Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  83. Robert V. Funsten “The Influence of the Sister Kenny Publicity on the Treatment of Poliomyelitis” Virginia Medical Monthly (October 1945) 72: 404. His speech was given in 1944 and published the following year.

  84. Elizabeth Kenny to Ladies and Gentlemen, [July 1944].

  85. [Mary Lou Drosten] A Layman’s Report, “Evaluation of the Kenny Treatment for Poliomyelitis” [July 1944], Ray of Light Letters, 1944, MHS-K.

  86. Whyte Participant Observer, 132–133.

  87. Richard Kovacs in “Discussion of Papers by Drs. John A. Toomey, Jessie Wright and Miland E. Knapp” Archives of Physical Therapy (November 1942) 23: 674.

  88. Ethel Calhoun “A Report On The Use of The Sister Kenny Concept and Method of Treatment for Poliomyelitis Patients at Oakland County Contagious Hospital, 1944–1949” [1949], Minnesota-Hospitals, 1944–1961, Sister Kenny Institute, Walter H. Judd Papers, MHS. See also Edward L. Compere “Modern Concepts of Infantile Paralysis” Archives of Physical Therapy (November 1942) 23: 677; Dorothy I. Ditchfield and Ethel M. Hyndman “The Nursing Procedure” Canadian Public Health Journal (June 1942) 33: 284.

  89. Plastridge “Report,” 9.

  90. Ray K. Gullickson in Sass with Gottfried and Sorem eds. Polio’s Legacy, 44–45.

  91. Pohl and Kenny, The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis, 152.

  92. “Nurse’s Paralysis Therapy Endorsed” Los Angeles Times May 7 1942.

  93. Gullickson in Sass with Gottfried and Sorem eds. Polio’s Legacy, 44.

  94. See the assumption that a patient must be motivated and able to understand the goals of therapy; “Recovery is slow and difficult in the patient who does not understand what is wanted, in the lazy person and in the spoiled, pampered child”; John A. Toomey “Observations on the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis in the Acute Stage” Canadian Medical Association Journal (January 1946) 54: 1–6.

  95. Clemson Griggs to Dear Sister Kenny, September 1 1951, Personal Correspondence and Related Papers, 1942–1951, MHS-K. J. Philip Kistler, a child from California, was another Institute patient who was also taken to a big auditorium “where she would demonstrate”; J. Philip Kistler, quoted in Silver and Wilson Polio Voices, 43–44.

  96. Plastridge “Report,” 7.

  97. Lois Maddox Miller “Sister Kenny Wins Her Fight” Reader’s Digest (1942) 41: 27–28; see also Irene F. Shea, “Notes on Kenny Method of Hot Foments Taken at the University of Minnesota, September 28 to October 4, 1942,” Sydenham Hospital Collection, MS C 243, Box 82, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine. My thanks to Janet Golden for showing me this source. See also Janet Golden and Naomi Rogers “Nurse Shea Studies the ‘Kenny Method’ of Treatment of Infantile Paralysis, 1942–1943” Nursing History Review (2010) 18: 189–203.

  98. Charles C. Zacharie to My Dear Dr. Stimson, January 11 1943, Box 2, Folder 4, Correspondence re Medical Talks, Philip Stimson Papers, Medical Center Archives, New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, New York.

  99. Philip Stimson to Dear Dr. Zacharie, January 12 1943, Box 2, Folder 4, Correspondence re Medical Talks, Stimson Papers.

  100. Deacon “The Treatment of Poliomyelitis in the Acute Stage,” 278–281; “New Infantile Paralysis Treatment Gets Approval” Science News Letter (December 13 1941) 40: 371.

  101. Yoder “Healer from the Outback,” 70.

  102. Gullickson in Sass with Gottfried and Sorem eds. Polio’s Legacy, 47.

  103. Toinette Balkema to Dear Sister Kenny, November 10 1942, Technicians—Misc., undated and 1941–1949, MHS-K.

  104. Charles Bohnengel “An Evaluation of Psychobiologic Factors in the Re-Education Phase of the Kenny Treatment for Infantile Paralysis” Psychosomatic Medicine (1944) 6: 83–86.

  105. Richard H. Todd to Dear Sister, January 8 1945, District of Columbia-Misc., 1944–1946, MHS-K; Rita Fitzpatrick “Polio Stricken Nurse to Get Aid Of Sister Kenny” Washington Times-Herald January 31 1945.

  106. Fitzpatrick “Polio Stricken Nurse to Get Aid Of Sister Kenny.”

  107. William G. Holman to Dear Sister Kenny, March 23 1945, Case Files-Misc.: A-K, 1943–1946, MHS-K.

  108. Mrs. W. G. Holman to Dear Sister Kenny, [1945], Case Files-Misc.: A-K, 1943–1946, MHS-K.

  109. In Krusen’s 1941 text he warned that polio patients usually within 2 years of fixed deformities must be relieved by an operation such as arthrodesis or tendon transplantation; Frank H. Krusen Physical Medicine: The Employment of Physical Agents for Diagnosis and Therapy (Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders, 1941), 595.

  110. Kenny “Preface” in Pohl and Kenny The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis, 23. Typically, operations were tendon lengthening, ankle fusion, bone stapling, and muscle transplantation.

  111. Mr. and Mrs. Louis Renel, August 7 1944, Case Files-Misc. I-Z, 1943–1946, MHS-K.

  112. Pohl and Kenny, The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis, 314.

  113. Howard W. Blakeslee [June 1944], Public Relations, MOD-K.

  114. Plastridge “Report,” 6–7.

  115. Kendall and Kendall, “Our Notes.”

  116. Henry O. Kendall, Florence P. Kendall and George E. Bennett “Normal Flexibility According to Age Groups” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (1948) 30: 690–694.

  117. Toomey “Observations on the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis,” 5.

  118. H. Relton McCarroll [Report] in “Reports on Meeting of Committee to Investigate the Kenny Method of Treatment, Sunday and Monday, November 22 and 23, 1942, Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Dr. R. K. Ghormley, 1943, MHS-K.

  119. J. Albert Key [Report] in “Reports on Meeting of Committee to Investigate the Kenny Method of Treatment, Sunday and Monday, November 22 and 23, 1942, Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Dr. R. K. Ghormley, 1943, MHS-K.

  120. Kenny to Dear Dr. Ghormley, [March 5 1943], Dr. R. K. Ghormley, 1943, MHS-K.

  121. Wilson Living with Polio, 77 [quoting Knapp (1953) Journal of Iowa State Medical Society].

  122. Lawrence Interrupted Melody, 185, 189.

  123. Toomey “Observations on the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis,” 5.

  124. Margaret Buell Wilder “Noted Nurse Gives Hope To Stricken” Los Angeles Examiner [March] 1943, Clippings, Box 5, MHS-K. For an example of Kenny as a model for some disabled veterans, see disabled servicemen gathered around Kenny when she came to a party at the Evalyn Walsh McLean’s Friendship House in Washington, D.C., waiting their turn for an autograph; “Disabled Vets Meet Famed Sister Kenny” Washington Times-Herald May 7 1945.

  125. “Sister Kenny Tests Paralysis Methods” New York Times November 13 1943.

  126. Clara Hulberg [White Earth, North Dakota] to Dear Miss Kenny, April 13 1943, Board of Directors, MHS-K.

  127. [Drosten] A Layman’s Report “Evaluation of the Kenny Treatment.”

  128. Ruby M. Green [Orthopaedic Hospital, Los Angeles] to Dear Sister Kenny, [October 1943], Los Angeles- Misc., 1942–1951, MHS-K.

  129. Wilson Living with Polio. For other examples of cruel nursing care see Judith Leavitt “ ‘Strange Young Women on Errands’: Obstetric Nursing Between Two Worlds” Nursing History Review (1998) 6: 3–24; and Julie Fairman “Not All Nurses Are Good, Not All Doctors Are Bad …” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Summer 2004) 78: 451–460. For other examples of sadistic health professionals see Beatrice Yvonne Nau and Ted Kellogg, quoted in Silver and Wilson Polio Voices, 46–47; see also Hugh Gregory Gallagher Black Bird Fly Away: Disabled in an Able-bodied World (Arlington: Vandamere Press, 1998) who recalled his experience in Bryn Mawr Hospital in 1952 and “the cruel, vicious, and inhumane manner” in which one of his physical therapists weaned him from the iron lung and stretched his muscles; she was “the only true sadist I have ever known,” 43–44.

  130. K. G. Hansson in “Discussion of Papers by Drs. John A. Toomey, Jessie Wright and Miland E. Knapp” Archives of Physical Therapy (November 1942) 23: 675.

  131. Bohnengel “An Evaluation of Psychobiologic Factors” 83–86; “Sister Kenny” London Illustrate
d [reprinted in] Hospital Magazine [Australia] (June 1943) 17, Wilson Collection.

  132. Sylvia M. Barker quoted in Silver and Wilson Polio Voices, 29.

  133. Milton H. Berry to My Dear Mr. President, January 22 1939, FDR-OF-1930, Infantile Paralysis 1934–1942, Box 1, FDR Papers.

  134. Richard Kovacs “Progress in Physical Medicine During the Past Twenty-Five Years” Archives of Physical Medicine (August 1946) 27: 473.

  135. Guy A. Caldwell “The Postwar Challenge to Orthopedic Surgery” JAMA (September 30 1944) 126: 270.

  136. Edward J. Doherty The Saint of Paralytics (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Press, 1925, 2nd. ed.), 25–33.

  137. A New Life: The Milton H. Berry School for Paralysis and Spastic Correction, Encino, California (n.p., [c.1937]) [pamphlet enclosed in] Mrs. Nevada Gates [Baldwin Park, California] to FDR, February 8 1945, FDR-OF-1930, Box 2 (Infantile Paralysis 1943), Infantile Paralysis 1943–1945, FDR Papers [1-2, 6]; Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 7–10. For a brief discussion of Berry’s work see Tony Gould A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 95.

  138. [Advertisement] “Constipation: Banished Without Drugs, Diet or Exercise” Los Angeles Times July 10 1921; [Advertisement] “A School for Paralysis and Spastic Correction: Milton H. Berry School, Encino, California” Los Angeles Times January 2 1940; A New Life [2]; Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 7–10.

  139. A New Life [3–4]; Milton H. Berry A Challenge on Behalf of Crippled Children to the Universities of America: Victims of Infantile Paralysis Need Not Hospitals … But Muscle Training/Not Doctors.… But Trained Teachers (Milton H. Berry Foundation, [1939]) [enclosed in] Milton H. Berry to My Dear Mr. President, January 22 1939, FDR-OF-1930, Infantile Paralysis 1934–1942, Box 1, FDR Papers; A New Life [2].

  140. Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 15, 34; A New Life [3, 5].

  141. Berry A Challenge on Behalf of Crippled Children; A New Life [2]; Berry to Doherty, October 19 1925, [letter reprinted in] Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 148.

  142. Berry to My Dear Mr. President, January 22 1939; O’Connor to My Dear Mr. President, June 27 1939, FDR-OF-1930, Infantile Paralysis 1934–1942, Box 1, FDR Papers.

  143. Berry to My Dear Mr. President, January 22 1939; Berry A Challenge on Behalf of Crippled Children.

  144. Berry A Challenge on Behalf of Crippled Children. His son Milton Jr. was supposedly studying medicine at the University of California; Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 10; Berry to Doherty, October 19 1925, letter reprinted in Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 146.

  145. Berry to My Dear Mr. President, January 22 1939; Berry A Challenge on Behalf of Crippled Children.

  146. Doherty The Saint of Paralytics, 98–99; Berry to My Dear Mr. President, January 22 1939.

  147. Rosemonde Rae Wright “A Great Humanitarian,” letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times December 12 1939.

  148. “Milton Berry Jr.” New York Times April 13 1954; Milton H. Berry and G. Stanley Gordon to Dear Sister Kenny, March 30 1944, Los Angeles-Misc., 1942–1951, MHS-K.

  149. Berry and Gordon to Dear Sister Kenny, March 30 1944.

  150. Peter Cusack to Basil O’Connor [telegram], June 15 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K.

  151. Margaret Stedman “There Are No Cripples in Wartime” Hygeia (October 1944) 22: 750–755.

  152. David Serlin Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 28–39; David Gerber “Anger and Affability: The Rise and Representation of a Repertory of Self-Presentation Skills in a World War II Disabled Veteran” Journal of Social History (Fall 1993) 27: 5–27.

  153. “Disabilities: Infantile Paralysis” Lancet (July 24 1948) 252: 155–157.

  154. Editorial “Physical Therapy and the Problem of Rehabilitation” Archives of Physical Therapy (May 1943) 24: 299–300.

  155. Howard A. Rusk “Convalescence and Rehabilitation” in Morris Fishbein ed. Doctors at War (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1945), 303–318.

  156. “Toymakers” National Foundation News (May 1945) 4: 25, 28.

  157. Howard A. Rusk and Eugene J. Taylor New Hope for the Handicapped: The Rehabilitation of the Disabled from Bed to Job (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946, 1949), 220. Howard A. Rusk (1937–1991), a member of the Army Air Force Corps, was chief of medical services at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri where he developed a convalescent training program that became a model program for the entire Army Air Force Corps. After the war he opened a medical practice with emphasis on rehabilitation in St. Louis, and then moved to New York City where he worked at Bellevue and Goldwater Hospitals to rehabilitate civilians, and directed the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation of New York University and in 1950 the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at Bellevue Medical Center.

  158. William Dock “The Evil Sequelae of Complete Bed Rest” JAMA (August 19 1944) 125: 1083–1085; [abstract] John H. Powers “The Abuse of Rest as Therapeutic Measure in Surgery: Early Postoperative Activity and Rehabilitation” JAMA (August 19 1944) 125 in Physiotherapy Review (1944) 24: 217; Bernhard Newburger “Early Postoperative Walking: Collective Review” Recent Advances in Surgery (July 1943) 14: 142–154.

  159. “On Bed: Abuse of Rest” Time (September 11 1944) 44: 90; “Use and Abuse of Bed Rest” New York State Journal of Medicine (April 1 1944) 44: 724–730; Dock “The Evil Sequelae of Complete Bed Rest,” 1083–1085.

  160. K. G. Hansson “Physical Therapy in Wartime” New England Journal of Medicine (November 2 1944) 231: 619–620.

  161. “Infantile Paralysis [1847–1947]” Hygeia (June 1947) 25: 439.

  162. “The Disabled Can Be Independent” Trained Nurse and Hospital Review (August 1945) 115: 110–111.

  163. Fred J. Cook “Lead Belt Helps Polio Victim Walk” New York World-Telegram April 28 1948.

  164. Joseph G. Molner “The Kenny Method” [paper presented at] Post-Graduate Course in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Texas, Medical Branch, Galveston, March 7 1946, Public Relations, MOD-K.

  165. C. E. Irwin “A Brief Resume of the Kenny Method of Treating Infantile Paralysis” [1947], European Trip 1947, MHS-K.

  FURTHER READING

  On disability history and politics in early to mid-twentieth-century U.S. see Emily K. Abel Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin 1850—1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Edward D. Berkowitz Disability Policy: America’s Programs for the Handicapped (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Edward D. Berkowitz Rehabilitation: The Federal Government’s Response to Disability, 1935–1954 (New York: Arno Press, 1980); Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum eds. ‘Defects:’ Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); David Gerber “Anger and Affability: The Rise and Representation of a Repertory of Self-Presentation Skills in a World War II Disabled Veteran” Journal of Social History (1993) 27: 5–27; Glenn Gritzer and Arnold Arluke The Making of Rehabilitation: The Political Economy of Medical Specialization, 1890–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Wendy Kline Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Seth Koven “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain” American Historical Review (1994) 99: 1167–1202; Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History” Journal of American History (2000) 87: 888–922; Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky eds. New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder eds. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Kim E. Nielsen The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Ruth O’Brien Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (Chica
go: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); David Serlin Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 28–39; Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (New York: Cassell, 1996); Joseph Shapiro No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993); Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Enns eds. Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (Lanthan: University Press of American, 2001); Barbara Waxman and Anne Finger “The Politics of Sex and Disability” Disability Studies Quarterly (1989) 9: 1–5; Frieda Zames and Doris Zames Fleischer eds. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

  On experiences of polio, including at Warm Springs, see Richard L. Bruno The Polio Paradox: Understanding and Treating ‘Post-Polio Syndrome’ and Chronic Fatigue (New York: Warner Books, 2002); Lynne M. Dunphy “ ‘The Steel Cocoon:’ Tales of the Nurses and Patients of the Iron Lung, 1929–1955” Nursing History Review (2001) 9: 3–34; Amy L. Fairchild “The Polio Narratives: Dialogues with FDR” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2001) 75: 488–534; Hugh G. Gallagher, Black Bird Fly Away: Disabled in an Able-Bodied World (Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1998); Hugh Gregory Gallagher FDR’s Splendid Deception (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985); Tony Gould A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Robert F. Hall Through the Storm: A Polio Story (St. Cloud, Minnesota: North Star Press, 1990); Daniel Holland “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Shangri-La: Foreshadowing the Independent Living Movement in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1926–1945” Disability & Society (2006) 21: 513–535;Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003); Leonard Kriegel Flying Solo: Reimagining Manhood, Courage, and Loss (Landham, NY: Ballantine: 1998); Theo Lippman, Jr. The Squire of Warm Springs: F.D.R. in Georgia 1924–1945 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1977); Janice Flood Nichols Twin Voices: A Memoir of Polio, the Forgotten Killer (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2007); Naomi Rogers “Polio Chronicles: Warm Springs and Disability Politics in the 1930s” Asclepio: Revista de Historia de la Medicine y de la Ciencia (2009) 61: 143–174; Naomi Rogers “Silence Has Its Own Stories: Elizabeth Kenny, Polio and the Culture of Medicine” Social History of Medicine (2008) 21: 145–161; Edmund J. Sass with George Gottfried and Anthony Sorem eds. Polio’s Legacy: An Oral History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996); Marc Shell Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Susan Shreve Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Julie Silver and Daniel Wilson Polio Voices: An Oral History from the American Polio Epidemics and Worldwide Eradication Efforts (New York: Praeger, 2007); Turnley Walker Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1953); William Foote Whyte Participant Observer: An Autobiography (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1994); Daniel J. Wilson “Braces, Wheelchairs, and Iron Lungs: The Paralyzed Body and the Machinery of Rehabilitation in the Polio Epidemics” Journal of Medical Humanities (Fall 2005) 26: 173–190; Daniel J. Wilson Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Regina Woods Tales from Inside the Iron Lung (and How I Got Out of It) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Heather Green Wooten The Polio Years in Texas: Battling a Terrifying Unknown (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009).