Polio Wars (6 page)

This project has long been part of my children's lives and when they were toddlers my husband taught them to say “Not Sister Kenny.” Nat and Dory have not made working easier but they always made it worthwhile. As a fellow historian John Harley Warner has shared my delight in archival finds and my struggles in writing and editing. He provided sustenance and comfort and knew when to back off. I dedicate this book to him and to my children.

California:

— Sister Kenny Collection, Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

Connecticut:

— John Enders Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven.

— John Rodman Paul Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven.

Illinois:

— Morris Fishbein Collection, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago.

Maryland:

— George E. Bennett Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

— David Bodian Papers, Alan Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

— Florence Kendall [private] Collection, Silver Springs, Maryland.

— George L. Radcliffe Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

Massachusetts:

— W. Lloyd Aycock Papers, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical Library, Boston.

Minnesota:

— James Henry Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul.

— Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul.

— Walter H. Judd Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul.

— Elizabeth Kenny Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul.

— Jay Arthur Myers Papers, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections, Minneapolis.

— Minnesota Poliomyelitis Research Committee, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections, Minneapolis.

— Presidents Papers, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections, Minneapolis.

— University Relations: Medical School 1950–1952, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections, Minneapolis.

— Maurice Visscher Papers, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections, Minneapolis.

New York:

— Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, New York Academy of Medicine, New York City.

— Philip Stimson Papers, Medical Center Archives, New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, New York.

— Public Relations Records, March of Dimes Archives, White Plains.

— Government Relations (Foreign) Argentina, March of Dimes Archives, White Plains.

— Alan Valentine Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Rochester.

— Archives at the University of Rochester, Rochester.

— President's Papers, Office Files 5188, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Archives, Hyde Park.

— President's Papers, Presidential Personal Files 4885 (1939–1945), Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Archives, Hyde Park.

— Record Group III-2K, OMR, Series: Medical Interest, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown.

— Basil O'Connor Papers, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Archives, Albany.

Pennsylvania:

— Thomas Rivers Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

Washington D.C.:

— Claus Washington Jungblut Papers, National Library of Medicine.

— National Research Council, General, Medical Sciences, 1944, National Academy of Sciences.

— Record Group 102, Children's Bureau Central File, 1941–1944, 4-5-16-1, Infantile Paralysis, National Archives.

Australia: Queensland:

— Charles Chuter Papers, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane.

— Home Secretary's Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics 1941–1949, A/31753, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane.

— Elizabeth Kenny Collection, Fryer Library and Special Collections, University of Queensland, St Lucia.

Australia: Tasmania:

— John R. Wilson [private] Collection, Quoiba, Tasmania.

Australia: ACT:

— Series A-1928, 802/17/Section, 3, Australian Archives, ACT Regional Office.

— Secretary, Prime Minister's Department [A.S. Brown], #707/9/A, Series A462, Australian Archives, ACT Regional Office.

Canada: Ottawa:

— “Conference On Poliomyelitis, December 3,4, & 5 1945, Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Record Group 29, vol. 201, file 311-P11-15, National Archive Centre, the Library and Archives Canada.

Canada: Manitoba:

— Children's Hospital of Winnipeg MG 10B33, Box 7, Province Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

ELIZABETH KENNY INTENDED
to visit 2 places in America: New York City, the headquarters of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), and Rochester, Minnesota, the site of the world famous Mayo Clinic. In April 1940, after traveling almost a month by boat from Australia and by train across the United States, 59-year-old Kenny and her 23-year-old ward Mary Stewart Kenny arrived in New York. The daughter of Irish-Australians from rural Australia and trained as a bush nurse, Kenny had come to the United States with a bold plan. She was determined to gain a hearing from American experts in order to explain her methods of treating patients with polio, and then, she hoped, physicians everywhere would adopt them.

Armed with a letter of introduction from William Forgan Smith, the Labor Party premier of her home state of Queensland, to Basil O'Connor, the NFIP's director, Kenny was eager “to meet this gentleman and outline my ideas.”
¹
When she called, however, O'Connor's secretary explained that the NFIP director was in Warm Springs with the President but that he had received word of her coming from Forgan Smith and was looking forward to her visit.
²
Reminded in this way of O'Connor's connections (President Franklin Roosevelt was his former law partner) and his dominant position in the field of polio care (Warm Springs was the nation's foremost polio rehabilitation center), Kenny and Mary faced the delay (an international symbol of the powerful) and waited for his return.

While in New York, Kenny contacted Kristian Hansson, the physician in charge of physical therapy at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled, a charity orthopedic hospital. A few months earlier Hansson, a graduate of Cornell's medical school with training in Swedish physical therapy, had published an article on the treatment of polio in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
(
JAMA
), which Kenny had read closely before
her trip across the Pacific.
³
Hansson invited her to his department where she met “several very alert and capable-looking men.” Such physicians were, Kenny was pleased to discover, different from those she had encountered in London a few years before whose eyes had held “the superciliousness… of the home-born Britisher toward the ‘colonial.' ” At this first meeting at a New York City hospital she left feeling hopeful about a new, more welcoming medical outlook.
⁴
Kenny hoped to escape attitudes that demeaned her as a woman, a nurse, and an Australian. She also hoped that her Irish background and rural upbringing, which had placed her in a subordinate category in Australian society, would not matter in the United States. And, here, her hopes were probably realized. As Australian diplomat Richard Casey noted in 1940, “the American people know very little about Australia” and “except on the Pacific coast they think very little about Australia.”
⁵

In appearance and manner Kenny was not easily dismissed. She was “large in every dimension,” recalled Marvin Kline, who had first met her when he was a member of the city council of Minneapolis. Her hat had “an incredibly wide brim and a plume of flowers blooming from a broad bend around the crown,” which though “quite out of style… only added to her dignity.”
⁶
Tall, dressed formally although oddly to American eyes, this nurse was clearly a respectable older woman aware of proper genteel conduct. And having come of age during the last decades of the Victorian era, Kenny understood respectability in starkly gendered terms: in public ladies were prim and restrained, expecting courtesy and respect from gentlemen. But she also had a tough and pragmatic side. Proud of her physical strength, she later mocked the mores of her childhood days when girls were told “it was vulgar to be healthy, ladylike to be delicate.”
⁷
And she demanded more than respect for a foreign lady visitor; she wanted professional support for her work.

In Kenny's youth, a few middle-class British women, inspired by the example of Florence Nightingale, trained in elite hospital nursing schools such as St Thomas's and left England to set up Nightingale-like nursing schools in Sydney and Melbourne. Australian working-class women who sought professional autonomy kept far from such hierarchical urban hospitals, working instead as bush nurses. Most, including Kenny, were trained through informal apprenticeship. Australian bush nursing, like rural nursing in North America, was physically demanding work, requiring confidence, ingenuity, and technical skills. Bush nurses were usually the sole health providers for families living many miles apart, and they tended to work with rather than for physicians.

Born in 1880, the fifth child of 9, Elizabeth Kenny spent most of her early life among agricultural and grazing communities in northeastern Australia. Her father Michael Kenny, an Irish immigrant, worked as a transient farmhand, and the family moved many times in rural New South Wales and then in southern Queensland. The children had a few years of formal schooling but relied on their mother Mary Moore to teach them at home. Living in small towns and with few resources Kenny's sisters all chose to marry local farmers; but Kenny was dissatisfied with domesticity. She worked briefly as a music teacher and a broker selling farmers' produce, but was especially interested in caring for the sick. As a young girl after breaking her wrist she stayed with surgeon Anneas McDonnell and his family in Toowoomba and studied anatomy and physiology
informally with him. She then used her knowledge to help her frail younger brother improve his physique by teaching him to “isolate the principal muscles of his body by voluntary contraction.”
⁸

In 1911 with money from her successful produce selling venture, Kenny set up a small clinic in Nobby, about a hundred miles west of Brisbane, and became a bush nurse. She reveled in this professional independence, gaining skill and respect as she worked in the sparsely populated Darling Downs in southern Queensland delivering babies, setting bones, and healing wounds. It was in the bush that Kenny first developed her methods of treating polio. She had never seen the disease before. She found that applying heated wool cloths and gently, carefully exercising muscles relieved her patients' pain and muscle tightness. Continuing these exercises after the pain and sensitivity were gone helped patients to strengthen weakened muscles and, Kenny came to believe, to reconnect pathways between the nerves and the muscles and thus ameliorate their paralysis.
⁹
She began to specialize in the care of the physically disabled, especially patients whose doctors had said they would never improve, and soon her clinic was primarily for their care.