Polio Wars (98 page)

But while Curtis attracted eager patients and Kenny spoke to respectful medical audiences, many German physicians remained adamantly opposed to Kenny's work. Orthopedists frequently told Curtis that “America has rejected the Kenny treatment,” comments which, Curtis was convinced, reflected the isolation of many European physicians from American medical journals during the early 1940s when Kenny's work was widely praised.
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After 18 months Curtis had treated over 80 patients and trained one nurse thoroughly and 4 more with the basics of the method. Families from the region, from other German cities, and from Italy sought Curtis out.
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But her position as a physical therapist made her efforts to win over doctors difficult. She described her efforts as being like “the Corporal trying to instruct Generals.” Instead of being able to explain “the whole thing clearly and boldly” she could not speak to a doctor on his own professional level but instead had to “insinuate and suggest and slip in a word now and then.” Still, her clinical results impressed individual pediatricians and internists.
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In Germany as in California, Kenny technicians only found opportunities to introduce the work possible in crowded city hospitals. Voluntary hospitals like Ausburg's orthopedic hospital were more resistant. Its medical staff refused to allow Curtis to train any of its nurses or to treat any patients. Her few medical allies were unable to institutionalize the work into the local health system, and by the time she left Germany no one had decided “who should employ or pay people who give the treatments.” Well aware that her work was not yet a formal part of Ausburg's health bureaucracy, Curtis worried that the work might “die out after I leave.”
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In 1953 Curtis returned to Minneapolis with a distinguished service medal she had received from the Bonn government for her work in Bavaria but little hope that her work there would leave a lasting mark.
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She became convinced that to overcome the political, institutional, social, and medical barriers in Europe, there needed to be a model Kenny Institute and Teaching Center where American doctors—“sufficiently high in professional standing to command respect”—working with Kenny technicians could demonstrate, explain, and train, thereby inspiring other medical professionals throughout Europe. The location of such an institute would have to be in a country “where it would be welcome and … [where] the people would not take it as a substitution for their own efforts, or merely tolerate it because they could get some American money free.”
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To set up this kind of institution would require a physician or politician with significant clout, vision, and energy as well as financial resources. But while Kenny had collected many enthusiastic letters from European physicians and lay allies, nobody prominent or courageous enough emerged to set up such a center. Although polio epidemics continued to ravage Western and Eastern Europe in the early 1950s,
the senior Kenny technicians left Europe and the KF retreated from the small efforts they had made at global expansion.

By 1950 the KF had become a nationally recognized philanthropy. Local KF groups joined the growing federated fundraising movement, which the NFIP continued to resist. The KF produced fundraising stamps, posters, pamphlets, and cans, all featuring a hopeful young child and the familiar figure of Kenny with her white hair. The KF Board in Minneapolis considered Kenny an inspiring figurehead, who could draw crowds and open wallets. But this figurehead did not just smile and wave; she gave fierce speeches that often left both NFIP and KF officials frustrated and defensive. She ignited antagonism between the 2 philanthropies and then added layers of disarray by pitting the national NFIP office against local and state chapters. Although Huenkens had begun to smooth ruffled feathers by establishing better relations among the KF, physicians, and the NFIP, Kenny's attacks made it hard to end the polio wars.

FIGURE 8.1
Part of the campaign brochure for the Kenny Foundation, showing the Yousuf Karsh portrait of Kenny and a blond girl with the shadow of a disabled figure on crutches behind her; Sister Kenny Foundation
You Can Help
[1950], Box 5, Elizabeth Kenny Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul.

In a confusing mixture of pride and frustration Kenny simultaneously attacked the NFIP's neglect of her work and boasted of her centers' cooperation with local and state NFIP chapters. Mixed with this was her growing attack on the organization of the KF. Thus she compared the centers in Jersey City and Buffalo, which not only offered treatment that was “pure Kenny” but provided patient care funded through full cooperation with the NFIP, to clinics in Centralia, Yakima, and Chicago, which had “failed miserably” because the KF Board had refused to let them run as autonomous centers.
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She also rejected any efforts by the Board to model the KF on the NFIP. KF chapters, she believed, should not have to send a proportion of their funds to the Minneapolis office, for the American public would become enthusiastic donors only when “the people understand that the money they contribute will be used in their own districts.” When the KF Board directors made a “fuss over self-government,” she warned one Board member, people say the Board members “are only squeaking because they could no longer share in the loot,” adding “which I know is not the case.”
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Although her speeches often angered KF officials, Kenny's imposing presence continued to be useful to ameliorate political obstacles. When the head of New York City's division of public charities tried to restrict “outdoor solicitations” by KF organizers Kenny pointed out that NFIP campaigners had used a loudspeaker at a recent football match to ask the crowd for donations and had passed around March of Dimes cans. “Mr. Sloane looked rather downcast at this statement,” she recalled.
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Kenny found it useful to point out NFIP fundraising strategies at the same time as she was denigrating the NFIP's leadership.

The struggle to expand the KF's support of patient care and technician training became caught up in domestic politics, including a renewed attention to civil rights. Until the late 1940s polio care, like most health care in America, was practiced in race-segregated institutions. Although some physicians continued to think of polio as a white disease, the growing visibility of black patients with polio led to demands for black specialists, and a wider awareness of philanthropic opportunities for black donors. The NFIP expanded its funding of the Tuskegee clinic, added funds for professional training for African American doctors and nurses, and hired an “Interracial Division” officer who traveled to black communities to organize March of Dimes events. The KF, similarly, began to pay attention to African American communities that might be sources of support for Kenny's work. As an emerging postwar civil rights movement began to target Jim Crow medicine, however, it was not clear how polio philanthropy was going to adapt.

By the late 1940s Kenny's Institute began to receive positive publicity from black newspapers like the
Pittsburgh Courier
for its “non-sectarian” training of black nurses alongside white nurses.
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Marjorie Wells, a black Kenny technician studying at the Institute, came to New York City as a featured speaker at a campaign rally for the KF's Negro Committee.
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Pruth McFarlin, a well-known disabled African American radio singer, raised money to “aid handicapped youth of all races” for the KF and was photographed beside Kenny in the
Chicago Defender
.
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In 1947 Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball and became a symbol of a new postwar world. In 1949, a few weeks after Robinson's well-publicized anticommunist testimony as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, KF officials, looking beyond the white society women in New York City who were Kenny's primary patrons, began to publicize Robinson as a KF celebrity. KF officials set up a fundraising drive to expand the Kenny clinic at the Jersey City Medical Center and named its new polio wing the Jackie Robinson Wing. Black Broadway and Hollywood stars, including Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie, performed at a downtown cafe for a Jackie Robinson Night to raise money for the new wing.
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The black press was delighted. “No greater tribute could be paid to any man than the naming of a healing ward after him,” the
Atlanta Daily World
declared, and the
New York Amsterdam News
exulted that it was “the first such honor to be bestowed upon a Negro athlete.”
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During this campaign Kenny was pictured in the
New York Amsterdam News
seated amid the Jackie Robinson Wing Committee organizers.
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This kind of philanthropic politics reflected a rising attention to black patients with polio and the hope that the KF, along with the NFIP, would be open to greater participation by African American celebrities.

Kenny may have resigned from her position as Institute director, but she did not, as Huenkens noted ruefully, “stay resigned.”
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Although she no longer spent much time in Minnesota she continued to act as if she were still in charge of the Institute. The Institute was supposed to stand as an emblem of what the Kenny treatment—properly applied by fully trained technicians—could achieve. Yet, Kenny warned the Institute's organizers, visitors noticed “procedures being carried out which are opposed to my theory” and “are not impressed with the results.”
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When students at the Institute asked her for help in December 1949, she jumped easily into her role as clinical demonstrator to show them “that they were treating the wrong area in a certain case where a deformity had materialized, and that, with a correct knowledge of the disease, it was possible to correct this deformity in a few minutes.” Some Institute patients, she discovered, had been treated for several weeks or months without any member of the staff explaining to students “the cause of the deformities and how to correct them.” In Kenny's judgment, these problems were the result of Huenkens' decision to use physical medicine specialists who were less likely to allow her technicians to use her methods without modification than were orthopedist supervisors, and she complained about this during her visit. She organized a clinical exhibition, relying on 3 of her former patients from the early 1940s, including one young woman who had had an “apparently flail leg” and an “affected” torso, but was now married with children, looked after her own household, and earned her own living. “She walks very well without the aid of artificial supports,” Kenny pointed out, and has “no bone shortening, no deformities.”
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An angry Huenkens confronted Kenny and ordered her “in a very dictatorial manner” to take back her critical remarks about physical medical specialists, warning that otherwise Miland Knapp and the other Institute physicians “would leave the premises.” Kenny refused and later talked to Knapp who did not walk out but instead arranged for her “to
meet the medical staff and give my explanation of certain difficult problems they were met with.”
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Knapp had learned to dodge confrontations with Kenny, an avoidance made easier by her frequent trips away from Minnesota. In the early 1940s he had been a prominent ally, but the rising prestige of physical medicine and his own prominence as the president of the American Congress of Physical Therapy had enabled him to ignore most local medical politics. He maintained a good working relationship with Huenkens and the KF Board and had expanded rehabilitation medicine at both the university hospital and the city hospital. Knapp had begun to articulate his discomfort with some of Kenny's theoretical claims around mental alienation and spasm as early as 1944, explaining to visitors to the Institute that his practice was “the best of Kenny mixed with the best of orthodox.”
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To try to avoid taking sides, however, he was willing to write a testimonial in 1949 stating that Kenny had “made a definite and important contribution of the field of poliomyelitis.”
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But he also began to prepare a follow-up study of patients treated under Kenny's direct supervision by her “well-trained therapists.”
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Knapp's amiable stance with Kenny personally may also have reflected his sympathy with her earlier battles and his growing recognition that she was not well and unlikely to fight back as fiercely as she once had.

Uncomfortable with the idea that medical knowledge was always unstable and tired of hearing about the need for additional research in order to confirm her ideas, Kenny began to lobby the KF for a Medical Council “consisting of the most outstanding orthopedic surgeons and neurologists in the world today.” The Council's members would have studied her work, agreed that it was “satisfactory” and “the concept correct,” and that “the confirmation of the theory abolishes the necessity for any further investigation concerning either treatment or theory.” She also advocated a new institutional policy according to which each Kenny center would be self-governing and the KF would be run by a new board of directors representing each center. This new board would put in place fair and balanced policies so that no one center could rule the others.
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