Naomi Rogers - Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine

SISTER ELIZABETH KENNY AND THE GOLDEN
AGE OF AMERICAN MEDICINE

Naomi Rogers

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Oxford University Press 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rogers, Naomi, 1958
Polio wars: Sister Elizabeth Kenny and the golden age of American medicine/Naomi Rogers.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 9780195380590 (hardback: alk. paper)ISBN 9780199701469 (updf ebook)
ISBN 9780199334131 (epub ebook)
I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Kenny, Elizabeth, 18861952. 2. NursesAustraliaBiography.
3. PoliomyelitishistoryAustralia. WZ 100]
RA644.P9
614.549dc23 2013011373

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For Nat, Dory,and JH

STANDING ON MY bookshelf is a coin container in an outrageous bright orange that was popular in the 1940s. Under white letters urging me to Sock Polio are 3 figures: a toddler in a loin cloth standing awkwardly but steadily; singer Bing Crosby, with a pipe and a jaunty hat; and a white-haired woman in a black dress and pearls, her hands reaching up toward the child with a look of intense pride. Please Give to the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation, the container pleads. Crosby was the national chairman of the foundations 1945 appeal, but who was Sister Kenny? When this can was passed down the aisle at movie theaters, no one in America needed to ask. She was so familiar and iconic a figure that Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys declared that she would not testify against a friend, not if they can prove he doped Sister Kenny.

Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse, came to the United States in 1940 to seek medical approval for her new methods of treating patients paralyzed by polio. (Sister was a British designation for senior nurse, not a religious title.) Despite the skepticism and even hostility of American physicians, she succeeded. With the sometimes grudging support of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), a polio philanthropy committed to funding patient care, research, and professional training, her methods were made standard polio care by the mid-1940s. Kenny became one of the most prominent women of her era: the subject of a Hollywood movie Sister Kenny (RKO 1946) starring Rosalind Russell; an expert witness at Congressional hearings on the founding of the National Science Foundation; and in 1952, not long before her death, chosen in a Gallup poll as Americas most admired woman, outranking former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Yet by the mid-1950s she was almost forgotten. Crosbys 1953 autobiography Call Me Lucky never mentioned her.

This book tells the story of Sister Kenny and the Kenny method. Kennys battles with American medical professionals illuminate the medical politics that lay at the heart of American medicine, even during its Golden Age. After her struggles with government bureaucrats and medical professionals in Australia Kenny was neither shocked nor fazed by the need to pull strings and gain influential allies in order to alter clinical care in the United States. Polio was a high-profile disease, and responsibility for its prevention and treatment rested on diverse authorities: local and state health officials and the U.S. Public Health Service; individual physicians, nurses, and physical therapists; civic and charity groups that ran hospitals and crippled childrens homes, did surveys, and set up services for families with disabled members; and the NFIP, which supported its activities through an annual national fundraising campaign known as the March of Dimes and numerous regional campaigns organized by its local and state chapters. Kennys heated battles with the NFIP and organized medicine captured the public imagination. Standing outside the elite scientific community, she sought to gain its respect through clinical and laboratory confirmation of her theories of polio. Simultaneously, however, she resented being held to standards of scientific rigor that she suspected were imposed more strictly on her because she was a woman and a nurse and because she dared to question the expertise of male orthopedic surgeons.

This book also focuses on the limber, healthy child patient featured on the 1945 container. Here is a dramatic, if sentimentalized, depiction of the results of a special kind of clinical care, yet the container does not show any doctor, hospital bed, syringe, or other symbol of medical science. For the American public the most powerful omission may have been the familiar picture of a polio patient: the crying child in a hospital bed with arms or legs in plaster casts; the fearful child waiting for an orthopedic operation; or the recovered child discharged with crutches or braces, all images typical in March of Dimes campaigns. On this Sock Polio container, health has been achieved in another way, through compassion and care based on a distinctive understanding of the body shared by Kenny and her staff but not by other professionals.

In an era when nurses were seen as the recipients of medical science rather than its designers, Kenny knew that her claims to a new understanding of polio were controversial before their content was even known. At first she presented herself as a supplicant to scientists, seeking their assistance to explain the meaning of the new symptoms she had identified and the reasons her methods worked. Her 1941 textbook had the temperate title