of her work.

Her critics in the United States were further emboldened by an attack from Philadelphia orthopedist Bruce Gill. In a 14-page commentary which he sent to all 50 members of the Orthopaedic Correspondence Club and later published in the
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery
, Gill reminded his peers that they could draw on their clinical experience—as supervisors of polio therapy and as surgeons—and on their specialized training in anatomy, pathology, and physiology. They knew what the polio virus did and did not do inside the body, and what the appropriate and safe technologies were to treat the symptoms of the disease. Conservative, steady orthopedic surgeons, he implied, should not follow the lead of easily swayed physical medicine doctors who were not strong enough to fend off ill-informed hospital trustees, uppity therapists, and demanding parents.