Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  Questions about Kenny’s nursing qualifications, the screenwriters recognized, were also being raised and, unusual for a nurse’s autobiography, And They Shall Walk had said little about her training.78 The writers sought to resolve this issue unambiguously. The film opened with Kenny arriving home in her new nurse’s cap and cape after graduating from an unnamed school. She continues to wear a version of a white nurse’s uniform, when she is an army nurse and then in her practice afterward. To reinforce the idea that officials regarded her as a reputable professional, the film also suggests that Kenny was supported and sanctioned by the government. Kenny is shown receiving a letter from members of the London City Council who “want you in England,” and later has a request from the Australian government that sends a government plane.

  But the film writers did not want to portray Kenny as too professional. Early- and mid-twentieth century nursing leaders promoted nursing to the public as an altruistic vocation rather than a career offering professional satisfaction. Thus, her physician-mentor tells her “you’re a born nurse” and is frustrated when she turns down his offer of a hospital position to work as a bush nurse. In the film local rural families give her a black horse in gratitude for her 3 years of work with them because “you won’t take a penny for what you’ve done.”

  A Hollywood nurse was usually a clever supportive assistant whose innocent insight aids the more brilliant male scientist or doctor. The most successful part of the screenwriters’ efforts to balance Kenny as a nurse and humane crusader were showing her in relation to dismissive physicians. She never strays far from the path of the good nurse, is soft-spoken with patients, and defiant but not disrespectful with doctors. When she is faced with her first patient with polio, for example, her professionalism is shown by her ability to ignore the girl’s constant crying and not do anything until she hears back from her physician-mentor by telegram. As she develops her own theory of polio and begins presenting it to disbelieving doctors, she is sometimes clearly frustrated by their rudeness, but she is never openly angry.

  Unlike Kenny’s experience in Australia and America the film showed no adult patients or male therapists. The gender relations in the film are stark: all the nurses and technicians are women, all the doctors are men, and all the patients are children. During the 1930s a few films (The White Angel, Warner Brothers, 1936 and Nurse Edith Cavell, RKO, 1939) had gone beyond the “nurse-handmaiden” approach, but not many. During the war, stoic and courageous nurses were becoming familiar characters, central to movies such as Cry ‘Havoc’ (MGM, 1943) and So Proudly We Hail (Paramount, 1943). Perhaps these movies and the recent success of MGM’s Madame Curie (1943) explained RKO’s willingness to stretch the conventions of commercial film storytelling and allow Kenny to be portrayed both as a healing nurse and a scientific innovator, challenging physicians to accept her concept of the disease. Both movies ended with a cautious feminist message: women scientists can achieve great things, but at a great cost.79

  And then the screen writers had to deal with the question of how to depict the medical establishment. Gunzburg had at first wanted to dramatize an episode from Kenny’s autobiography in which a medical antagonist steals her manuscript and tries to publish it under his own name. To balance this picture of a bad doctor, Gunzburg was willing to portray Kenny as angry, explaining to McCarthy: “in justice to the medical profession, as well as to the humanization of Kenny, we have established that her temper was responsible for some of the misunderstandings and prejudices against her.”80 But the plagiarist did not appear in the film and neither did the anger.

  In the film the dichotomy between medical right and wrong is exemplified by the 2 central male physicians. Aeneas McDonnell, Kenny’s mentor and the “good” doctor, is the rural general practitioner and a man of the people. He has an old-fashioned unpretentious office, the final script suggested, unlike his medical opponent’s office that “is large and very modern, full of scientific paraphernalia and new books.”81 In the words of one reviewer, he “speaks with a fine, thick Scotch burr and looks on Miss Russell as the greatest thing in medicine since Pasteur.”82 The “bad” doctor and Kenny’s main antagonist is contemptuous Brisbane orthopedic specialist Dr. Brack. He is presented as elitist, rational, and inflexible. In the film’s most memorable scene, based on an episode in Kenny’s autobiography, Kenny confronts Brack while he is lecturing on the virtues of splinting to a group of nurses and doctors seated in a Brisbane hospital amphitheater. Kenny, simmering with frustration, interrupts him, asking why he refuses to meet with her and why he has colluded with the city health authorities to close her clinic. Brack invites her to speak to his audience. Although he tells Kenny that “as open-minded men of science we do not reject ideas without examination,” he dismisses her, saying her words “are not scientific terms.” Kenny replies that “the words I use describe the things I see.” When Brack asks her why doctors do not see them, she says “because you’ve got a book in front of your eyes” and turns to Brack’s audience to remind them that “medical ideas change: your fathers bled their patients.” Throughout the scene a patient lies at the center, fully encased in splints, and when Brack warns Kenny not to debate “in front of the patient,” Kenny retorts “it’s his life, not yours or mine.”

  In another scene, the 2 doctors debate Kenny’s work by arguing about the evidence of books versus bodies. “Are we to take her word or Sir Robert Jenkins?” Brack asks McDonnell, who retorts “you only recognize a fact when it’s printed in a book.” Brack berates McDonnell for encouraging “a nurse to contradict the greatest medical authorities in the world.” McDonnell replies “If she’d been a doctor, she’d have followed the orthodox treatment. She wouldn’t have done the things she did, she wouldn’t have dared.” In the final script Gunzburg suggested that Brack ask McDonnell “do you often get these mad ideas about fake cures brought in by untrained people?”83 But in the film Brack does not say that Kenny is “untrained.” In one of the film’s few references to Kenny’s claim that she had identified a new disease, Brack comments: “If her ideas were correct she’d have discovered not a new treatment, but an entirely new disease.” McDonnell replies, “Well, I don’t mind her discovering a new disease so long as she can cure it.”84 To explain his refusal to try her methods, Brack declares dramatically that “I will not experiment with the lives of children! … Guinea pigs, yes—children no.” His ethical qualms are presented seriously, and McDonnell says later with reluctant admiration: “He’s a brilliant man, he’s absolutely sincere. In his mind he’s defending the rights of children.”

  Near the end of the film Brack attacks Kenny, saying that “instead of aiding physicians you have the arrogance to try to teach [them] … in the opinion of many doctors you are no longer a nurse.” Kenny’s self-sacrifice and nursely behavior, shown by many examples before this, is intended to refute any such accusation, and she responds with quiet defiance, “I have given up too much to wear this nurse’s uniform.”

  The film’s ending reinforces the idea of Kenny’s sacrifice. As the AMA committee’s critical report plays over the loudspeaker of a lecture room Kenny bravely continues to give a lecture to orthopedic surgeons. She returns to her office at the Institute, lonely and unhappy, having learned of McDonnell’s death and now another medical committee’s rejection. As she walks to the Institute’s front gates a flock of happy children (former patients) come running to greet her singing “Happy Birthday.” They are all healthy children walking without crutches or wheelchairs, but it is a poignant scene, hardly a sign of uplifting success.85

  Pohl felt that the scene showed that “the happiness and well bodies of children are of more importance than rebuffs from the medical profession,” but he did “not like to see Sister Kenny as a bitterly disappointed woman without a future.”86 Kenny agreed—this was not the ending she had imagined. She urged Nichols to use a scene based on one he himself had witnessed at the Institute where “doctors stood on chairs and tables to watch me correct a defor
mity.” The film, she suggested, could offer “a grand climax” such as when an orthopedic surgeon told the group of physicians that “the deformity had been corrected and function restored and said ‘Gentlemen, that is the answer to the accusations.’ ”87

  FIGURE 6.1 Still from RKO’s Sister Kenny (1946) showing Philip Merivale as orthopedist Dr. Brack debating with Rosalind Russell as Kenny in a Brisbane amphitheatre. Courtesy of Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

  In August 1946, after Kenny learned that the ending remained the same, she sent a telegram to RKO protesting that as it conveyed “a message of defeat,” RKO should “not release the picture” without a more positive ending, “otherwise it would not be my life.”88 By this time, however, the upcoming Kenny Foundation (KF) fundraising campaign was using footage of the film and claiming (inaccurately) that all the child actors except for Doreen McCann were “cured patients from the Kenny Institute.”89 More importantly, Kenny had staked her professional career on it. It was not easy to admit that she had lost creative control. A day later she sent another telegram presenting her change of heart as the result of speaking to calmer heads. Both Russell and Valerie Harvey, one of her technicians who was working as an advisor on the Hollywood set, Kenny explained, had disagreed with her assessment. She was “willing to take their verdict [that]… the ending of the film was satisfactory.”90

  The KF campaign and Kenny’s own extensive fundraising also made her earlier harsh depiction of elite women seem inappropriate. McCarthy and Gunzburg had planned to dramatize one of the few class conflicts in Kenny’s autobiography through the figure of Lady Latham, described by McCarthy as a parody of a female British aristocrat with “three chins, a lorgnette and a nose perpetually pointed upward in disapproval.” 91 In one script version McCarthy made Latham a trustee of the Toowoomba Nurses Home, where Kenny is finishing her training. “Elizabeth Kenny may be a good nurse, but she must be taught to keep her place,” Latham announces; her off-duty clothes are “too frivolous” and “beyond her station in life.” “No good Australian has any patience with that ‘station in life’ nonsense,” young Kenny retorts. “We nurses resent people who give money to hospitals just for their own personal glory and amusement. Laymen should consider it a privilege to give such checks, but, after giving them, they should go away quickly and permit experts to run the affairs of the sick.”92 Gunzburg at first liked this character, adding “this was not to be the first nor the last society woman to become peeved when Kenny refused to permit them to bask in the sunshine of her career at [the] expense of her treatment.”93 But as wealthy women like Latham loomed larger in Kenny’s fundraising, the character was dropped. One of the few references to the financing of medical care comes when Kenny learns that a donation from Kevin was paying for 10 beds at the Toowoomba Hospital.

  Kenny’s claim to have contributed to polio science was also avoided. The film offers a safely domesticated story of scientific discovery. Kenny’s understanding of polio comes from her heart and from her clinical experience. Kenny succeeds in healing a paralyzed child because she does not understand polio and is thus free from the constraints of any orthodox medical knowledge. Her hands, her knowledge of sick bodies, and her ability to use tools of the domestic environment such as strips of blanket and hot water build on her “natural” understanding of healing. In McCarthy’s words, she succeeds “using nothing but her shrewd eyes and her common sense, plus her great knowledge of the muscular system.”94 In the bush cabin where she meets her first patient, she directs the girl’s parents to tear up blankets, pour boiling water over them, and twist them so that every drop comes out. After treating the pain and spasm she and the parents realize that the girl’s legs still cannot move. The mother cries, but Kenny in cape and long-sleeved white uniform keeps her emotions under control. She tells the child she is “going to have to teach them [her legs] how to walk.” She gently moves a leg and, when she notices a tendon react, she tells the child calmly “your leg just told me something.”

  The film makers, perhaps pressured by RKO, stayed away from the direct portrayal of groups of “deformed” children. In the film Kenny and her mentor examine a textbook by “Sir Robert Jenkins,” which is identified as Brack’s “bible,” and note the similarities between its images and some of the patients she has recently treated. One of the scripts proposed a close-up of a plate from the Jenkins book “showing us a typical posture in the acute stage,” but the film does not show any such images.95 In fact, other than a scene of a ward of children in splints and braces, there are very few groups of severely disabled children. In the final script this ward was described as “full of horribly crippled children, in wheel-chairs, braces, walking cages, etc.” but the camera avoids any close ups and there are no wheelchairs or walking cages.96 Brack doubts Kenny’s evidence that her method works and dismisses her first healed patient, saying “this child never had infantile paralysis … the symptoms were not accurately observed.” He suggests that Kenny “stick to nursing and not meddle with orthopedic medicine. It’s a complicated subject which is difficult enough for those who have spent a lifetime studying it.” Meanwhile, the film lingers on Dorrie, one of Kenny’s patients (child actor Doreen McCann), turning cartwheels while Brack’s own patient David, a small boy in braces and crutches, whom Brack proudly shows as an example of orthodox success, watches morosely. This image is interpreted with horror by Kenny who ends the scene saying quietly “I will never forget David.”

  By 1945 Kenny had constructed a story of her life that downplayed the role that the NFIP had played in her career. She reminded Nichols that O’Connor was not responsible for the introduction of her work to America; rather, that a group of Australian doctors had arranged for her to arrive “as an official visitor … with a definite statement that I had made a brilliant contribution to medicine.” In fact, O’Connor “told me to go home.”97 Russell believed that the movie script had been sent to the NFIP for approval, but O’Connor later assured a reporter that he had stayed away from “the movie.” While Fishbein’s role as a movie censor has been well documented for other scripts, his role here is unknown.98 In any case, although Kenny’s 1943 autobiography had dwelt for some chapters on her struggles to convert American physicians, the filmmakers avoided mentioning either O’Connor or the NFIP and depicted very few of Kenny’s experiences in the United States, omissions that must have seemed strange to American audiences when the movie came out in 1946.

  Despite these omissions and the script’s many additions to Kenny’s history, the film was promoted as a “true” story. RKO publicity claimed that Russell’s depiction of Kenny herself was accurate. The studio told reporters that Russell was doing an intensive course in the Kenny method, and had “the nurse’s magic hand motions down pat.”99 Mary Kenny recalled that Russell, a great mimic, was able to copy Kenny’s own accent perfectly. But after Kenny protested that she did not “sound like that,” Russell used a bland English accent instead.100 The movie’s appearance of cinematic documentary was reinforced by old-fashioned clothes and backdrops. A newspaper reported that the Toowoomba hospital, where a member of the merchant marine had been treated during the war, was being copied by the same man, who was now a set dresser at RKO.101

  Convinced that accuracy was important, Kenny warned Nichols that the script had a “few little things that will annoy Australians exceedingly.” A story about a bull added to dramatize the founding of the Sylvia stretcher would lead to “a lot of criticism” and “give the whole picture a phony atmosphere.” Her clinic in Brisbane also had not been in “an old dilapidated building” but one that was “wonderfully renovated and beautifully equipped.”102 Chuter was asked to assess scripts for their accuracy and in 1945 the managing director of RKO in Sydney thanked him for cooperating “in the research that we have been required to carry out by our Studio in the interests of authenticity.”103 Chuter also dispelled what he considered to be misapprehensions about Kenny’s main antagonist. To some who had seen the script, Brack sugge
sted orthopedist Harold Crawford, whom Kenny had named in her autobiography. But Chuter was sure that Brack was meant to be Sir Raphael Cilento. “No one will waste any sympathy on this person,” Chuter assured an RKO official; “he has been Sister Kenny’s most implacable enemy, and really deserves all opprobrium which can be heaped upon him.”104 Two years later, Chuter was able to use his authority to counter protests about the content of the film. In 1947, just before the film’s premiere in Australia, Queensland’s state censor threatened to cut a dramatic scene between Kenny and Brack, claiming it was not “authentic.” Chuter prevented this, arguing: “This scene is, in my opinion, the great scene in the picture. It focuses and crystallizes the issue fought over many years and in many Countries. The brave nurse forces her way into the teaching citadel and fights out the issue. Dr. Brack portrays the concept [and] attitude of traditional medicine admirably and accurately.”105