Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  The disjunction between clinical ability and scientific understanding was picked up by other reviewers as well. Kenny “will never forsake her theory [that polio is] … essentially a disease of certain muscles,” Archer Winsten reflected in the New York Post. But physicians base their theories on “much more penetrating research into the nature of the causative virus [and]… point to actual nerve destruction.” Thus, doctors may “grant her good therapeutic innovations” but they “consider her scientifically ignorant.”228 “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing when it touches the field of medicine,” agreed Florence Fisher Parry of the Pittsburgh Press. The movie, she believed, “misrepresents the medical profession in a manner shocking to those who hold it in high regard.” Parry quoted Nebraska orthopedist H. Winnett Orr who questioned even Kenny’s clinical methods. He argued that the promotion of Kenny’s treatment had been a cruel fraud that had led to the spending of millions of dollars “in a campaign which has had only a minor effect upon the care of a few patients.” In Orr’s view the polio epidemics of the past few years had abundantly demonstrated that splints, braces, and surgical care were “necessary in order to put these patients on their feet, to restore them to usefulness in society, and to make them independent of the care of families, relatives, and institutions.”229

  Life featured the film as its movie of the week, calling Kenny “the most publicly controversial figure in the medical world today” with “a host of utterly devoted followers and a host of strongly skeptical medical opponents.” Life recognized that “many medical men will utter howls of protest against it—and not without reason—for Sister Kenny is frank propaganda for the Kenny treatment and, by inference, against other methods employed by most doctors.” The magazine included 2 pages of stills from the movie and a full-page photograph of Russell as Kenny in Brack’s auditorium with the caption “Sister Kenny Glares at a Doctor Who Thinks She is a Quack.”230 But the same issue also contained a short review by New York pediatrician Philip Stimson entitled “A Doctor Comments on ‘Sister Kenny.’ ” In a stunning reversal, Stimson, who had been a strong Kenny supporter since the early 1940s, now argued that “millions of people will be stirred by the movie and believe all its implications.” He warned it was not true that all acute patients treated by Kenny recover completely and rapidly or that “all but a few orthopedists are opposed to Sister Kenny and have nothing to do with her treatment.” He praised the Kenny method but noted many similarities between Kenny and orthopedists, arguing that the best treatment of polio involves the services of many experts.231 Stimson had recently been featured in the National Foundation News as the director of a new unit providing specialized polio training for doctors, nurses, and other professionals at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital.232

  Life also provided a separate story about Kenny herself, describing her as 59 and “undaunted.” Even though the KF was now a large and growing institution and Kenny was a local celebrity, success had not “made her any less determined or cantankerous.” “She is still caustic toward all critics” and regards the AMA and the NFIP “as woefully far from the true faith.” The story included a photograph of Kenny and a girl patient who was standing for the first time and another photograph of Kenny with Russell and an RKO executive.233

  In October 1946 Ed Sullivan came out on Kenny’s side in his syndicated column “Little Old New York.” “Basil O’Connor’s richly-endowed National Foundation won’t let Sister Kenny have the money,” he told readers, even though the NFIP had formally endorsed her work. He warned that “the future of tens of thousands of polio victims is being jeopardized by temperament and false pride” and suggested that “Basil O’Connor, custodian of $20,000,000 of public contributions, should render an accounting of this curious situation.” As for the difference in quality of care between ordinary therapists and Kenny-trained therapists, Sullivan quoted Kenny saying “it is as if a Boy Scout’s knowledge of first aid were opposed to the knowledge of a specialist.”234 This immediately became a national story. The editor of New York Medicine responded by calling Sullivan “a romantic partisan” and Kenny “tragically egotistical.”235 “If I’m a ‘romantic partisan’ of Sister Kenny,” Sullivan retorted in print, then Kenny’s allies such as Robert Bingham and the late Don Gudakunst were “in the upper brackets of romanticism.” As for the accusations of egotism, “the parents of a child afflicted with infantile paralysis don’t care whether the healer is an egotist—all they want is to see that child walk again.” Sullivan framed this as a public interest story, arguing that “the public, which volunteers the money gladly to fight this cruel disease” had “a financial stake” in any meeting between NFIP and KF leaders. He also doubted the good faith of many physicians. “Somewhere along the line, deliberately or accidentally, the medical profession apparently tossed the Kenny method overboard, [and] turned instead to a modification of her method which perhaps relieved them from acknowledging that all along they had been in error.”236

  Marvin Kline thanked Sullivan for his “clear exposition of the facts,” noting “the tremendous reader interest in your column and the enormous circulation of your newspaper.”237 In the New York Post Archer Winsten praised Sullivan’s “great-hearted attempt to reconcile Nurse Kenny and the medical profession,” and suggested that O’Connor “invent a diversion by which all faces are saved.”238

  In private notes NFIP officials were delighted with the New York Medicine editorial, which they described as carefully thought out and “logical.”239 In public the NFIP issued a 13-page statement on “The Kenny Question” to clear up “a slight confusion in the public mind as to the present status of the Kenny method of treatment [raised by] … the recent film depicting the life of the Australian nurse, Elizabeth Kenny.” Doctors had accepted her method and most now practiced a modified version. Moreover, NFIP funds were available for any polio treatment prescribed by a doctor, including at the Kenny Institute. It was Kenny’s concept of the disease that doctors rejected. “True scientists,” the statement read, “are willing to follow any clue, any lead that seems to promise new discoveries. They merely are unwilling to disbelieve the evidence of many competent investigations and reports already made, though less publicized than the Kenny concept among laymen.”240 Thus, the NFIP portrayed the film as a sign of Kenny’s inappropriate use of publicity to try to persuade patients and doctors to employ a technique only a quack would resort to.

  Theater managers, uneasy about the film’s antidoctor tone, were advised by their trade journals “to draw attention to the performance of Rosalind Russell and to the name of Sister Kenny … [and] to avoid the controversial aspect of the Sister Kenny vs. the medical profession fight.”241 Some exhibitors, Dudley Nichols told Kenny, were “reluctant to run the film because they fear it lacks popularity and therefore will not bring them in a profit.”242 An official from RKO drafted a letter to be written on KF letterhead and signed by Kenny, which presented her as altruistic and fully committed to the movie and its makers. Thus, she had “no financial stake” in the movie; she had “personally approved and endorsed the story that Mr. Dudley Nichols wrote and produced and directed”; and she hoped the film would “help to light up the darknesses [sic] of ignorance … [and] save lives before it is too late.”243

  Many medical societies delighted in the controversy and reprinted the film’s critical reviews as a way of attacking both Kenny and also journalists who preferred fantastical drama to the less exciting, scientifically proven truth. “We would suggest a few movies, books, and magazine articles portraying the heartaches, the emotional catastrophes which every reputable physician encounters as counsellor in the ultimate facing of the bitter truth by those whose hopes have been falsely aroused,” wrote the editor of the Westchester Medical Bulletin. Referring implicitly to the Hearst papers’ support of both Kenny and the antivivisectionists, the editor continued, “Let those who have in their control the tremendously powerful media for moulding the thinking of the masses through press, radio and motion
picture screen realize and live up to their great educational responsibility!”244 The reviewer in the nursing journal The Lamp praised this “sincere story of devotion to a cause” but protested that objections by physicians “to novel ideas on treatment devised by unqualified persons [were]… often soundly rooted.” As “Sister Kenny’s idea has been thoroughly examined and as thoroughly rejected by the main body of opinion” it would have better if RKO “had chosen a subject that doctors should have examined, but have not.”245

  Most of the film’s critics tended to portray the public as a passive audience, easily swayed by this populist attack not only on polio orthodoxy but medical orthodoxy.246 Eileen Creelman of the New York Sun warned that the film might “keep people from accepting the standard methods,” for “whether ‘Sister Kenny’ will do harm or good is not for the layman to decide.”247 After Time made a list of the film’s “most outstanding distortions,” Pohl protested that the magazine’s “Cinema section” was not “the proper place in which to pass upon the relative merits of a highly scientific medical subject.”248

  The film’s sanctification of Kenny also disturbed critics. Exaggerating the heroism of a central figure was, of course, a standard part of the Hollywood bio-pic.249 However, the idea of producing a film about a living person whose “noble accomplishments”—unlike the work of Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur––had not yet “been established in history … had social and moral perils,” warned Bosley Crowther, the leading film reviewer for the New York Times, comments that were quoted extensively in an editorial on “Sister Kenny: Problem Child of Medicine” in New York Medicine.250

  Both the film’s sanctification of Kenny and its harsh dichotomy between medical right and wrong were at the heart of film critic John McCarten’s review in the New Yorker. “The business of treating Miss Kenny’s clinics with the kind of reverence that suggests the miracles of Lourdes is obviously dangerous,” he argued. “There is in this picture no hint that Miss Kenny is fallible. Her patients, one and all, are represented as being completely cured, whereas the patients of physicians unwilling to subscribe in toto to her ideas are uniformly revealed to be hopelessly warped and twisted.” McCarten found the film not only boring but exaggerated and not medically sound. Unlike other reviewers he was not impressed with Russell’s acting, which he described as “a series of grimaces that grow more and more arch as ‘Sister Kenny’ moves glumly along.”251

  THE PUBLIC RESPONDS

  After the RKO movie was distributed letters poured into the Kenny Institute. The vast majority of these writers saw the film as the true story of a great figure who could heal the crippled and who understood polio better than doctors. The film had clearly convinced many Americans that Kenny was a polio expert and probably also a miracle worker. Writers variously interpreted her work as Hollywood legend, as medical resource, and sometimes as generalizable to other disabling diseases such as multiple sclerosis or osteomyelitis.

  Just as NFIP officials had feared, writers appealed to Kenny as healer and medical consultant. Paralyzed 49 years earlier, Ray Pospisil of Miami, Florida, saw Kenny’s work as a medical resource, explaining, “I saw the moving picture of you treating the infinitile [sic] paralysis with hot packs that gave me a new idea how to treat my paralysis.” He asked her to “please send me the book so I can get well.”252 Kenny was a preferable alternative to a doctor, partly for her skills and partly for her empathy for the suffering, as shown by her personal sacrifices on the silver screen.

  Some felt the film confirmed their doubts not just of an individual doctor but the whole orthodox profession. With a daughter who was always in pain from osteomyelitis, Mrs. H. P. Schoening of Allegan, Michigan, was “so happy that you have told the truth about so many doctors and how many people have been cripple[d] for life from Polio, through so many doctors.” It had taken 9 doctors to diagnose her daughter’s illness and “the doctors even went so far as to tell us it was a mental condition.”253 Leon Colton of Milwaukee admitted that “I do not go to shows very often, and do not care much for them but this one I stayed awake.” He had no doubt that he and Kenny agreed on the flaws of organized medicine. “I have know[n] for some time that Doctors of today could not live under the present system, if everybody were well. So it is the duty of a Dr. not to make you well, and not to kill you, but to prolong your life as long as posble [sic], so as to give the Dr. a meal ticket … I am for you and with you in this work 100 percent & wish you much luck & success.”254

  Responding to the film’s unsympathetic portrayal of Brack, many saw Kenny’s method as a promising alternative to orthopedic surgery. Alda Cononna of River Edge, New Jersey, who had been paralyzed by polio since 1939, had become interested in the Kenny method since seeing the movie. Her doctor had urged her to have an operation, but she first wanted to try the Kenny treatment and to have Kenny’s “personal advice about it.”255 Others like Helen E. Sente of Hastings on Hudson, New York, had had a number of operations, “and would still go throu[gh] more if there was ever the slightest hope of getting rid of one brace.” Paralyzed by polio during the 1916 epidemic, Sente thought “the picture of your life … was to[o] wonderful for words … You certainly have given a lot to humanity.” She was also willing to be part of any scientific research. “I know it is asking a lot after all these years, but I do believe in mericals [sic] and am will[ing] to be a ‘human guinea pig’ if I may use that expression … I’ve had a lot of disappointments in my life, so please don’t hesitate to give me your honest opinion.”256

  Some viewers saw the movie as implying clinical options for cerebral palsy patients as well. Mrs. Don Lariscy of Savannah had taken her 7-year-old daughter who had been “injured at birth” to “several Medical Doctors, Specialists in Polio Cases and to Chiropractors” who had all told her that “there is not anything that can be done.” “At present I am massaging her with Coco-Butter and have had her in a Walker since last September.” Mrs. Lariscy ran a beauty shop to care for her 2 children. “After seeing the wonders you have obtained for other children I do have some hope.”257 But Kenny and her staff had put aside their previous efforts to extend her work to cerebral palsy patients, and her secretary replied that the Kenny method was intended primarily for the treatment of polio in the acute stage. Kenny had worked “with spastics in Australia but while in the United States all her work has been with infantile paralysis.”258

  Kenny’s experiences depicted in the movie made many writers sure that she would have special empathy as well as knowledge, as this heart-wrenching yet unsentimental letter suggests. Arthur, the son of Mrs. Mary Cavallaro of Brooklyn, had been paralyzed by polio in 1944. He spent 4 months in the St. Charles Hospital and was then sent home and told to use therapy daily to stretch his foot. His mother took him to another doctor who suggested “a stretching with instruments and his leg in a cast for 6 weeks,” but “our doctor” disagreed, warning that his foot might deform and then require an operation. “Last night I saw your picture,” Cavallaro told Kenny, “and after seeing what you gave up to help the children, I knew I had to write to you.” She had thought her son accepted his brace, but “last week I heard him cry for the first time because he can’t go skating. I hear that cry in my head day and night and it[’]s almost driving me crazy.” She believed Kenny could advise her on what medical option to follow: “if you tell me it’s all right to do that, I’ll do it because I have a lot of faith in you. Because to me, you are like a God.” Her friends, she added, told her she was crazy and that “you wouldn’t help me or see my son, but I feel different[ly] … after seeing your picture and reading about your work you’ve done with children with braces and corsets, I think you can make my son well.” In a combination of a bargain and a plea, she promised, “Sister Kenny, if you do this, so help me God, I’ll do anything in my power to help you in any way. I’ll even help your fight against those Doctors who still don’t believe in you … He’s the only child I have and everytime I watch him walk a nail go[es] through my heart deeper and d
eeper.”259

  DEFENSIVE KENNY

  Kenny’s own reaction to the film was intense and defensive. She was appalled that Life had published the Stimson article, even though it was juxtaposed with the magazine’s fulsome review of the film as its movie of the week.

  Kenny was already frustrated with the publicity surrounding the Knickerbocker unit.260 She especially disliked the NFIP’s announcement that Knickerbocker had been the site of a 6-week NFIP-funded course to teach the Kenny method. Such an announcement, she warned Stimson, was “pure exploitation and a delusion as far as the students and public are concerned,” for the clinic was staffed by therapists with a few months experience, “just enough time to give them an idea of the value of the work [but]… not enough time to let them know what were the symptoms and conditions present for which the work was really evolved.”261