Polio Wars (76 page)

For some lay viewers the film's impact was tremendous and positive. A North Dakota woman who saw the film after hearing Kenny lecture told her that “what you have done in the field of medical science seems to me like a great sermon, which I wish the world might hear.” Watching the film, she had “received a spiritual vision”: just as patients with polio were “crippled [so] … our spirits are imprisoned in braces and splints and corsets [for] … we use only a small fraction of the spiritual life which is rightfully ours.”
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Clara Russell La Roche, Rosalind Russell's sister, showed the film to potential donors in New York City, and, according to her husband, the occasion spurred the founding of the New York KF chapter.
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While Kenny continued to see
The Kenny Concept
as appropriate for both professional and lay audiences, she also produced a 12-minute film
The Value of a Life
, designed specifically “for the lay person.”
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Institute officials found this film particularly useful to show to families and potential donors, but Kenny continued to show
The Kenny Concept
to members of the public as well as medical professionals who visited the Institute.
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In 1946 Kenny was caught up in the excitement of the Hollywood movie's premiere and promotion. She flew to New York to attend the movie's premiere in Time Square, and spoke at a gathering of New York's social elite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where she was presented with a large book of photographs commemorating the movie. “Wish you were here to go with me,” she wrote to Mary; “I have a new green evening frock to wear as I am not quite sure what these bally Americans will do to me at such a premiere.”
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According to the
Minneapolis Star-Journal
, traffic in Times Square was “a mad mix up” as more than 20,000 people “jammed in for a close look at arriving celebrities,” along with extra squads of policemen. Kenny arrived escorted by Russell's husband Frederick Brisson. She told the crowd “it is a pleasure to see you here and I know you will see a fine film … It has been gratifying to be able to do something for your country, that has done so much for mine.” The crowd broke through the barriers and jostled the platform on which Kenny stood, “nearly throwing her off balance.”
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The northwest premiere the next month in Minneapolis rivaled the New York premiere “in color and fanfare,” as a crowd of over a thousand milled outside the RKO-Orpheum theater to watch local and regional celebrities enter.
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Advertised as “one of the world's great stories of love, sacrifice and conflict,” the film was clearly made to capitalize on public curiosity about a controversial and popular figure, and on the celebrity attraction of Rosalind Russell.
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Although
Sister Kenny
did not do well at the box office, audiences and many film critics liked it. In November 1946 the National Screen Council, comprised of local civic film committees, gave it that month's Blue Ribbon Award for family entertainment, even though the film's average gross was lower than that of the council's usual award choices.
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Russell's performance was widely praised, and few were surprised when she received a Golden Globe award for best dramatic actress and an Academy Award nomination.
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The Oscar for Best Actress, however, went to Olivia de Haviland in
To Each His Own
.

The movie's message was harder to assess. Howard Barnes of the
New York Tribune
called it “a fascinating documentation of a ceaseless and stirring medical struggle.”
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The
Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph
considered it “a sympathetic and indignant photoplay” with “a depth of feeling and sincerity that occasionally takes on a documentary tinge.”
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As sentimental as any March of Dimes preview,
Sister Kenny
drew its appeal from dramatizing the fear of ignoring the value of the Kenny method. On this occasion it offered the American public a heroic “woman in white” who provided alternative, perhaps even antiorthodox, solutions to puzzles the American medical establishment could not solve. The film's image of scientific discovery—the outsider versus the conservative professional establishment—was, leaders of organized medicine realized, one that fit all too well with the public's distrust of what it considered the overblown claims of America's medical elite. Members of the audience would leave the cinema convinced they had the right to choose between experts to care for a child paralyzed with polio. This was, of course, an option they had always had, but one that was now recognized by Hollywood's powerful silver screen. Kenny's critics feared the movie would sway a public already eager to embrace a miracle worker.

James Hulett, Jr., a young sociologist at the University of Illinois, decided that the movie provided the perfect research subject to follow “the conflict between scientific medicine and the Kenny group as it affects the attitudes of the public.” He wrote to the NFIP's national office to ask for “a reliable statement on the question whether the Kenny therapy represents anything new or ‘revolutionary' that was unknown before Kenny ‘discovered' it.” “My purposes in studying the Kenny movement are strictly objective,” he assured NFIP officials.
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The NFIP had always paid close attention to movies about polio. In 1944 it had advised its Minneapolis chapter not to sponsor the film
They Shall Have Faith
(later renamed
Forever You
rs), produced by the B-studio Monogram. It was the story of a doctor's daughter paralyzed by polio who defies her father's old-fashioned splinting methods and is healed by the experimental treatment of Army surgeon Tex O'Connor. The NFIP headquarters concluded that polio was hardly central to the plot, which was “the usual Hollywood romance,” but suggested the chapter not sponsor the film, for “the picture will do no damage but is the type of thing which we should have no part of.”
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RKO's
Sister Kenny
was different. Not only was polio central to the plot, but there was also an explicit discussion of medical orthodoxy, and the doctors who disagreed with Kenny's ideas were the ones leaving children deformed.
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Further, Kenny had made the film her personal triumph. After talking with his staff, who noted that Hulett had written an “outstanding article on ‘The Kenny Cult,' ” the head of NFIP's Public Relations suggested that Hulett contact Maurice Visscher, Harold Diehl, and other members of Minnesota's medical faculty who were “living as it were in the middle of the Kenny movement.”
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In the article Hulett published a few years later he saw the film's success as the result of a misguided popular beliefs.
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Some reviewers turned to physicians to try to balance the film's pro-Kenny stance. In the
New York Herald Tribune
Judith Klein noted the film's “distortion and omission of facts,” a problem that “not only tends to shake public faith in the medical profession but also raises false hopes as to the universal effectiveness of treatment.” She referred to Pohl's 1945 study of the numbers of Kenny patients who were left with extensive residual paralysis and she also quoted NFIP medical director Hart Van Riper. While Van Riper praised Kenny's “brilliant results in treatment” and credited her with the demise of the orthodox use of plaster casts, he made it clear that praising Kenny as a clinician did not
mean accepting her theories of polio. “If Miss Kenny had remained on the clinical side—instead of invading the laboratory field of the physician—the great schism between her and the medical profession would not have occurred.” The movie, he feared, might revive the feuding between doctors and Kenny. “Let's not worry about cause,” Van Riper told Klein and her readers, “but concentrate on the treatment … there is no known cure for poliomyelitis.” After all, he concluded, “doctors cure very few people. The Lord cures them. Doctors just help Him along.”
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The disjunction between clinical ability and scientific understanding was picked up by other reviewers as well. Kenny “will never forsake her theory [that polio is] … essentially a disease of certain muscles,” Archer Winsten reflected in the
New York Post
. But physicians base their theories on “much more penetrating research into the nature of the causative virus [and]… point to actual nerve destruction.” Thus, doctors may “grant her good therapeutic innovations” but they “consider her scientifically ignorant.”
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“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing when it touches the field of medicine,” agreed Florence Fisher Parry of the
Pittsburgh Press
. The movie, she believed, “misrepresents the medical profession in a manner shocking to those who hold it in high regard.” Parry quoted Nebraska orthopedist H. Winnett Orr who questioned even Kenny's clinical methods. He argued that the promotion of Kenny's treatment had been a cruel fraud that had led to the spending of millions of dollars “in a campaign which has had only a minor effect upon the care of a few patients.” In Orr's view the polio epidemics of the past few years had abundantly demonstrated that splints, braces, and surgical care were “necessary in order to put these patients on their feet, to restore them to usefulness in society, and to make them independent of the care of families, relatives, and institutions.”
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Life
featured the film as its movie of the week, calling Kenny “the most publicly controversial figure in the medical world today” with “a host of utterly devoted followers and a host of strongly skeptical medical opponents.”
Life
recognized that “many medical men will utter howls of protest against it—and not without reason—for
Sister Kenny
is frank propaganda for the Kenny treatment and, by inference, against other methods employed by most doctors.” The magazine included 2 pages of stills from the movie and a full-page photograph of Russell as Kenny in Brack's auditorium with the caption “Sister Kenny Glares at a Doctor Who Thinks She is a Quack.”
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But the same issue also contained a short review by New York pediatrician Philip Stimson entitled “A Doctor Comments on ‘Sister Kenny.' ” In a stunning reversal, Stimson, who had been a strong Kenny supporter since the early 1940s, now argued that “millions of people will be stirred by the movie and believe all its implications.” He warned it was not true that all acute patients treated by Kenny recover completely and rapidly or that “all but a few orthopedists are opposed to Sister Kenny and have nothing to do with her treatment.” He praised the Kenny method but noted many similarities between Kenny and orthopedists, arguing that the best treatment of polio involves the services of many experts.
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Stimson had recently been featured in the
National Foundation News
as the director of a new unit providing specialized polio training for doctors, nurses, and other professionals at New York's Knickerbocker Hospital.
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Life
also provided a separate story about Kenny herself, describing her as 59 and “undaunted.” Even though the KF was now a large and growing institution and Kenny was a local celebrity, success had not “made her any less determined or cantankerous.” “She is still caustic toward all critics” and regards the AMA and the NFIP “as woefully far
from the true faith.” The story included a photograph of Kenny and a girl patient who was standing for the first time and another photograph of Kenny with Russell and an RKO executive.
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In October 1946 Ed Sullivan came out on Kenny's side in his syndicated column “Little Old New York.” “Basil O'Connor's richly-endowed National Foundation won't let Sister Kenny have the money,” he told readers, even though the NFIP had formally endorsed her work. He warned that “the future of tens of thousands of polio victims is being jeopardized by temperament and false pride” and suggested that “Basil O'Connor, custodian of $20,000,000 of public contributions, should render an accounting of this curious situation.” As for the difference in quality of care between ordinary therapists and Kenny-trained therapists, Sullivan quoted Kenny saying “it is as if a Boy Scout's knowledge of first aid were opposed to the knowledge of a specialist.”
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This immediately became a national story. The editor of
New York Medicine
responded by calling Sullivan “a romantic partisan” and Kenny “tragically egotistical.”
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“If I'm a ‘romantic partisan' of Sister Kenny,” Sullivan retorted in print, then Kenny's allies such as Robert Bingham and the late Don Gudakunst were “in the upper brackets of romanticism.” As for the accusations of egotism, “the parents of a child afflicted with infantile paralysis don't care whether the healer is an egotist—all they want is to see that child walk again.” Sullivan framed this as a public interest story, arguing that “the public, which volunteers the money gladly to fight this cruel disease” had “a financial stake” in any meeting between NFIP and KF leaders. He also doubted the good faith of many physicians. “Somewhere along the line, deliberately or accidentally, the medical profession apparently tossed the Kenny method overboard, [and] turned instead to a modification of her method which perhaps relieved them from acknowledging that all along they had been in error.”
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Marvin Kline thanked Sullivan for his “clear exposition of the facts,” noting “the tremendous reader interest in your column and the enormous circulation of your newspaper.”
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In the
New York Post
Archer Winsten praised Sullivan's “great-hearted attempt to reconcile Nurse Kenny and the medical profession,” and suggested that O'Connor “invent a diversion by which all faces are saved.”
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