Polio Wars (60 page)

The “Pennies for Kenny” campaign enhanced Kenny's presence as a civic celebrity, and not long after it ended Kenny was chosen as both the Minneapolitan and Minnesotan of 1944, according to a poll conducted by the
Minneapolis Star-Journal
.
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The Institute's board proudly announced that the campaign had raised more than $350,000. These funds would be used for training programs in which “true Kenny methods will be taught in their entirety” and for clinical research on “neuromuscular disorders.”
¹⁶²
Not coincidently, the January 1945 March of Dimes campaign, just a few months later, made much of the effective patient care the NFIP had funded during the previous year's epidemics, especially in Hickory, North Carolina. A short film starring Greer Garson, best known as MGM's
Madame Curie
, dramatized the NFIP's work during the Hickory epidemic as a battle against polio that brought people together, an implicit criticism of the divisive polio wars.
¹⁶³

In an effort to dampen antagonism in the Twin Cities and lay out a middle ground, Miland Knapp and 3 other physicians who headed departments in the city hospital published a brief analysis of patients with polio in the
Journal-Lancet
. They carefully described some of the “points in which we disagree with Miss Kenny's methods and theories” and sought to balance this with their conclusion that her methods had led to a definite decrease of “deformities.” They praised patients' improved general condition, the successful management of muscle shortening or “spasm,” and the overall “decreased incidence of deformity,” especially scoliosis and pelvic obliquity. Such results confirmed their decision to accept “some of the methods which appeared to be of the greatest value.” But they agreed with the AMA report's criticism of the unfortunate publicity around Kenny's “enthusiastic assertions” and reiterated that she had made “inaccurate comparisons of patients treated by her methods and by other methods.” In a muted critique of the AMA committee, they pointed out that to assess her methods required a close study of every
patient paralyzed during a series of epidemics “after sufficiently long intervals,” for only then would there be “a fair and trustworthy set of facts … upon which a truly scientific evaluation can be based.” Thus, they concluded hopefully, “open-minded” physicians would continue to “study and observe the work of Miss Kenny” and “judge her efforts fair-mindedly,” for “full appraisal must await the passage of time.”
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Kenny saw the similarities between this analysis and the AMA report and complained to the Institute's board that she deserved an apology from the AMA, Knapp and the other local physicians for “the accusation that I have made inaccurate comparisons has cost me much grief and humiliation.”
¹⁶⁵
Pohl began to prepare his own study of Institute patients. He was coming to share Kenny's sense that the NFIP was part of a conspiracy to denigrate Kenny's work and urged the board to publicize “the untruths, deceit, misrepresentation, and racketeering in human misery practiced by the National Foundation.”
¹⁶⁶
He was not surprised, however, when
JAMA
and the
British Medical Journal
rejected his paper. He was able to publish it in Minnesota's
Journal-Lancet
the following year where it was countered by a series of antagonistic articles carefully choreographed by Maurice Visscher and the journal's other editors.
¹⁶⁷

Former allies such as Gudakunst no longer supported Kenny's “concept.” In an internal NFIP memorandum on “Questions Frequently Asked” Gudakunst noted that physicians had accepted the value of her method of treatment but not “her explanation as to the nature of the disease, her ideas as to pathology, or her ideas as to why her form of therapy is good.”
¹⁶⁸
In
Parents Magazine
he praised her “now famous method of treatment” but warned that the Kenny method was not a cure and would not “save a single nerve cell from death.” After all, he added, using a well-honed NFIP line, “treatment is not enough”: only through “research” could polio “eventually be brought under control.”
¹⁶⁹
In the
American Journal of Nursing
he also warned that despite “the exaggerated claims made in some lay publications” there was no “miracle cure for the paralysis caused by the disease.” Professionals, he added, needed to distinguish “between the Kenny treatment and Sister Kenny's interpretation of the disease,” for her interpretation was “still under careful scrutiny.”
¹⁷⁰

Pressed by Kline, Gudakunst refused to concede that Kenny's work had led American physicians to develop a new concept of polio. “Based on our knowledge of the pathology and its resultant symptoms,” he told Kline, polio was “a virus infection in which the princip[al] lesions involve the cells of the central nervous system.” Such pathological changes must be accepted for “the rational development of any reasonable and acceptable system of therapy.” In any case medical practice was more complicated. The therapeutic regime of most physicians was “not based upon any one [disease] concept [but was] … the result of years of experience and study in many parts of the world on the part of many professional persons and is continuously being modified and improved as the result of further scientific investigation and clinical experience.”
¹⁷¹

In another scripted radio interview O'Connor reminded the public that the best polio care was provided not just at one center but at centers all over the country where hundreds of doctors and nurses trained under NFIP grants “stand ready to administer the Kenny treatment to all patients in their area.” Reiterating the image of Kenny as an insightful clinician O'Connor agreed that her work “completely reverses the old theory previously held by many doctors.” But, he claimed with a rhetorical twist, this “theory” was her rejection of immobilization.
¹⁷²
Even President Roosevelt, immersed in fighting
the last stages of the war, was drawn into this other fight. In a fundraising statement, phrased as a letter to O'Connor, Roosevelt described the work of the NFIP “as one of the brightest pages in the history of how a nation of free people, working together, seeks to assure for its children the priceless gift of health,” and particularly praised the NFIP's research program. “Treatment, no matter how adequate, cannot win this war against a disease aggressor,” Roosevelt declared, but scientific research “will unquestionably conquer this disease.”
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In March 1945 the NFIP finally sent the Institute's board an official letter informing them that the NFIP's board of trustees, advised by the NRC, had rejected the Institute's grant application.
¹⁷⁴
By this time, many of the things that the NRC committee had feared had come to pass. Seeing themselves under attack, the Institute's directors had reconstituted themselves formally as a nonprofit philanthropy, with the provocative name the Kenny Foundation (KF), and had begun to plan a national fundraising campaign. The new KF began to rely exclusively on professional publicity firms, and its board ignored the dangers of escalating administrative costs or the temptation for misuse of funds inherent in poorly supervised fundraising schemes. NFIP national officials, though, felt a sense of freedom. “For the first time, we are not supporting Kenny or her work,” Peter Cusack reflected in an internal note to Gudakunst.
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With the NFIP grant formally rejected, Kenny made a bold move: she accepted 6 patients who did not have polio to the Institute. After 2 of them were sent home “apparently normal” she began to teach her staff “the extra treatment for these special disabilities” for the remaining 4 who had cerebral palsy, transverse-myelitis, and arthritis. But Kenny made 2 missteps: only doctors were allowed to admit patients to city hospitals, and the Institute had been designated as a polio facility. Pediatricians on the hospital staff, appalled that Kenny had stepped over the bounds of her position, ordered her staff not to treat the new patients and told the Institute's superintendent to expel them.
¹⁷⁶
This incident was immediately reported in the local press, and, according to a reporter, “touched off the long pent-up resentment felt by Sister Kenny against those who have denied her recognition.” Once again Kenny threatened to resign from the Institute and to return to Australia, claiming that she was facing an “organized opposition” to her work. Showing a sharp understanding of local politics, Kenny told the
Minneapolis Morning Tribune
that groups in Washington and New York had offered her “complete facilities” for research, treatment, and teaching if she would establish an institute in those cities.
¹⁷⁷

Kenny had treated patients disabled by cerebral palsy in rural Australia and her first textbook had described the way her techniques could aid both
Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia
.
¹⁷⁸
She had continued to treat a few such patients in England in the late 1930s, and her methods with such patients were praised by the medical officer in charge of the Queen Mary's wards in a
British Medical Journal
article.
¹⁷⁹
Although Kenny's autobiography
And They Shall Walk
was mainly about her polio work, she did describe treating a child who was “a victim of that horrible disease, cerebral diplegia” as an example of “the cases the medical world turns its back upon.”
¹⁸⁰
In 1944 the Institute's NFIP
grant application had proposed pursuing clinical research in both polio and “Spastic Paralysis.”
¹⁸¹

In a world where social and medical neglect of the disabled was common, cerebral palsy therapy was particularly poor. The term
cerebral palsy
was used to indicate a combination of genetic, fetal, and birth trauma disabilities, and most physicians assumed that people with these disabilities were also mentally disabled. There were few organized facilities or cerebral palsy specialists other than those at the multidisciplinary clinic at Children's Hospital in Boston and the Children's Rehabilitation Institute for Cerebral Palsy in Reisterstown, Maryland.
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There was some interest in the use of antispasmotic drugs to treat the condition, but so far their effectiveness was doubtful.
¹⁸³
On occasion an exceptional individual with cerebral palsy, such as Earl Carlson, was featured in the popular press. Carlson, a 1931 graduate of Yale's medical school, began treating cerebral palsy patients like himself at the New York Neurological Institute and published his autobiography
Born That Way
in 1941.
¹⁸⁴

Cautiously Minnesota Republican Congressman Walter Judd praised Kenny's methods for treating cerebral palsy patients as “definitely most helpful in many cases that I have seen personally.”
¹⁸⁵
Marvin Kline called a meeting of the city's Board of Public Welfare to hear the “pleas of sorrowing parents.” The Johnsons of Salisbury, North Carolina, and the Coplans of Livingston, Montana, whose children had been expelled from the Institute, assured city officials “we aren't interested in medical technicalities … we just want our babies to be normal.” Mrs. Coplan said she had shoveled sand in a Minneapolis foundry for more than 8 months to be able to pay for her daughter to have the Kenny treatment.
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Under this pressure the city's welfare board ordered these 2 children readmitted to the Institute, although it did not amend its regulations to permit “spastic paralysis” patients to be treated at the Institute in the future.
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Back at the Institute, the
Minneapolis Daily Times
reported, Carol Lee Coplan “not only sits up but walks around her crib and even ruffles a book” while Allen Johnson's parents—who were told by an expert that “nothing could be done for him”—“hope he will make the same progress.”
¹⁸⁸
City officials refused Kenny's resignation and promised that they would “do everything humanly possible” to obtain the clinical research facilities she demanded.
¹⁸⁹

Kenny's brief public foray into the field of cerebral palsy excited parents of children who had neuromuscular disorders other than polio. A mother from Chicago who was a member of a Parents Association for the Handicapped contacted other mothers of “handicapped” children and they “got busy.” “We are keeping our fingers crossed in the hopes that you will continue your research for all neuro-muscular diseases,” she told Kenny.
¹⁹⁰
A few of Kenny's medical allies were also eager to pursue this new direction of her work. Orthopedist Alfred Deacon urged the director of the Winnipeg's Children's Hospital to send a physician to the Institute to study “cerebrospastic” therapies “which would be of great benefit to the Children's Hosp[ital].”
¹⁹¹

Kenny continued to see herself as an independent clinician not bound by institutional restrictions. Even after the Institute's board refused to open its door to additional cerebral palsy patients, she assured an Illinois mother that “my dermo-neuro-muscular therapy is definitely not for infantile paralysis alone.” Although she was restricted to polio at the Institute she would be happy to examine the child privately and advise the mother “as to the treatment.”
¹⁹²

It was not Kenny's effort to expand her work to other diseases, however, but her claim that her work was hindered by organized medicine that made it a national story. In March 1945 Congressman Donald O'Toole, a Democrat from New York, introduced a resolution calling for a House committee to investigate the “organized opposition” against Kenny.
¹⁹³
Within 2 weeks 1,500 letters were sent to O'Toole's office in support of Kenny from doctors, nurses, chiropractors, builders, businessmen, housewives, and mothers. Only one letter written by a nurse from Virginia was critical, O'Toole claimed.
¹⁹⁴
He also wrote to Roosevelt deploring the “lack of cooperation and a degree of intimidation practiced upon [Kenny] … by the medical profession.” As a hearing could not be set up before Congress returned from Easter recess, he respectfully asked the President “to use your great office in an effort to detain Sister Kenny in this country for … a word from you would give new faith and hope to Sister Kenny and would insure her remaining in this country to continue her splendid work.”
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O'Toole, one reporter noted sardonically, was an independent Tammany Democrat who had been elected without support from Roosevelt's New Deal administration and was “not adverse to starting a move calculated to embarrass the President.”
¹⁹⁶