Polio Wars
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268. Nicholas S. Ransohoff “Curare in the Acute Stage of Poliomyelitis: Preliminary Report” JAMA (September 8 1945) 129: 129–130; see also Ransohoff “Treatment of Acute Anterior Poliomyelitis with Curare and Intensive Physical Therapy” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (1947) 23: 661–669; J. D. Ratcliff “Poison For Polio” Colliers (September 28 1946) 118: 72, 76–77. Ransohoff, a 1919 graduate of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, was an attending surgeon at New York’s Hospital for Joint Diseases and chief orthopedic surgeon at the Monmouth Memorial Hospital in Long Branch, New Jersey; “Nicholas S. Ransohoff 1895–1951” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (1951) 33: 817. On the special myograph machine that Ransohoff built to give a visual picture of spasm see Fred J. Cook “Walks Away From Polio Deathbed” New York World-Telegram April 29 1948.
269. Scott M. Smith, letter to editor, JAMA (November3 1945) 129: 707.
270. Ratcliff “Poison for Polio,” 72, 76–77.
271. Fred J. Cook “New Polio Treatment Waits Tests” New York World-Telegram April 30 1948. See also Kenny’s comment that “It will be rather amusing, as it is today, when I see all the arguments about the better way to treat spasm and remember how I was ridiculed when I said the condition of spasm existed”; Kenny to Dear Mr. Chuter, November 9 1945, Box 3, Folder 12, OM 65-17, Chuter Papers, Oxley-SLQ.
272. Kenny [Paper May 1943], Louisiana 1943–1944, MHS-K; Kenny to Dear Mr. O’Connor, January 21 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K.
273. Arthur L. Watkins, Mary A. B. Brazier, and Robert S. Schwab “Concepts of Muscle Dysfunction in Poliomyelitis Based on Electromyographic Studies” JAMA (September 25 1943) 123: 188–192.
274. R. Plato Schwartz, Harry D. Bouman, and Wilbur K. Smith “The Significance of Muscle Spasm” JAMA (November 11 1944) 126: 695–702.
275. Kenny [Paper May 1943].
276. “Research Reveals ‘Anxiety Chemical’ ” New York Times May 28 1943; Joseph Moldaver “Physiopathologic Aspect of the Disorders of Muscles in Infantile Paralysis: Preliminary Report” JAMA (1943) 123: 74–77; “Kenny Theory Doubted” Science News Letter (September 18 1943) 44: 183; “Medicine: Polio Polemic” Time (September 27 1943) 42: 60.
277. W. B. Dublin, B. A. Bede, and B. A. Brown “Pathologic Findings in Nerve and Muscle in Poliomyelitis” American Journal of Clinical Pathology (May 1944) 14 [abstract] in “Current Medical Literature” JAMA (September 16 1944) 126: 192.
278. “Medical Professor Backs Kenny Method” [Minneapolis Star-Journal [1943], Scrapbooks, 1945 [sic]–1952, Henry Papers, MHS.
279. Kenny to W. C. Higginbotham, November 22 1943 W. C. Higginbotham, 1942–1946, MHS-K.
280. “Sister Kenny Makes Reply: Answers Criticism in AMA Article” Minneapolis Morning Star-Journal [reprinted in] The A-V (October 1943) 51: 137.
281. “Medicine: Polio Polemic,” 58.
282. W. C. Higginbotham to Dear Sir [Basil O’Connor], September 24 1943, Higginbotham File, Thomas Rivers Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
283. Nicholas S. Ransohoff “Experiences with the Kenny Treatment for Acute Poliomyelitis in the Epidemic of 1942, Monmouth and Ocean Counties, New Jersey” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (January 1944) 26: 99–102.
284. Richard Kovacs ed. The 1943 Year Book of Physical Therapy (Chicago: Year Book Publishers, 1944), 265.
285. Dr. Eliot to Dr. Van Horn Memorandum, June 2 1943, Record Group 102, Children’s Bureau, Central File, Box 102, 4-5-16-1, Infantile Paralysis, National Archives.
286. Harold S. Diehl to Dear Doctor Knapp, June 15 1943, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, 1941–1944, MHS-K; Diehl to Dear Doctor Knapp, October 12 1943, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, 1941–1944, MHS-K.
287. Diehl to Dear Sister Kenny, December 1 1943, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, 1941–1944, MHS-K; William A. O’Brien to Dear Dr. Diehl, February 9 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K; see also O’Connor to My Dear Dr. Diehl, June 21 1943, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, 1941–1944, MHS-K.
288. Diehl to Dear Sister Kenny, December 1 1943, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, 1941–1944, MHS-K; Diehl to Dear Doctor Knapp, October 12 1943.
289. Diehl “Summary.”
290. Kenny to Dear Dr. Diehl, June 21 1943.
291. In 1942 officials at the University of Minnesota had floated the idea of Kenny speaking at the university’s convocation, pointing out that “she is certainly a striking figure to see” and that “the students would be interested in her story.” Harold Diehl asked Cole and Knapp “their opinion,” and nothing came of it. Indeed Kenny was never given an honorary degree by that university. Malcolm M. Willey to Dear H. S. Diehl, Memorandum, June 2 1942, [accessed in 1992 before recent re-cataloging], Am 15.8, Folder 4, UMN-ASC; Diehl to Gentlemen [Cole and Knapp], June 4 1942, [accessed in 1992 before recent re-cataloging], Am 15.8, Folder 4, UMN-ASC.
292. Unnamed article, New York Times June 10 1943, Chuter Scrapbook, OM 65-17, Box 2, Folder 3, Chuter Papers, Oxley-SLQ.
293. Clare Dennison “Citation: Elizabeth Kenny for the Honorary Degree Doctor of Science, The University of Rochester, May 2 1943,” Folder 37, Alan Valentine Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.
294. Alan Valentine “Citation: Elizabeth Kenny for the Honorary Degree Doctor of Science, The University of Rochester, May 2 1943,” Folder 37, Alan Valentine Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester; C. Chuter to Dear Mr. Smith, November 13 1944, Box 3, Folder 12, OM 65-17, Chuter Papers, Oxley-SLQ.
295. Kenny altered her earlier prohibition of lipstick; Mary Kenny recalled that she had “teased her, and she said well, I photograph better”; [Cohn interview with] Mary and Stuart McCracken, April 14 1953, Cohn Papers, MHS-K; see also [Cohn interview with staff of Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children, Carshalton] Richard Metcalfe, August 29 1955, Cohn Papers, MHS-K.
296. Chuter to Dear Sister Kenny, June 29 1943.
297. “Sister Kenny” [Sydney] People Magazine June 20 1951, 4; [Cohn interview with] Valerie Harvey, March 19 1953, Cohn Papers, MHS-K.
298. Joe Savage to Dear Mr. Dayton, August 29 1947, Public Relations, MOD-K.
299. “Tibbett’s Son a Kenny Patient” New York Times May 6 1943; Kenny to Dear Dr. Diehl, June 21 1943. For the claim that Tibbett contributed funds to the Institute and later the Kenny Foundation see Hertzel Weinstat and Bert Wechsler Dear Rogue: A Biography of the American Baritone Lawrence Tibbett (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996), 165–169; Tibbett’s wife Jane was later involved in fundraising for the Kenny Foundation; see “Norma Heads Kenny Appeal” New York Times November 19 1945.
300. Kenny to Dear Mr. Stryker, April 7 1943, Government-Misc., 1943–1951, MHS-K; Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=jack%20delano%20kenny, accessed June 12 2013.
301. Yoder “Healer from the Outback,” 68.
302. John B. Davies “Sister Kenny Triumphs in America” Australian Women’s Weekly (March 6 1943) 10: 9.
303. Margaret Buell Wilder “Noted Nurse Gives Hope To Stricken” Los Angeles Examiner [March] 1943, Clippings, MHS-K.
304. Jean Barrett “Her 30 Years War Made Sister Kenny Belligerent” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin April 22 1943.
FURTHER READING
On the use of the media by government and philanthropic groups in the early and mid-twentieth century see Allan M. Brandt No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Georgina D. Feldberg Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Evelynn Maxine Hammonds Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Bert Hansen Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Philip D. Jordan The People’s Health: A History of Public Health in Minnesota to
1948 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1953); James T. Patterson The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Suzanne Poirier Chicago’s War on Syphilis, 1937–1940: The Times, the “Trib,” and the Clap Doctor (with an Epilogue on Issues and Attitudes in the Time of AIDS) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Richard H. Shryock National Tuberculosis Association, 1904–1954: A Study of the Voluntary Health Movement in the United States (New York: National Tuberculosis Association, 1957); John W. Ward and Christopher Warren eds. Silent Victories. The History and Practice of Public Health in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jacqueline H. Wolf Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001).
On the history of therapeutic change see Erwin H. Ackerknecht Therapeutics from the Primitives to the 20th century (New York: Hafner Press, 1973); Sydney A. Halpern Lesser Harms: The Morality of Risk in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Harry M. Marks The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg eds. The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); John Harley Warner The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge and Identity in America, 1820–1885, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Of the history of drugs see Robert Bud Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jeremy A. Greene Prescribing By Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); John E. Lesch The First Miracle Drugs: How the Sulfa Drugs Transformed Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Siegel Watkins and Andrea Tone eds. Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
PART TWO
4
Polio and Disability Politics
WORLD WAR II invigorated the politics of disability in the United States. As able-bodied workers joined the armed services, groups such as the Disabled Persons Association of America exhorted employers to hired disabled workers. The term “crippled”—still used in charity campaigns—was replaced by “handicapped” with its implications of a dynamic, although inferior, relationship with the able-bodied world. Empowering disability-rights terms such as “crip” were far in the future, but disabled adults began to claim the rights of able-bodied adults and to resist infantilizing medical care, especially in rehabilitative institutions. In April 1943 newspaper reports that the wife of wealthy polio survivor Fred Snite, Jr. was pregnant with the couple’s second child made concrete the idea that survivors—even men in iron lungs—were sexually potent.1 A survey of 45 factories by the National Association of Manufacturers a few months earlier found that 35 had hired “physically handicapped workers” including those who were blind, deaf, or disabled by polio or by the loss of a limb or an eye. Here performing a patriotic duty was mixed with the display of the disabled in a way to humiliate other workers into being more productive. Thirteen blind aircraft workers were called “pace-setters” by their employers, as “without exception, they have stimulated the sighted people around them to increased production.” Similarly, the manager of a New England machine tool factory praised 15 “deaf mutes” who were “among our most able and respected employe[e]s.”2
The link between polio and the war was made tangible by stories of young men who had “overcome” polio and joined the armed forces, the ultimate sign of manly citizenship and therapeutic success.3 The February 1944 issue of True Comics—where “Truth is stranger and a thousand times more thrilling than FICTION”—had a 4-page spread on the “Fight Against Infantile Paralysis” in which a young man overcomes the disabling effects of polio to become a member of the United States Army.4 The story begins as fellow soldiers tell Philip Hawco “we can’t believe you’ve ever had infantile paralysis! Why you’re just like us!” “A few years ago,” Hawco explains, “I could hardly move. I sat in a chair all day reading books.” Avoiding controversy, the comic does not mention Hawco’s specific therapy in the “special hospital” where he is treated, but his therapy is successful enough for him to be able to return “to school and play games.” Another soldier says “Gosh, Phil, I thought infantile was hopeless!” “Things have changed since the 1916 epidemic [when] … there was no central agency to which the people could turn for aid,” the narrator explains. On the third page Basil O’Connor appears, a man who “serves without pay, giving willingly of his time and his keen intellect to guide the crusade.” The following panel (11 out of 18) shows Kenny, her hands around the knee of a patient, being watched by a doctor and a nurse. Reflecting the popular link between the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) and Kenny, the narrator says: “The Foundation sponsors unending research work and new experimental methods. In 1940 it introduced the Australian nurse Sister Kenny, and her revolutionary treatment into the United States.” On the last page one panel shows a pie chart divided in half, indicating the division of NFIP funds: help for patients and providers in local communities and “special grants” to “scientists seeking the cause, prevention and cure of infantile paralysis.” The story concludes with a quote from Franklin Roosevelt as able-bodied children run over grassy hills: “While we fight the global war we must see to it that the health of our children is preserved and protected [and] … help them win their victory over disease today.”5 Here the global war abroad is on par with the war on polio at home.
Not until near the end of the war, when disabled veterans became a political force, were government-funded rehabilitative services expanded as alternatives to charity “homes” and orthopedic hospitals. Ironically, the infrastructure created by New Deal programs made access to services even more difficult. As one polio survivor noted bitterly, the new “churches, libraries, colleges, post offices, courthouses, city and state federal buildings [and] … railway stations” funded by the Works Progress Administration and built in the neoclassical style, had flights of steps and stairways “which are either impossible or very difficult for people of faulty locomotion.” “I used to dream that when I grew up I’d make a lot of money … and put stout hand railings on all the steps in the world,” she declared. A magazine writer and not a millionaire, she could not see any “single good reason” why these buildings should not have ramps and railings.6
Despite a growing emphasis on older polio sufferers, the problem of “crippled children” remained prominent in public and philanthropic policy. New Deal funding for children with disabilities codified in Section V of the 1935 Social Security Act had been one of the least controversial parts of Roosevelt’s expansion of government services. The Act had expanded the federal Children’s Bureau and provided funds to welfare and public health divisions of state governments to survey the numbers of disabled children and the facilities for them, and then to expand those services.7
The harsh edge of living with a disability in the 1930s and 1940s was heightened by a widespread acceptance of eugenics. Americans who discriminated against the disabled made no distinction between people born with a disability and those who had become disabled through injury or illness. Mothers, fathers, doctors, and physical therapists knew—in ways disabled children slowly recognized—that physical disability was associated with the eugenically unfit who were placed outside the possibilities of a future with love, fulfillment, and economic independence. Not only were disabled children and adults stereotyped as “defective,” but many lived in family homes dependent on the physical assistance of their relatives. Speaking from bitter experience, a nurse whose legs were paralyzed by polio appealed to all family members who agreed to help the disabled to try not to approach this task as a “grim duty.”8 The despair of the physically disabled was often hidden but well understood. When
one physician who worked at the Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati developed polio and was put in an iron lung he begged his fellow residents to kill him with morphine because he was convinced that if he survived he would have a “tortuous” future.9
Indeed, the disabling consequences of polio were frequently raised to explain why public funds and attention should be directed to polio rather than other diseases with high mortality but not “the grim wreckage it [polio] leaves behind.”10 In a Washington Post column soaked in pity, Mal Stevens, a physician and college football coach, reminded readers not to forget to “help the boy who keeps the score.” His image of this boy was the opposite of a happy, athletic American boy: “sports develops grace and stamina and strength—This disease destroys those very things.”11 Similarly, a March of Dimes radio spot asked “Have you been grumbling because you have to walk more, ride less, these days? Then think for a moment of those who cannot even walk … the children crippled by infantile paralysis.”12
KENNY AND DISABILITY
Rehabilitation in the 1940s was based on 2 assumptions, one old and one new. The first was that survivors must embrace the work ethic as hard work (like exercising muscles) inevitably brought results (with the concomitant idea that lack of improvement was the patient’s own fault for he or she had been lazy and not worked hard enough). The second was the idea of psychological adjustment. Rehabilitation was intended to “normalize” people with disabilities to accommodate them to society. Disabled people were expected to develop especially strong egos to cope with the prejudice and discrimination they would experience in the world outside the hospital. Such “therapy” was predicated on personal transformation, not on social, cultural, or political change.