Polio Wars (88 page)

In December 1948 Sonja Betts and other league representatives went to Jersey City to attend a 1-day conference. Seeking to reach over the head of the NFIP and the AMA by focusing on national organizations with clout over the nation's health and welfare institutions as well as scientific research, Kenny and her allies had invited representatives of the Federal Security Agency and the Public Health Service along with Bernard Baruch and
John D. Rockefeller. The league received “courteous replies” from Baruch and Rockefeller, regretting that they could not attend.
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Representatives from the 2 federal agencies did attend along with a number of physicians and physical therapists.

Kenny loved this new forum. She urged the league to demand that findings of the research that had shown that polio was a disturbance in peripheral structures be published and made available to all American voters. This research, she promised, would “result in the rewriting of the medical books of today.”
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Foreign delegates, she told the Jersey City audience, had been “disappointed” at the way she was treated at the recent international conference. She quoted the sympathetic remarks of a Spanish participant that she had been “thwarted and frustrated while at the conference … unable to answer questions, [and] given no recognition.” Thousands of American children and adults with polio, she warned, would “become needlessly deformed and crippled” because they were not being treated with her methods in its entirety. She showed Public Health Service and Federal Security Agency patients as evidence of the danger of such modified treatment. Every 6 months she had tried to present scientific reports on the Kenny concept to the NFIP in “a friendly conference with representatives of all bodies interested in this particular disease,” but she had been consistently rejected. Along with a heated discussion of Roland Berg's recent book
Polio and Its Problems
Kenny quoted Alfred Deacon, who had said his patients treated with her methods were “ten times better.” She also announced triumphantly that a new affiliation with the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, and the Institute was “now in the process of culmination.”
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The Jersey City meeting was described by the
New York Times
and in a private note by an NFIP official who estimated that there were only 22 people in attendance, including Philip Stimson, Marvin Stevens, another 5 doctors, young women who were probably physical therapists, several press representatives, and a photographer. In the meeting's hostile environment, Stimson's mild protests that the NFIP had indeed authorized money to pay for Kenny and her technicians had been ignored.
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Neither Chester LaRoche nor Mal Stevens was comfortable with the Citizens Polio Research League or the heights to which it inspired Kenny. Such publicity, LaRoche warned Kenny, “hurts our efforts” as it seemed to emphasize “that the medical profession is not with us.” “Let's not get people feeling that we are fighting,” he urged her, but have everyone know “that the Kenny treatment is accepted all over the country.”
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Unrepentant, Kenny claimed she had been trying “to get known to the public that the doctors are with us” and the NFIP is “against us.” As for any impact on the KF's campaign, “your drive shall be a failure until the truth is known.”
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Stevens was even more disturbed than La Roche. He felt Kenny's speech, which had been widely reported, “spreads salt on old wounds and opens new ones.” He told LaRoche that he doubted whether the Mayo Clinic “would condone this statement of affiliation.” While it was true that the Mayo Clinic taught Kenny technicians as part of their regular physical therapy course, that was “a far cry from being a medical tie-up” with the Institute. Stevens agreed that Kenny's clinical observations “have been and are of great value,” but noted that a number of people, including doctors, had warned him that she “should not be the spokesman on medical matters or on the foundation's plans for expansion unless she is so instructed to be by the medical board or the foundation.”
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Learning of these remarks Kenny disagreed vehemently, replying that the
New York Times
version of her speech in Jersey City had given “great satisfaction to Doctor
Huenkens who especially asked me had I seen it.” In a confusing effort to combat Stevens' metaphor she added that “if the truth rubs salt on old wounds and opens new ones, the more salty the old wound becomes and the more numerous the new ones become, the better for humanity.” As for relations with the Mayo Clinic, she had received a letter from Melvin Henderson “congratulating me on the fact that a great burden had been removed from my shoulders and exhorting me to take life much easier.” She did not, she protested, aspire to be a spokesman on medical matters other than on those that were “still unknown to the medical world to a great extent, such as my own contribution.” In any case, she noted to LaRoche, Stevens was not proving himself a particularly good proponent of her work. He had ignored a suggestion by the head of New Jersey's Crippled Children's Association that “all doctors in the state should be presented with my findings.” He had also excused himself from a meeting with a physician from the Children's Bureau who had come to visit Jersey City, and had ignored an offer by the New York Academy of Medicine to show her technical film.
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As Van Riper shrewdly recognized, even in her own Institute Kenny was being pushed to the side. Never easy to work with, she had lost much of her patience and tact without Mary Kenny's watchful eye. She pretended to a heroic humility, telling audiences in London “I am of no consequence … It is only my great gift—my work—which matters,” but she was annoyed when her contribution to American medicine was called the Kenny method instead of “an entirely new concept of the disease.”
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Her suspicions of conspiracy also deepened after she returned from one of her European trips in 1947 and discovered that her technical film “had been cast aside” by Institute officials, a pamphlet she had prepared for parents during the 1946 epidemic had not been distributed, and her gray book
Physical Medicine
was not mentioned in any of the KF reference lists.
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Worse, she learned in early 1948 that a script writer from Hollywood had been employed without her knowledge to write a script about her methods. All these were efforts, she warned, “to eliminate my name.”
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Kenny believed correctly that these policies were the work of William O'Neil, the KF's new director of information services. O'Neil saw his role as reestablishing relations with local physicians and the medical school and ending “wild promotion schemes.” He contacted Fishbein and got him to agree to publish a leading article by John Pohl on the early diagnosis of polio in
JAMA
.
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He defended the Hollywood script project by arguing that “the public is anxious to know just what training is in back of a Kenny technician.” Kenny relied on technical films but she wanted only her cinematic vision, which combined clinical evidence and theoretical explanation. The public, she told O'Neil, was “not anxious to know anything about the training [but was] … only interested in the end results of treatment.”
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Worried that O'Neil was making alliances with her own medical supporters she warned Pohl that O'Neil was boasting “about being able to twist you around his little finger.”
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She sent a series of annoyed letters to the KF board and finally called Kline from New York and said she was “not going to come back to Minneapolis as long as that man is there.” O'Neil was fired in April 1948.
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Kenny continued to seek additional celebrity testimonials. She met President Truman's daughter Margaret who had expressed interest in the Citizen's League and asked her to become the League's “national patroness” (a request Truman gracefully ignored).
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Kenny enthusiastically allied herself with William Fox, owner of the Fox theater chain, and his daughters Mona and Belle, who had become Kenny supporters.
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She graciously
accepted effusive praise from English suffragist Christabel Pankhurst who described her as “our modern Florence Nightingale as well as great medical pioneer.” Pankhurst wanted to know Kenny's view of “the actual
cause
of Poliomyelitis” and described her own theory of “a poisonous element in pools and ponds.”
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Kenny did not respond.

In November 1948 the celebrity photographer Yousuf Karsh produced a new portrait of Kenny titled “Polio-Fighting Australian Nurse.” It was published in the family magazine
Coronet
just in time for the 1948 KF campaign.
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It was a full length black-and-white picture of Kenny, arms outstretched, wearing no jewelry or hat. She is dressed in black with a white cape around her shoulders. The light shines on her hands, her lined face, and her strong shoulders. It is a portrait of a woman who has struggled, but—bereft of laboratory instruments or patients—it is not a picture of a scientific researcher or even a clinician. In contrast, Karsh's later depiction of Jonas Salk placed him with a child patient and a syringe.
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Kenny's distinctive personality was widely used to explain why working with her was so difficult.
Newsweek
noted her “stubborn will and sharp tongue” and her “bitterly undiplomatic … dealings with American physicians” who had “resisted taking peremptory orders from a nurse with no formal medical training.” “She has,” the magazine continued, “ ‘resigned,' flounced out of hospital wards and executives offices—and later reconsidered her resignation.”
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Albert Deutsch agreed that Kenny was “a strong-willed stubborn woman, given to exaggerating the importance of her work, just as her enemies tend to minimize it.”
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Van Riper said privately that at any meeting “called by her or her representatives … she will make her claims just as she always has in the past, and if intelligent questions are asked or if she is crossed in any way, you are subjected to humiliation and ridicule.”
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He repeated this argument to explain to donors why the NFIP refused to fund additional efforts to evaluate Kenny's work. “It is unlikely that any evaluation would satisfy Miss Kenny or her staunch supporters,” he explained to one woman; “I think we must realize that nothing less than a complete and total surrender to Miss Kenny will ever satisfy her or anyone who supports her.”
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Around this time Kenny learned that O'Connor was describing her as an “Amazon,” a term which both she and O'Connor found denigrating, implying inappropriate independence and defiance of gender norms.
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Kenny's claim to scientific discovery did not sway the organizers of the First International Poliomyelitis Conference. But it certainly enhanced her celebrity status. A few months after the international conference, Gallup pollsters asked the American public: “What woman, living today in our part of the world that you have heard or read about do you admire the most?” The top 3 women listed were first Eleanor Roosevelt, then Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and third Sister Kenny.
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The NFIP's public image was buffeted by the polio wars and the Congressional hearings. Although O'Connor made a point of sending major donors social science research to confirm his argument that voluntary health agencies were vital to American democracy, doubts lingered. In private memos, John Rockefeller III's advisors argued that he should not support the NFIP as it was “well-heeled” and did not “disclose its financial situation to the public.” The NFIP, they warned him, also “overdramatizes” its case and raises massive funds for a disease compared to “diseases of far greater importance in terms of
their incidence and toll.”
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Virologist Thomas Rivers, a member of the NFIP's scientific advisory committee, told Rockefeller quietly that he agreed that “there are other fields of medicine that need your help more urgently.”
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In
Consumer Reports
science journalist Harold Aaron agreed that the NFIP—“one of the world's richest and most powerful voluntary health organizations”—was misdirecting public resources to a single disease that was far less significant in the public's health than the NFIP's scare campaigns claimed. In 1948, for example, the NFIP had spent $17,0000,000, while Congress had given the Children's Bureau only $7,500,000 for the care of all types of disabled children. Yet according to statistics gathered by the Crippled Children bureaus at least as many children in 1948 were disabled by cerebral palsy as by polio (about 175,000 for each), and many had other neglected diseases with major disabling effects including diabetes (35,000), epilepsy (200,000), and rheumatic heart disease (500,000).
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Progress in the treatment of polio was also harmed by fights between the KF and the NFIP, Aaron suggested, especially fights over “the controversial figure of Sister Elizabeth Kenny.” The NFIP and the KF competed with each other “in the promotion of research methods of treatment, and provision of medical facilities.” The battle was based on “fundamental differences of opinion as to proper treatment of a disease which stubbornly resists the development of vaccines for its prevention and drugs for its control.” Parents of patients would “continue to suffer from the doubts raised in their minds by claims and counterclaims.” In Aaron's assessment the NFIP had not given Kenny “an adequate opportunity to make further contributions” and had also denied her supporters any part of the “abundant harvest of the annual March of Dimes.” Fights over “matters of prestige, antagonisms and jealousies, personal as well as professional,” had, he believed, led the NFIP to withdraw its national support of Kenny's program and had widened the breach between the 2 groups.
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