33. Cilento “Report on Sister E. Kenny’s After-Treatment,” 8–9, 12–14, 15–16; Cilento “Report on The Muscle Re-Education Clinic, Townsville,” 4–5.
34. “Infantile Paralysis: Clinic for Brisbane” Townsville Daily Bulletin May 15 1935; “Sister Kenny: Brisbane Bombshell” Townsville Daily Bulletin May 14 1935; [Cohn interview with] Sir Raphael Cilento, November 16 1955, Cohn Papers, MHS-K. On Wilhelmina G. Wright see Alexander Maverick, 79–80. Wright’s 1912 article “Muscle Training in the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis” from the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal was republished by the U.S. Public Health Service.
35. “Sister Kenny: Brisbane Bombshell” Townsville Daily Bulletin May 14 1935; “Infantile Paralysis: Clinic for Brisbane” Townsville Daily Bulletin May 15 1935.
36. Cilento “Report on Sister E. Kenny’s After-Treatment,” 8–9. This fight even reached the Lancet; see “Australia: The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis” Lancet (June 15 1935) 1: 1408–1409.
37. “ ‘I Am Nobody’s Servant’: Status of Sister Kenny’s Clinic” Brisbane Courier Mail March 2 1935; [Cohn interview with] Sir Raphael Cilento, November 16 1955, Cohn Papers, MHS-K; “ ‘My Work Will Go On In Spite Of Criticism’: Sister Kenny’s Declaration: ‘Too Important to Permit of Controversy’ ” Brisbane Telegraph March 27 1935.
38. Kenny, Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia, xxiv.
39. “Queensland Nurse’s Generous Action!,” 4.
40. Ibid.
41. “Sister Kenny’s Paralysis Method: The Statements For and Against” Australasian January 15 1938; see also Cohn Sister Kenny, 100.
42. Tom Aikens to Dear Pal [Cohn] [December 1955], Cohn Papers, MHS-K. For additional tales of conspiracy see Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 117–121.
43. G. W. Rainnie, letter to editor, North Queensland Register, April 20 1935.
44. “Sister Kenny: Brisbane Bombshell” Townsville Daily Bulletin May 14 1935; “Sister Kenny: City Council Motion” Townsville Daily Bulletin May 17 1935; see also Alexander Maverick, 68–69; Cohn Sister Kenny, 96–97, 106.
45. See Alexander Maverick, 81; “Sister Kenny Was Political Pawn in Queensland” [Sydney] Smith’s Weekly January 15 1938; On Thelander see Betty Newell and Rodney Thelander Footprints: Life and Times of Charles Thelander, 1883–1959 ([Brisbane] Queensland: Figtree Pocket, 1995).
46. “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission on Modern Methods for the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis” Medical Journal of Australia (January 29 1938) 1: 187–224; “Treatment of Infantile Paralysis By Sister Kenny’s Method: Report of Queensland Commission” British Medical Journal (February 12 1938) 1: 350; “Australia (From Our Regular Correspondent): A New (?) [sic] System of Orthopedics” JAMA (March 19 1938) 110: 910–911. The commissioners were Charles August Thelander (chair), Aeneas John McDonnell, Leslie John Jarvis Nye, John Bostock, J. Rudolph Sergius Lahz, Alexander Edgar Paterson, James Vincent Joseph Duhig, and Leslie Wylie Norman Gibson.
47. “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission,” 191, 205; “Appendix B: Review of Miss Kenny’s Text-Book by Dr. Lennox Teece, October 1 1937” in “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission,” 220, 222; see “Muscle Reeducation” [review of Kenny Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia: Methods Used for the Restoration of Function] Medical Journal of Australia (May 8 1937) 1: 713–714. As part of the Commission’s investigation Kenny had identified about a dozen disabled patients and provided a prognosis for each one, based on her assessment of how much they would improve after about a year of her treatment.
48. “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission,” 201–203, 190.
49. “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission,” 204, 222–223. The commission especially disliked the defense of Kenny’s cerebral palsy work by F. H. Mills, a young Sydney physician in the British Medical Journal a year earlier. Mills had also attacked certain orthopedic operations as likely to “increase spasticity,” a claim the commission considered “so ridiculous as to need no further comment”; F. H. Mills “Treatment of Spastic Paralysis” British Medical Journal (August 25 1937) 2: 414–417; see also F. H. Mills “Treatment of Acute Poliomyelitis: An Analysis of Sister Kenny’s Methods” British Medical Journal (January 22 1938) 1: 168–170. On a letter that Mills wrote to the Victorian minister of health in 1938 praising Kenny’s work see Alexander Maverick, 101.
50. “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission,” 213–214, 219; Cilento [Report, August 1934] quoted in “Report of the Queensland Royal Commission,” 189; see Alexander Maverick, 81, 92–98.
51. “Doctors’ Sharp ‘No:’ Find Kenny System A Failure” Sydney Sun January 5 1938; “Sister Kenny Explains Her Treatment of Paralysis” Sunday Sun and Guardian January 16 1938.
52. “Sister Kenny’s Paralysis Method: The Statements For and Against” Australasian January 15 1938.
53. On Kenny in London see Alexander Maverick, 87–92.
54. Anne Killalea The Great Scourge: The Tasmanian Infantile Paralysis Epidemic 1937–1938 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1995), 23. On the founding of the Kenny Clinic in Hobart see Killalea The Great Scourge, 11, 24; “Sister Kenny’s Paralysis Method: The Statements For and Against” Australasian January 15 1938; “Sister Kenny’s Camera Clouts For Her Critics” Melbourne Truth February 5 1938; Jean Macnamara “Elizabeth Kenny” Medical Journal of Australia (February 17 1953) 1: 85.
55. “Doctors’ Sharp ‘No:’ Find Kenny System A Failure” Sydney Sun January 5 1938; “Sister Kenny’s Trenchant Reply to Commission: Says Her Method Was Never Viewed” Melbourne Truth January 9 1938; “ ‘Would Be Humorous If It Were Not Ludicrous:’ Sister Kenny Replies to Sir Cilento” Brisbane Telegraph January 1938, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, A/31752, 1938–1940, QSA; “ ‘So Weary of Untruths’ Sister Kenny’s Denials” Melbourne Argus January 12 1938; see also Alexander Maverick, 99–102.
56. “Sister Kenny’s Camera Clouts For Her Critics” Melbourne Truth February 5 1938.
57. See Miss Ethel Dunne, letter to editor, Brisbane Telegraph January 17 1938. A sympathetic report on Kenny’s patients in the Brisbane Telegraph highlighted those who were now independent including a South African man who had moved from a wheelchair to crutches and a “spastic” girl who could now recite nursery rhymes; “Patients of Sister Kenny Tell of Their Recovery” Brisbane Telegraph January 7 1938.
58. N. Thompson “Paralysis Patient’s Story” Brisbane Courier-Mail January 16 1938.
59. “Sister Kenny Was Political Pawn in Queensland” [Sydney] Smith’s Weekly January 15 1938; see also John G. Kuhns et al. “Sixty-Seventh Report of Progress in Orthopedic Surgery” Archives of Surgery (1938) 37: 1035; “Australia (From Our Regular Correspondent),” 910–911.
60. H. A. T. Fairbanks, Macdonald Critchley, E. I. Lloyd, C. Lambrinudi, R. C. Elmslie, George M. Gray, and Henry O. West “Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia Clinic at Carshalton” British Medical Journal (October 22 1938) 1: 852–854; “Medical Practice: Report of the Committee Appointed to Observe the Kenny Method of Treatment for Paralysis at London” Medical Journal of Australia (December 31 1938) 2: 1133–1137. See also Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 141–142; Alexander Maverick, 101–102.
61. E. Kenny, letter to editor, Medical Journal of Australia (March 4 1939) 1: 368–369; Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 141–142; W. R. Forster and E. E. Price “Medical Practice: Report on an Investigation of Twenty-Three Cases of Poliomyelitis in Which the ‘Kenny System’ of Treatment Was Used” Medical Journal of Australia (February 25 1939) 1: 321–325; see also Alexander Maverick, 103–104. She reiterated these comments in a letter to Australia’s prime minister, emphasizing that “two medical men of high degree should not be passed over”; Kenny to Dear Mr. [Arthur] Fadden, May 15 1939, Series A-1928, 802/17/Section, 3, AA-ACT.
62. Elizabeth Kenny Treatment of Infantile Paralysis in the Acute Stage (Minneapolis: Bruce Publishing Company, 1941), 26, 119. She also claimed that she had told t
he Brisbane Hospital audience in 1933 that the exaggerated groove in the patient’s neck was the result of spasm; Kenny Treatment of Infantile Paralysis, 146.
63. Jean Macnamara “The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis” Medical Journal of Australia (March 8 1939) 1: 562–563. Macnamara (1899–1968) was a respected orthopedist with a private practice that emphasized polio care, and was a consultant at the physical medicine department of Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital. She had been an advisor to Victoria’s polio committee in the late 1920s and then to other state official bodies. She had spent over a year in Britain and the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation traveling scholarship (1931–1933) where she had met Agnes Hunt at the Shropshire Orthopaedic Hospital and developed new ideas for splinting and rehabilitation. Her renown as an orthopedist had led to the honor Dame of the British Empire in 1935; Ann G. Smith “Macnamara, Dame Annie Jean (1899–1968)” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 345–347; see also Desmond Zwar The Dame: The Life and Times Of Dame Jean Macnamara Medical Pioneer (Melbourne: Macmillan & Co Limited, 1984). Kenny had met Macnamara at a 1936 conference on “the crippled child” in Canberra, and been rebuked by Lady Ella Latham, a wealthy philanthropist who was the head trustee of Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, a reminder for Kenny that many elite Australians shared Brisbane specialists’ disdain for her; see Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 127–129; Alexander Maverick, 82. On Latham see Howard E. Williams From Charity to Teaching Hospital: Ella Latham’s Presidency 1933–1945, the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne (Glenroy, Vic: Book Generation, 1989).
64. W. Kent Hughes, letter to editor, Medical Journal of Australia (March 18 1939) 1: 448.
65. Cohn Sister Kenny, 93; Alexander Maverick, 83, 94, 99.
66. “Sister Kenny Explains Her Treatment of Paralysis” Sunday Sun and Guardian January 16 1938; “Sister Kenny’s Paralysis Method: The Statements For and Against” Australasian January 15 1938; see also “The Treatment of Paralysis at the Elizabeth Kenny Clinic Royal North Shore Hospital of Sydney” Medical Journal of Australia (November 13 1937) 2: 888–894.
67. Felix Arden, interview with Naomi Rogers, September 29 1992, Brisbane, Queensland; Alexander Maverick, 105–106. She told the hospital administrator that she wanted this ward painted blue in the same shade as her treatment room in the Townsville clinic; Kenny to Dear Dr. Pye, April 26 1939, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, A/31752, 1938–1940, QSA.
68. [Cohn interview with] Abe Fryberg, [1953], Cohn Papers, MHS-K; see also Arden, interview with Rogers, 1992; and Abraham Fryberg “Experiences of a Medical Administrator: Address to College of Medical Administrators, Melbourne, 29th May 1968” The Quarterly ([first published in Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators First Annual Report, May 1968] reprinted December 2007) http://racma.edu.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=104:experiences-of-a-medical-administrator&catid=8:the-quarterly-vol40-no4-december-2007&Itemid=182. Fryberg (1901–1993) had stopped his clinical practice and become a health administrator after losing his arm in a car accident in the early 1930s. He received his Graduate Diploma in Public Health from the University of Sydney in 1936, and was appointed Queensland Director-General in 1947; he retired in 1967.
69. Arden, interview with Rogers, 1992; see also Pye, interview 1980, Fryer Library; and Cohn Sister Kenny, 118. Aubrey David Dick Pye (1901–1994) was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Royal Australian College of Surgeons, and was the Brisbane Hospital director from 1932 to 1967; in the first decade he was the only physician member of the Brisbane and South Coast Hospitals Board.
70. Arden, interview with Rogers, 1992; Anthony Arden “Felix Wilfrid Arden,” Volume XI, page 25, RCP Munks Roll; http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/5130. Felix Arden (1910–2002) was the medical superintendent of the Children’s Hospital [Hospital for Sick Children in Brisbane, renamed The Royal Children’s Hospital in 1968] from 1938 to 1946 and then entered private practice.
71. J. D. Radcliff to Dear Sir [General Superintendent, Brisbane Hospital] May 15 1939, Kenny Collection, Fryer Library; Kenneth W. Starr A Report to the Minister for Health, N.S.W. on Sister Kenny’s Method of the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis (Newcastle: N. Morriss, May 1939); on Starr’s report see Alexander Maverick, 104–108.
72. Kenny to Sir [Mr. Watson, Under Secretary, Chief Secretary’s Department], February 14 1940, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1941–1949, A/31753, QSA; Kenny “Complications Due to Immobilisation in Cases of Anterior Poliomyelitis,” [1939], [enclosed in] Kenny to Dear Dr. Pye, August 18 1939, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1938–1940, A/31752, QSA; [Cohn interview with] H. J. Wilkinson, April 24 1953, Cohn Papers, MHS-K.
73. Kenny “Complications Due to Immobilisation in Cases of Anterior Poliomyelitis” [1939], [enclosed in] Kenny to Dear Dr. Pye, August 18 1939, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1938–1940, A/31752, QSA; Kenny Treatment of Infantile Paralysis, 20–26, 47–49; Kenny to Dear Dr. Pye, August 18 1939, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1938–1940, A/31752, QSA; and see Kenny to Dear Sir [Manager of Brisbane and South Coast Hospitals Board], September 19 1939, Kenny Collection, Fryer Library.
74. Herbert J. Wilkinson “Foreword” Kenny, Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia, i–xvii.
75. Kenny to Dear Sir, November 25 1938, John R. Wilson Collection, Quoiba, Tasmania (hereafter Wilson Collection).
76. Kenny to Dear Sir [Manager of Brisbane and South Coast Hospitals Board], September 19 1939, Kenny Collection, Fryer Library.
77. Cohn Sister Kenny, 119. See, for example, Sydney orthopedist Allen Fletcher who came with 2 colleagues to see her work at the Brisbane outpatient clinic and in Ward 7 and told the Brisbane Telegraph that they agreed that “of all treatment we have seen of the early stages of anterior poliomyelitis the method evolved by Sister Kenny offers greater hopes than any other”; Alan Fletcher to Dear Sister Kenny, December 18 1939, Australia 1939–1952, MHS-K; see Alexander Maverick, 110–111. Fletcher also sent a statement to the federal minister of health saying that they “were much impressed by the condition of the patients” and “that it would be nothing short of a crime if her methods are not made available to every sufferer from infantile paralysis”; Alan Fletcher to Minister for Health, December 18 1939; Series A981/1, United States 148, AA-ACT.
78. K.G. Hansson “After-Treatment of Poliomyelitis” JAMA (July 1939) 113: 32–35; Kenny to Dear Sir [Manager of Brisbane and South Coast Hospitals Board], September 19 1939, Kenny, Fryer Library; see also Alexander Maverick, 110.
79. Kenny to Sir [E. M. Hanlon], February 19 1940, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1941–1949, A/31753, QSA.
80. [Cohn interview with] Jarvis Nye, April 23 1953, Cohn Papers, MHS-K; see also Alexander Maverick, 112; E. M. Hanlon to Dear Miss Kenny, February 21 1940, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1941–1949, A/31753, QSA. Note that she had sent letters to federal and state officials pointing out both “the humane value of the work” and its potential “financial gain” for the federal and state governments; see, for example, Kenny to Sir [Mr. Watson, Under Secretary, Chief Secretary’s Department], February 14 1940, Home Secretary’s Office, Special Batches, Kenny Clinics, 1941–1949, A/31753, QSA.
81. Lee, Nye, Pye, Arden, and Fryberg To Whom It May Concern March 12, 1940; Series A981/1, United States 148, AA-ACT; Forgan Smith to Dear Sir [Basil O’Connor], March 11 1940, Series A981/1, United States 148, AA-ACT; Alan Fletcher to Minister for Health, December 18 1939; Series A981/1, United States 148, AA-ACT.
82. See, for example, Paul de Kruif Microbe Hunters (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1926); de Kruif Men Against Death (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932); de Kruif The Fight for Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938).
83. Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 207. See
also Kenny to Mrs. M. G. McCrae, January 16 1942, in Box 3, Folder 12, OM 65-17, Charles Chuter Papers, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane (hereafter Oxley-SLQ).
84. Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 209; Henry Otis Kendall and Florence P. Kendall Care During the Recovery Period in Paralytic Poliomyelitis (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1938, revised 1939, Public Health Service Bulletin No. 242). This Bulletin was cited consistently in Kenny’s 1941 textbook; Kenny Treatment of Infantile Paralysis. In 1944 Kenny claimed that Cusack had given her the pamphlet saying that “this was the accepted work of the United States of America and no institution was interested in investigating my presentation”; Kenny “My Message to the People of the United States of America,” [1944] Evidence-Reports, Box 1, MHS-K.
85. “My method introduces an entirely original conception in the treatment of poliomyelitis” that was “exactly the opposite to methods now employed”; “Australia Brings American Medicine New Method of Treating Infantile Paralysis” Los Angeles Times April 16 1940; see Cohn Sister Kenny, 126.
86. Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 209.
87. Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 210.
88. Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 210–211; see also Paul A History, 313. Rivers’ later version of refusing to meet Kenny is only slightly different; see Saul Benison Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 282–284; see also Tony Gould A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 96.
89. Richard Carter The Gentle Legions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 116–121.
90. Jessie L. Stevenson The Nursing Care of Patients with Infantile Paralysis (New York: National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, 1940).
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