Polio Wars (93 page)

173.
“Centralia's Kenny Clinic Patients to Get Care in Chicago”
Chicago Daily Tribune
March 17 1949; Levine
I Knew Sister Kenny
, 173–174, 223.

174.
“Polio Rises in Illinois”
New York Times
July 18 1949; Levine
I Knew Sister
Kenn
y, 222; B.K. Richardson
A History of The Illinois Department of Public Health 1927–1962
(Illinois: [Governor's Office] 1963), 85–87.

175.
Kenny “For the Information of the Citizens of the State of Minnesota and the Citizens of the United States of American Concerning My Approaching Departure” [1947] Mayoralty Files 1945–1948, Box 10, Humphrey Papers, MHS.

176.
“Scope of Kenny Clinics' Work Expanding in U.S.” [Toowoomba newspaper, n.d.], Clippings, MHS-K; Margaret Opdahl Ernst, interview with Rogers, May 11 2001, St Paul, Minnesota; Kenny to Dear Mary [McCracken], May 7 1949, Kenny Collection, Fryer Library.

177.
Kenny to Dear Mary and Stuart [December 1947], Kenny Collection, Fryer Library; Kenny to Dear Friends [November 1947], Personal Correspondence and Related Papers 1942–1951, MHS-K; Kenny to Mr. President, Mrs. Webber and Gentlemen, May 24 1948; Karen Peterson Butterworth
Mind over Muscle: Surviving Polio in New Zealand
(Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1994), 62; J.E. Caughey and D.S. Malcolm “Muscle Spasm in Poliomyelitis: A Study of a New Zealand Epidemic”
Archives of Disease in Childhood
(March 1950) 25: 15–17. For the intriguing suggestion that Bell began to “refine” Kenny's methods over the years see Butterworth
Mind over Muscle
, 64. The hospital was endowed by Thomas Duncan, a wealthy farmer and philanthropist.

178.
Kenny to Dear Sir Norman [Nook], April 25 1949, Wilson Collection; Kenny to Dear Sir [W. Moore], March 24 1952, Wilson Collection; [Cohn interview with] Valerie Harvey, March 19 1953, Cohn Papers, MHS-K; [Cohn interview with] Pete Gazzola [Director of Public Relations, KF Eastern Area], August 25 1953, Cohn Papers, MHS-K; [Cohn interview with] Will O'Neill, May 20 1955.

179.
Kenny to Dear Friend [Alejandro del Carril], June 24 1949, Argentina, MHS-K; Kenny to My Dear Mary and Stuart, September 24 1946, Mary Stewart Kenny, 1942–1947 MHS-K; Kenny to Dear Mary and Stuart, May 18 1947, Kenny Collection, Fryer Library; Kenny to Dear Mary, January 31 [n.d.], Kenny Collection, Fryer Library.

On medical politics in the late 1940s, see James G. Burrow
AMA: Voice of American Medicine
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963); Frank D. Campion
The AMA and U.S. Health Policy since 1940
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1984); Jonathan Engel
Doctors and Reformers: Discussion and Debate over Health Policy 1925–1950
(Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown eds.
Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Rickey Hendricks
A Model for National Health Care: The History of Kaiser Permanente
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Robert D. Johnston ed.
The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century
North America
(New York: Routledge, 2004); Monte Poen
Harry S. Truman versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979); Elton Rayak
Professional Power and American Medicine: The Economics of the American Medical Association
(Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1967); Naomi Rogers
An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Naomi Rogers “The Public Face of Homeopathy: Politics, the Public and Alternative Medicine in the United States 1900–1940” in Martin Dinges ed.
Patients in the History of Homeopathy
(Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2002), 351–371; Paul Starr
The Social Transformation of American Medicine
(New York: Basic Books, 1982); Rosemary Stevens
In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Basic Books, 1989); Patricia Spain Ward “
United States versus American Medical Association et al
.: The Medical Anti-Trust Case of 1938–1943”
American Studies
(1989) 30: 123–153.

On medical science and research in the 1940s and 1950s see Toby A. Appel
Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945–1975
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Angela N. H. Creager
The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Roger L. Geiger
Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bert Hansen
Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Victoria A. Harden
Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887–1937
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Michael Kazin
The Populist Persuasion: An American History
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Daniel J. Kevles “Foundations, Universities and Trends in Support of Physical and Biological Sciences, 1900–1992”
Daedalus
(1992) 121: 195–235; Gretchen Krueger
Hope and Suffering: Children, Cancer, and the Paradox of Experimental Medicine
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Harry M. Marks “Cortisone, 1949: A Year in the Political Life of a Drug”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
(1992) 66: 429–432; Harry M. Marks
The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); James T. Patterson
The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven P. Strickland
Politics, Science and Dread Disease: A Short History of United States Medical Research Policy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); James Harvey Young
The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

KENNY HAD LONG
argued that good medicine was global medicine. She boasted of her many international patients and especially the physicians from Canada, Europe, South America, Asia, and South Africa who came to study her work and then returned to establish it in their home countries. With the emerging Cold War divided nations sought to keep their scientists separated, and few countries dared to breach this gap. But for Kenny such Cold War global politics were of little importance. In her mind the totalitarian enemy was not the Soviet Union but the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) and the American Medical Association (AMA), and she looked for places where their influence was muted. In the late 1940s as she sought to expand her work across the world, she ignored such Cold War boundaries as the Iron Curtain. In her view of global medical politics her work could connect the American public and sympathetic professionals with their counterparts around the world.

After the 1948 international conference organized by the NFIP, Kenny made much of the restriction of freedom of scientific speech that had left her unable to answer a question posed during the conference. Still, she recognized that the words of scientists carried more weight at such conferences than those of a nurse. While she continued to speak at small medical meetings organized by the Kenny Foundation (KF), she sought to enlist respected polio scientists, without the handicap of her gender and lack of training, to promote her ideas. The 1948 Congressional hearings had introduced Columbia University virologist Claus Jungeblut as a polio researcher opposed to the NFIP-funded scientific establishment and seeking to extend Kenny's theories. Jungeblut became a potent symbol for KF fundraising drives reinforcing the foundation's claim that it was raising money for both patient care and polio research.

Jungeblut's work sounded credible not only because he was a well-known virologist, but also because scientists were developing a new picture of polio. American postwar
polio science had broken through the dead-end of the 1930s and early 1940s as recognition of distinctive viral strains of the disease had begun to allow laboratory researchers to focus on characteristics that had previously been dismissed as anomalous. Most significantly, in 1948 virologist John Enders and his team at the Boston Children's Hospital grew a strain of the polio virus in nonneurological tissue. A physiological and pathological picture of polio that no longer centered on the central nervous system sounded similar to Kenny's concept of polio as a “systemic” disease in which the virus could invade any part of the body, whether the central nervous system or peripheral structures. Strikingly, when Enders and his team published their findings in
Science
, they described experiments that demonstrated that the multiplication of the Lansing virus strain “occurred either in peripheral nerve processes or in cells not of nervous origin.”
¹

These changes enabled a few scientists like Jungeblut to step outside the NFIP establishment and accept KF funding, while still being able to base their own work on the best science of their day. Researchers both in North America and in Europe, impressed by the well-publicized clinical results of Kenny's methods, began to pursue laboratory and clinical research based on—if not her exact theories—then ideas that sounded quite similar. As a result, Kenny at last had scientific evidence to support her claims that she had contributed not just to the best clinical practice but also to the best virological science.

To expand her nascent global network Kenny traveled frequently to Europe in the early Cold War years. She recognized that polio was becoming a global health issue and the subject of discussions by European health departments and by the new World Health Organization (WHO). Polio outbreaks also began to occur in Asia and Africa and were clearly a threat to both developed and developing nations.
²
In a letter to the KF board, Kenny claimed that a prominent WHO official had advised her that the KF should apply for WHO membership and that “he had every hope to keep this great organization free of politics.”
³
Kenny went to Geneva to visit the WHO's new headquarters in 1950, and hoped that her meetings with officials there would “later bear fruit.”
⁴
But although Kenny's network of sympathetic physicians and her celebrity reputation made it relatively easy to gain a hearing with a few influential WHO officials, these brief encounters did not create any formal alliance between the WHO and the KF.

By 1950, just as reporters found what she was saying not new, Kenny came to recognize that her health problems were more serious than she had admitted. At the end of the year she gave up her house in Minneapolis and moved back to Australia to make a new home amid family and old friends. But she kept returning to the United States, brimming with scientific news that she believed further confirmed her work. She sought to imprint a permanent legacy for her work and for herself, but by the time she died of a stroke in 1952 this was a failed project. The new science she had hailed was moving into a realm that would make polio's clinical care irrelevant. Emerging research on a polio vaccine made it easier for her enemies to depict her as a figure of a different age, no longer relevant or important.

As polio outbreaks in Europe became more frequent after the war, European physicians began to seek out American expertise. In September 1950 Christopher Joseph McSweeney, an infectious disease specialist who was a Fellow of the Royal College of
Physicians of Ireland and the medical director of Dublin's infectious disease hospital, came to investigate polio care in the United States.
⁵
His observations give a good summary of the state of polio treatment.

A few months before he arrived McSweeney heard Frank Krusen at a medical meeting in Dublin compare the first 40 years of the twentieth century—“the years of immobilization”—to the 1940s in which the introduction of “the so-called Kenny concept” had led to the early treatment of muscle spasm. Krusen claimed “Kenny's contribution was little or nothing,” but admitted that it was “extremely difficult” to define the modern treatment of polio as much of it was not new and some of it was “pure empiricism.”
⁶
Not long after Krusen's talk McSweeney met Kenny in Dublin while she was visiting the city's infectious disease hospital where he practiced. She showed her film to an audience that included Noel Browne, Ireland's minister of health, and declared that she had had “no association” with Krusen for many years, and that “he had evidently forgotten what he had been taught.” In Kenny's recollection, McSweeney boasted that 90 percent of his patients recovered, and she replied that “he was wasting his time going to America if that was so, as America should be going to him for information.” When McSweeney remarked, “Why, you saw my recoveries,” she replied “I saw many of your patients but there wasn't a recovery in the whole lot.”
⁷
Such a flat dismissal intrigued McSweeney and led him to seek out proponents and critics of Kenny's work during his trip.