Polio Wars (85 page)

NFIP officials recognized that public support for science populism threatened their organization. They were therefore eager to use the 1948 hearings to contest the claim that their refusal to fund Kenny's Institute proved that they were using public funds in an undemocratic way. The NFIP had consistently sought to defend itself by emphasizing that it was both democratic and meritocratic, in fact “the
people'
s Foundation,” as O'Connor had assured one donor during the polio wars.
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It had also long claimed for itself the role of director and perhaps even instigator of research. During the polio wars NFIP officials had contrasted medical research conducted before its founding—“faltering, unorganized and without coordination”—to research progress afterward.
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In 1948 the foundation boasted of ten years of promising research in its new pamphlet
A Decade of Doing
and bragged about a new understanding of the mechanism of immunization after Johns Hopkins researchers described experiments showing that polio antibodies in the central nervous tissue of a monkey injected with the live virus could protect the animal from developing paralysis. This research suggested that such antibodies might offer resistance to the “crippling after-effects of this disease” in humans.
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The 1948 hearings gave the NFIP a chance to speak as the nation's expert on polio and explain the danger of too much government interference in medical and scientific affairs. Of course, the NFIP did not want to portray itself as unreasonably antagonistic to all government funding. NFIP officials thoughtfully pointed to the “crying need” for research in other fields such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.
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Research funding, one official admitted frankly to Congress, was a crucial part of the NFIP's public fundraising and was the “interest and hope” of the thousands of men and women who “work at the grass-roots level.” If the NFIP's research program were “taken over by the Government … we believe our greatest appeal for public support will be removed.”
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NFIP representatives were strongly opposed to the idea of a special polio commission within the proposed NSF or any other government agency, warning that “such a step might jeopardize a voluntary program which is achieving important gains.”
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O'Connor had a longstanding belief in free-market medicine, research, and philanthropy, and he had always been opposed to federated fundraising. With the power of the NFIP behind him he defended medical charities. Charity-directed medical research was, he claimed, the “American way.” The nation's great philanthropic agencies were “a peculiarly American type” supported “by funds derived from the mass of the people [and]… led by individuals who join together for the common good … without any thought of emolument in terms either of money or privilege.” Any change would threaten the entire system of philanthropy, for the strength of these agencies was “their voluntary and independent nature.” Without naming Gunn and Platt's study O'Connor decried their proposal for setting up “a central group with a permanent directorate which all agencies would join.”
Each agency would then be compelled to accept the dictums of this directorate about when to seek funds and how to distribute them. This would lead to a loss of humanity in philanthropy and would be part of a wider, more dangerous form of totalitarianism in society at large. American charities required “integrity and independence” to ensure their continued work in “aiding and assisting the less fortunate so that they may participate in and enjoy our standard of life.”
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Fishbein made similar arguments when he praised America's system of voluntarism in the organization of both philanthropy and medical care. The NFIP's research program, he told a group of polio experts at Warm Springs, was “as fine a program of research … as any developed by any agency in the world in relation to any other disease.” Attacking the NFIP, he argued, was like attacking America's fee-for-service medical system. People sometimes said, Fishbein remarked sarcastically, that health charities were not systematic or democratic. But they were “in accord with the democratic traditions of the United States”; rather than being communistic or socialistic, they were “an inspired effort arising out of the hearts and souls of a free people.” In defending both the NFIP and America's current fee-for-service health system Fishbein added his own interpretation of attacks on government-directed research agencies. President Truman, Fishbein claimed, had vetoed an earlier version of the NSF bill because he could see that “the research developed with freedom and private initiative gave the better results.” As for the argument that there was too much money being collected for “one disease that afflicts so few people,” Fishbein dared his audience to “place a child with T.B. above one with infantile paralysis, or one with heart disease above one with infantile paralysis.” The NFIP's attitude to polio should be “a model to be emulated in relationship to other diseases.”
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Prompted by an NFIP suggestion, Fishbein then wrote a
JAMA
editorial on medical research urging Congress to “omit any and all special commissions for specific diseases” from the current NSF bill.
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Fears that government-funded research could lead to socialized medicine was most starkly laid out before the House committee by Basil's brother John O'Connor, a former New York Democratic congressman who was now an NFIP official. Even if the proposed NSF would be only a “government research bureau” collecting data, John O'Connor argued, “we believe [it] is the proverbial camel getting its nose under the tent and from that time on you have the whole animal, and the whole carcass, right in the center of the ring. You have got the government taking care of the personal disease of our people, a completely totalitarian idea that never was intended in America.” He asked the Congressmen to imagine their own families threatened by polio. In 1947, his son, who had just graduated from Harvard Medical School, had become a victim, and the father explained, “I did not want then, and I do not want now any Government representative whether he is a scientist or a doctor, treating me or my people under such circumstances. I want to get the best private treatment. And this proposed research by the Government is bound to develop by the Government taking over completely.”
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As a witness at the Congressional hearings Kenny sought to benefit from the complicated medical politics of the times. She enjoyed the effusive, over-the-top language common in Congress and was able to tell her story in terms that fit well with the current
congressional climate. Republicans, who had gained control of the House and Senate in 1946, found that supporting Kenny—an underdog battling a medical trust—made good politics and good press.
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Minnesota Republican Congressman Joseph O'Hara described relations among Sister Kenny, the NFIP, and some of the doctors as a “civil war.”
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New Jersey Republican Charles Wolverton, chair of the House committee, was especially concerned, and, reiterating many of Kenny's own arguments, pointedly questioned NFIP officials about their refusal to fund her work.
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According to
The Washington Times-Herald
, Wolverton gave the NFIP “a severe tongue lashing,” warning that its refusal to support Kenny was “inconceivable” and that the NFIP had clearly “given her the run-around” when she offered to design an exhibit for the upcoming conference.
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“In all my experience on this committee,” Wolverton told Kenny on her second day at the hearings, “you have had more photographers interested in taking your picture than any witness we have ever had before the committee.” “I am afraid I do not make a very pretty one,” Kenny replied with unconvincing modesty.
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In fact, according to one commentator, the hearings
had the aspect of a trial whose defendants were O'Connor and Roosevelt. Although the late President's name was not mentioned, the critical questioning leveled at NFIP spokesmen and the relish with which Republican members listened to Kenny's attacks on an organization founded by Roosevelt, heightened the feeling that both the former president and his New Deal were under attack.
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FIGURE 7.1
A proud and dignified Kenny was a witness at a Congressional committee hearing in 1948; “Sister Kenny Takes the Stand”
Washington Times-Herald
May 15, 1948.

Kenny made her work a symbol of medical populism. She sought to draw in her congressional audience by demonstrating her trust in the abilities of lay observers to judge evidence put before their own eyes. She showed her technical film at the hearings, noting that she had shown it the previous summer in Europe. This “documentary evidence,” she said in introducing the film, could be rejected only through neglect, ignorance, or prejudice. Kenny then recommended that the film be shown to all state health departments and that pamphlets be printed and distributed to inform every family about the Kenny concept.
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Kenny was aware that the State Department was sending out invitations for the NFIP conference to some 60 countries. Pressing her claim to be included, she spoke in terms of the new global health politics (the first assembly of the World Health Organization would be meeting in Geneva that summer), reminding the committee of her visits to both Western and Eastern Europe.
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Thus, she argued, her participation in the NFIP's conference would give the federal government an opportunity to present to “governments of all countries … [a] link in the golden chain of friendship.” Turning this argument into a threat, she warned that friends could become enemies. While the gift of her knowledge might “cement the much desired friendships,” if it were withheld it was possible that “a bitterness will enter the hearts of the people when the truth finally becomes known.” And the NFIP was at fault. Its refusal to allow her to participate in the upcoming conference was “perpetrating a grave injustice on the people of this country by assuming this attitude which, to me, is not American.”
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Many Congressmen caught the implications of the politics of medical openness. If the NFIP's International Conference could carry “governmental implication … to the people of this country and other countries,” Massachusetts Republican John Heselton reflected, the committee should “inquire as to what further consideration has been given to the [Kenny] Institute's request, and as to whether or not … there has been a run-around or a pigeon holing of this very reasonable request to participate in developing all the facts.”
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One of the most provocative moments in the case against the NFIP was the appearance at the hearings of a pro-Kenny scientist. Claus Washington Jungeblut, a bacteriologist at Columbia University, had been working as a polio researcher for the previous 2 decades, and had been funded by the Milbank Committee, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Birthday Ball Commission.
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Kenny had met him in January 1948 along with other Columbia scientists when she had shown her film at the medical school. She had immediately begun to claim him as an ally.
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Born in Minnesota but brought up in Switzerland, Jungeblut had received a medical degree in 1921 from the University of Berne and worked as a bacteriology assistant at Berne's public health institute and later at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Fluent in German and English—which he spoke with a Swiss-German accent—he had been hired as an
assistant professor of bacteriology at Stanford in 1927 and after 2 years moved to Columbia University to study polio. In the early 1930s William Park and his colleagues had established the failure of polio convalescent serum to protect children from polio, an insight followed by the disastrous testing of a polio vaccine that Park had helped to develop. These events convinced Jungeblut that polio was not like other infectious diseases and that its etiology was more complicated. He proposed that as patients' previous exposures to the polio virus did not explain the patterns of paralysis, there must be additional “poliocidal substances”—perhaps in vitamins or hormones—that would explain why some children developed paralysis and others did not.
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Jungeblut became a full professor in 1937. His work was praised by the Queensland Royal Commission and 35 of his articles were cited in the NFIP's collection
Infantile Paralysis: A Symposium Delivered at Vanderbilt University April, 1941
.
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Impressed by Kenny's clinical results Jungeblut saw in her a new funding source and hoped to gain respect as a KF-funded scientist standing apart from the NFIP. But he did not want to go too far. During her testimony, for example, Kenny had mentioned her plan to set up a rival international polio conference and scientific council and boasted that “several outstanding scientists” were willing to be part of this council.
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But Jungeblut had already told Kenny privately that he was not willing to be part of any such council and that he thought a separate conference was a bad idea, fearing that few of his fellow scientists would be willing to proclaim such “open rebellion against the National Foundation.” “The course I have chosen for myself—not without considerable mental anguish—is to continue my experimental work,” he told her, “and hope that with further diffusion of knowledge the objective facts will eventually be accepted.”
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