Polio Wars (78 page)

Sister Kenny
, she began to assure wealthy allies, would have “a tremendous influence on the minds of the medical men of the world” and in Rochester physicians from the Mayo Clinic had already “flocked to see the picture.”
²⁶⁶
The Hollywood film had become part of her work to be defended as strongly as her clinics, textbooks, or technicians.

Over the next months Kenny became stiffer and more suspicious, partly in response to the continuing criticism and partly as she tried to hide her age. Although reporters saw a lighthearted side of her in social occasions they found her unwilling to show any lightness in discussing her ideas; on those “she displays a solid, granite-like fanaticism [speaking with] … a stilted, formal quality that sounds almost like what is known in the patent medicine and carnival world as a ‘pitch.' ”
²⁶⁷
Adopting the attire of Hollywood celebrities, Kenny began to wear even larger corsages and decorative jewelry, and ordered stylish clothes from stores like Lane Bryant that specialized in large sizes. She began a life of fundraising rather than clinical care, and, like Basil O'Connor, she openly sought out a life of luxury. The KF provided her with “a big car,” although she supposedly insisted on riding with the chauffeur. When she was in New York, she went to nightclubs like the Copa or the Stork Club where performers and club owners would come and talk to her, and she was disappointed if there was not a crowd around. With her house paid for by the city of Minneapolis, a regular allowance from the Exchange Club, and additional funds from the Institute's board, Kenny became a lady bountiful. She always carried “a big pocketbook with a big load of dough in it,” a KF official recalled, and would take $50 or $60 and give it to some poor patient who needed it.
²⁶⁸

Stimson remained a well-regarded polio expert. His growing distance from Kenny led him closer to the NFIP. He began to describe Kenny as “the best physiotherapy technician” he knew who “would get a lot further” if she limited her activities to clinical care.
²⁶⁹
At a meeting of the American College of Physicians in 1947 he declared, in a dramatic turnaround, that the “so-called Kenny treatment” had been described in a pamphlet published by New York health authorities in 1928, a reference to Boston therapist Wilhemine Wright's work.
²⁷⁰
Kenny later protested that she asked Stimson “to produce this health pamphlet describing my treatment in the year 1928” and that he was unable to do so.
²⁷¹
Stimson realized that Kenny would always see any recanting convert as an enemy; she had no middle ground. He remained fascinated by her, however, and began to compile private letters, unpublished reports, and newspaper clippings into a scrapbook that he later called “Sister Elizabeth Kenny and Her Treatment of Acute Poliomyelitis in The United States as Experienced and Taught by Philip M. Stimson, M.D.”
²⁷²

At the Institute, Visscher and Myers continued their quiet campaign against Kenny. In December 1946, while Kenny was away, 2 respected physicians, Abraham Fryberg, a Queensland bureaucrat who had known Kenny for some years, and Brisbane orthopedic surgeon Thomas Stubbs Brown visited the Institute. They had been sent to America and Britain under the auspices of the Queensland government to investigate medical and rehabilitative care for polio, industrial hygiene, and tuberculosis.
²⁷³
Based on a visit to the Kenny wards at Carshalton in Surrey as well as the Institute in Minneapolis and other American hospitals, they concluded that polio treatment in the United States was “in a phase of change.” Physicians were “uncertain” about therapeutic procedures: “old principles have been discarded and in their place treatments have been formulated which have a clinical rather than a scientific basis.” They praised Kenny's work and clinical innovations, but her concepts, they concluded, were “not proven.”
²⁷⁴

By February 1947 Myers had received not only a copy of the Fryberg–Stubbs Brown report but additional reports from Australia suggesting that Kenny had never been a registered nurse. “I wonder,” he wrote to Visscher, “if we have not had among us a worse imposter than we had realized.” He was keeping “all of this material about Elizabeth Kenny in a special file so it will be available to you or anyone else who wishes to use it.”
²⁷⁵
“She isn't quite on the level!” his friend Visscher agreed.
²⁷⁶

Kenny was disappointed at the Fryberg–Stubbs Brown report. She had already visited Australia during the spring of 1946, her first opportunity since 1941. The visit was disappointing in many ways: her beloved Mary was now married and engrossed in domestic life; the report of the AMA committee had reinforced a wider dislike of her methods among Australian physicians; and even her Labor Party allies in the Queensland government had unhelpfully passed her request for an inquiry to the state's new Medical Research Council.
²⁷⁷
She showed her technical film in several places, but it was not well received. She sent a protesting report to Queensland Premier Ned Hanlon, and made sure Brisbane reporters heard her side of the story.
²⁷⁸

Back in Minneapolis Kenny found that she had begun to be pushed to the side. She was now called Honorary Director at the Institute, although she retained a place on the KF board of directors.
²⁷⁹
Still she returned to Australia in October 1947, determined to be present for the Brisbane premiere of her Hollywood movie. She had already heard that the film had “not gone too well” in Melbourne or Sydney, the result, Chuter believed, of “medical threats.”
²⁸⁰

In Brisbane Kenny was featured in Hoyts Regent advertisements as the “famous Australian, whose dramatic and adventurous career is the subject of this outstanding picture.” But despite Kenny's appearance at the Brisbane opening and generally positive reviews in the press,
Sister Kenny
did not do well in Brisbane either.
²⁸¹
This may partly have been the result of a campaign of critical comments by the
Brisbane Telegraph,
which had mocked the idea that Australian physicians were “selfish, narrow-minded men, who refuse to accept or listen to new medical discoveries or treatments.” The paper also quoted a local “cynic” who suggested the movie be retitled “Saint Elizabeth Kenny.”
²⁸²
Members of Brisbane's medical elite, especially pathologist James Duhig who had long disliked Kenny, promised that when the movie was shown, they would provide pamphlets attacking Kenny's treatment to theatre audiences.
²⁸³

Where the movie did find a delighted audience was in Toowoomba. Flashes of train carriages with words “Queensland Railways” and old-time railway stations caused “gasps of surprise from picture[-]goers who are so seldom treated to a sight of their own institutions on the screen,” noted the
Toowoomba Chronicle
. The audience also enjoyed comparing the actors to the people they knew well: the actor who played McDonnell “had the physical and facial characteristics of Dr. McDonnell to a degree that made the identification easy” but his “rather strong Irish-Scottish tone” did not resemble “the thinner tone of the well-known Toowoomba medico.” The actor playing Chuter, though, was “excellently drawn, bearing a reasonable likeness for those who know Mr. Chuter.” Some of the actors “had traces of the American accent” but the
Chronicle
felt that “in all, much of the Australianism of the language was achieved.”
²⁸⁴

Aware of growing antagonism in Australia and even at her own Institute Kenny had become convinced that only in Europe would she find serious medical supporters. She traveled widely in 1947, visiting England, Ireland, France, Belgium, Sweden, Russia, Norway, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and Holland. She met with orthopedic surgeons, pediatricians, public health officials, and some ministers of health, assuring her audiences that the American physicians who “knew the least about my work during these last five years were the only ones to … supply reports in the medical journals.” In Madrid she was met at the airport by doctors carrying a large bouquet; “it was very cheering to me to receive this floral tribute from a world famous Institute while I was yet able to smell them.”
²⁸⁵
This was a joke she would repeat often, but its reference to her mortality made the humor rather black.

1.
Mary Kenny McCracken, interviews with Naomi Rogers, November 1993, Caloundra, Queensland, Australia.

2.
Kenny “Paper Read at the Northwestern Pediatric Conference, Nov. 14, 1940, Saint Paul University Club,” Kendall Collection; Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 106–107, 111.

3.
Kenny to O'Connor, September 12 1941, Basil O'Connor, 1940–1942, MHS-K; Kenny to Dear Mr. O'Connor, September 5 1941, Public Relations, MOD-K; Kenny to Dear Dr. Fishbein, October 5 1941, Public Relations, MOD-K.

4.
Kenny to Dear Mr. Cusack, November 11 1942, Public Relations, MOD-K.

5.
Kenny to Dear Miss [Catherine] Worthingham, June 24 1942, American Physiotherapy Assoc., 1941–1942, MHS-K; Catherine Worthingham to Dear Miss Kenny, July 20 1942, American Physiotherapy Assoc., 1941–1942, MHS-K; “The Biennial”
American Journal of Nursing
(July 1942) 42: 754–762; J. Albert Key [Report] in “Reports on Meeting of Committee to Investigate the Kenny Method of Treatment, Sunday and Monday, November 22 and 23, 1942, Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Dr. R. K. Ghormley, 1943, MHS-K. Key was shown a movie at the General Hospital “from which I could draw no conclusions as to the relative value of the Kenny and the orthodox treatment.”

6.
Secretary to Sister Elizabeth Kenny to Dear Mr. Harris, July 16 1943, John H. Harris, 1942–1944, 1952, MHS-K; Secretary to Sister Elizabeth Kenny to Dear Mr. Harris, November 1 1943, John H. Harris, 1942–1944, 1952, MHS-K; John H. Harris to Dear Sister Kenny, December 16 1943, John H. Harris, 1942–1944, 1952, MHS-K.

7.
Mrs. Sydney Sanner and Mrs. George Leslie Smith [Kate Crutcher Works of the Children's Hospital, Los Angeles] to Dear Sister Kenny, July 17 1943, Los Angeles-Misc., 1942–1951, MHS-K.

8.
Ethel Calhoun to Dear Sister, November 24 1943, Ethel Calhoun, MHS-K.

9.
[Philip Lewin] “Report of the Proceedings of the Committee on Treatment of After Effects,” December 1 1938, Public Relations, Historical Organization, MOD. In the early 1940s the NFIP produced a one-reel sound motion picture on epidemiology and treatment of polio that was available to chapters; D. B. Armstrong and John Lentz “Credit Lines: A Selective Digest of Diversified Health Interests: Jottings”
American Journal of Public Health
(January 1942) 32: 94.

10.
[Lewin] “Report of the Proceedings of the Committee on Treatment of After Effects,” December 1 1938.

11.
Howard A. Rusk “Motion Pictures Changing Form of Medical Education”
New York Times
November 7 1948.

12.
Thomas G. Hull “Bureau of Exhibits” in Morris Fishbein
A History of the American Medical Association 1847–1947
(Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co., 1947), 1055; Brian Stanford “The Evolution of the Medical Film in Britain”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
(October 1947) 57: 385.

13.
See “[Obituary] Sarnoff, Jacob”
JAMA
(1961) 178: 345.

14.
Rusk “Motion Pictures Changing Form of Medical Education.”

15.
Hull “Bureau of Exhibits,” 1056–1057; Stanford “The Evolution of the Medical Film in Britain,” 386. For examples of some Navy films including
Morning Care, Bathing the Bed Patient, Beds and Appliances, Evening Care, Taking Blood Pressure, Postoperative Care,
and Temperature, Pulse, Respiration
see “Sound Films: Nursing Procedures”
American Journal of Nursing
(September 1944) 44: 917–918.

16.
“Films on Physical Therapy”
Physiotherapy Review
(1938) 18: 318. On the movies shown by the AMA's Council on Physical Therapy, including
Massage, Occupational Therapy, and Underwater Therapy
see Medical Motion Pictures
JAMA
(September 4 1943) 123: 43–44.

17.
“Report of the Executive Committee [of the American Physiotherapy Association]”
Physiotherapy Review
(July–August 1937) 17: 152; Lucie P. Lawrence “Florence Kendall: What a Wonderful Journey”
PT Magazine of Physical Therapy
(May 2000) 8: 41.

18.
Hull “Bureau of Exhibits,” 1047.

19.
“The Program of the Sections, American Medical Association, Ninety-Third Annual Session, Atlantic City, June 8–12, 1942: The Scientific Exhibit”
JAMA
(May 2 1942) 119: 60.

20.
Max M. Green to Dear Sister Kenny, January 27 1943, Louisiana 1943–1944, MHS-K; [form “If you desire to have a Scientific Exhibit …] [enclosed in] Max M. Green to Dear Sister Kenny, January 27 1943, Louisiana 1943–1944, MHS-K.

21.
Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 128. See also Kenny's offer to the Townsville city council of a film of her work; “Sister Kenny: City Council Motion”
Townsville Daily Bulletin
May 17 1935.

22.
Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Work
, 245.

23.
Mary McCarthy “ ‘Sister Kenny' Outline,” [1942], Paul Kohner Inc., Hollywood, Sister Kenny Collection, Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, 13. Mary Eunice McCarthy was no relation to the novelist and critic Mary Therese McCarthy. For a longer version of this section see Rogers “American Medicine and the Politics of Filmmaking:
Sister Kenny
(RKO, 1946)” in Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy
Tomes, and Paula A. Treichler eds.
Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 199–238.