Polio Wars (5 page)

20.
Ober “Physical Therapy in Infantile Paralysis,” 45–46; “Infantile Paralysis”
American Journal of Nursing
(1931) 31: 1142; Legg and Merrill
Physical Therapy in Infantile Paralysis
.

21.
Stevenson “After-Care of Infantile Paralysis,” 729.

22.
Evelyn C. Pearce
A Textbook of Orthopaedic Nursing
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1930), 40–41.

23.
Jessie L. Stevenson
The Nursing Care of Patients with Infantile Paralysis
(New York: National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, 1940), 12–13, 25, 35; Stevenson “After-Care of Infantile Paralysis,” 730–732.

24.
Her major textbooks were Kenny
Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia: Methods Used for the Restoration of Function
(Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1937); Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis in the Acute Stage
(Minneapolis: Bruce Publishing Co., 1941); John F. Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis and Its Treatment
(Minneapolis: Bruce Publishing Co., 1943); and Kenny
Physical Medicine: The Science of Dermo-Neuro-Muscular Therapy as Applied to Infantile Paralysis
(Minneapolis: Bruce Publishing Co., 1946).

25.
Philip Moen Stimson “Minimizing the After Effects of Acute Poliomyelitis”
JAMA
(July 25 1942) 119: 990; see also Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
.

26.
See, for example, Michael S. Burman “Curare Therapy for the Release of Muscle Spasm and Rigidity in Spastic Paralysis and Dystonia Musculorum Deformans”
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery
(1938) 20: 754–756.

27.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 25.

28.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 16–22, 38–39.

29.
Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 48.

30.
Pohl and Kenny,
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 117–118; Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 214. Hot packs were initially made in a complex system involving a small galvanized iron wash tub filled with boiling water mounted on a frame so it could be rolled from bed to bed, with a hand wringer on one side. Later hot pack machines were standardized, and the material for hot packs was Munsingwear, produced by a Minnesota company.

31.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 109.

32.
Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 51–54, 133.

33.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 39–40; Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 51–54, 77, 136, 139.

34.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 109; Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 152.

35.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 157; photograph on 158.

36.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 40, 115.

37.
Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 51, 55.

38.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 134–137; Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 56.

39.
Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 147, 151, 185.

40.
Kenny to Dear Dr. Pye, August 18 1939, Home Secretary's Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1938–1940, A/31752, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane (hereafter QSA).

41.
Pohl and Kenny
The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis
, 303–313. She had used these techniques since the 1930s; see Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 81.

42.
Alice Lou Plastridge “Report of Observation of Work of Sister Elizabeth Kenny in Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 1941” [read to Georgia Chapter of American Physiotherapy Association on February 14 1941, at Warm Springs], Florence Kendall Collection, Silver Springs, Maryland, 3. For a similar description see Wallace H. Cole and Miland E. Knapp “The Kenny Treatment of Infantile Paralysis: A Preliminary Report”
JAMA
(June 7 1941) 116: 2579–2580.

43.
Ober “Physical Therapy in Infantile Paralysis,” 45–46; Wolf
Textbook of Physical Therapy
, 239–241; William Joseph Mane Alois Maloney
Locomotor Ataxia (Tabes Dorsalis): An Introduction to the Study and Treatment of Nervous Diseases, for Students and Practitioners
(New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1918), 147.

44.
Carmelita Calderwood “Nursing Care in Poliomyelitis”
American Journal of Nursing
(1940) 40: 629; Krusen
Physical Medicine
, 592; Stevenson
The Nursing Care of Patients with Infantile Paralysis
, 22.

45.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 232.

46.
Victor Cohn
Sister Kenny: The Woman Who Challenged the Doctors
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 34–36.

47.
Kenny quoted in Marvin L. Kline “The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met”
Reader's Digest
(August 1959) 75: 205.

For discussions of medical practice see Rima Apple
Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Barbara Clow
Negotiating Disease: Power and Cancer Care, 1900–1950
(Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001); Christopher Crenner
Private Practice in the Early Twentieth Century Medical Office of Dr. Richard Cabot
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Christopher Lawrence ed.
Medical Theories, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery
(New York: Routledge, 1992); John E. Lesch
The First Miracle Drugs: How the Sulfa Drugs Transformed Medicine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Martin Pernick
A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); John Pickstone
Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Anson Rabinbach
The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
(New York: Basic Books, 1990); Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg eds.
The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); John Harley Warner
Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); John Harley Warner
The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Elizabeth Watkins
The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone. Replacement Therapy in America
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

IN DECEMBER 1992
I traveled to the Minnesota Historical Society to look at its Elizabeth Kenny Collection for the first time. I also contacted Richard Owen, a rehabilitation specialist and polio survivor who had been treated by Kenny as a child, and Margaret Opdahl Ernst, Kenny's first American secretary, who invited me to attend the fiftieth reunion of the Kenny Institute. At the celebration I was asked to interview former Kenny patients, most of them in their sixties and seventies, as they sat in front of a camera and talked eagerly about their lives. Being treated at the Institute with Kenny in charge of their therapy was for them an intense experience, made even more significant by their growing disabilities as the result of Post-Polio Syndrome. Polio had defined their childhood, had been conquered to a lesser or larger extent, and was now returning to redefine their senior years. Kenny herself—her height and bearing, her Australian accent and idiosyncrasies, and most of all her techniques—had left an indelible mark. For them clinical care was not a question of intellectual debates or professional boundaries but the fabric of their lives. These impressions have stayed with me through years of research and writing.

This book has been sidetracked many times. Since that first visit to Minnesota I got married, had 2 children, completed another book and various articles, got a position at Yale, and recovered from 2 serious illnesses. I also discovered that Kenny research can be endless. This project, I now recognize, is simply my assessment of polio care and Kenny's American years. There have been other books on Kenny and on polio; there will surely be more.

I want to acknowledge with gratitude the efforts of librarians and archivists at various locations: in Minneapolis/St. Paul, the Minnesota Historical Society and the University of Minnesota's Archives and Special Collections; in Philadelphia, the American
Philosophical Society; in White Plains, New York, the March of Dimes Archives; in New York City, the New York Academy of Medicine's main library and Rare Book Room, and Cornell University's Medical Center Archives at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital; in Rochester, New York, the archives at the University of Rochester; in Hyde Park, New York, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum's archives; in Albany, New York, the New York State Archives; in Baltimore, Maryland, the Alan Chesney Medical Archives of Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Historical Society; in Chicago, the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center; in Washington, D.C., the National Academy of Sciences; in Beverly Hills, California, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Province Archives of Manitoba; in Ottawa, Ontario, the Library and Archives Canada; in Quoiba, Tasmania, John Wilson's personal archives; in Brisbane, Queensland, the John Oxley State Library of Queensland; and in St. Lucia, Queensland, the Fryer Library and Special Collections at the University of Queensland. At Yale I am surrounded by a profusion of scholarly riches that I was able to sample with the help of librarians and archivists at Yale's Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library and the Sterling Memorial Library. Ramona Moore and Ewa Lech at Yale's Section of the History of Medicine patiently provided logistical and practical aid and I am especially grateful for their support. Melissa Grafe and Florence Gillich graciously helped me through the tangle of image permissions and reproductions. I have also benefited from the organizational efforts of many research assistants including Ashley McGuire Ferrara, Catherine Gliwa, Natalie Holmes, Amber Levinson, Catherine Ly, Robyn Schaffer, Amanda Tjemsland, and Allison Walker. David Rose encouraged and guided me through the March of Dimes Archives, and Meg Hyre gave me thoughtful editorial assistance. My ability to travel to archives and to write has benefited from grants from the Australian Research Council, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the National Library of Medicine.

I have met and corresponded with many people who remembered Kenny and the polio wars of the 1940s, including physicians, nurses, physical therapists, patients, and family members. Conversations with Mary Kenny McCracken and Stuart McCracken at their home in Caloundra, Queensland, allowed me to recapture some of the experiences of the 5 years that Mary spent as Kenny's companion in Minnesota. Florence Kendall spent 2 days talking with me and letting me read some of her personal papers; Mary Pohl recalled the alliance between Kenny and her father John Pohl; Margaret Ernst shared documents and memories with me as well as Kenny materials collected by Chris Sharpe; and Victor Cohn provided materials from his visits to Australia in the 1950s that are now at the Minnesota Historical Society. Sadly a number of my informants are no longer alive, including 2 other people unable to celebrate the publication of this book: Barbara Seaman, a friend and mentor, and Gina Feldberg, who was my loving confidant.

Colleagues and friends have been encouraging and patient. Janet Golden and Susan Smith read an early draft and offered wise comments. My fellow historians at Yale have offered me advice and critique as have the graduate student members of the Frederick L. Holmes Workshop. My wonderful wide community of medical historians gave me intellectual and physical sustenance. I especially thank Emily Abel, Rima Apple, Charlotte Borst, Ted Brown, David Cantor, Pat D'Antonio, Nadav Davidovitch, Brian Dolan, Jackie Duffin, Julie Fairman, Jennifer Gunn, James Hanley, Bert Hansen, Kerry Highley, Robert Johnston, Esyllt Jones, Suzanne Junod, Wendy Kline, Judy Leavitt, Sue Lederer, Janet
MacCalman, Ellen More, Dorothy Porter, Leslie Reagan, Susan Reverby, Corrine Sutter, John Thearle, Janet Tighe, Nancy Tomes, and Daniel Wilson. Debbie Doroshow read and edited parts of the book with verve and ruthlessness; Kennie Lyman provided extraordinary help in cutting, shaping, and tightening; and Cindy Connelly and Liz Watkins have been crucial sources of insight, guidance, and encouragement. In Melbourne my mother June Factor has been a caring critic; Joanne Aslanis Maguire, Juliette Borenstein, and Greg Chambers reminded me about the joys and trials of ordinary life. In New Haven Nancy Johnson provided glasses of wine and calming conversation; Darcy Chase gave me the gift of time by helping to care and cook for my family.