The 1948 hearings gave the NFIP a chance to speak as the nation’s expert on polio and explain the danger of too much government interference in medical and scientific affairs. Of course, the NFIP did not want to portray itself as unreasonably antagonistic to all government funding. NFIP officials thoughtfully pointed to the “crying need” for research in other fields such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.45 Research funding, one official admitted frankly to Congress, was a crucial part of the NFIP’s public fundraising and was the “interest and hope” of the thousands of men and women who “work at the grass-roots level.” If the NFIP’s research program were “taken over by the Government … we believe our greatest appeal for public support will be removed.”46 NFIP representatives were strongly opposed to the idea of a special polio commission within the proposed NSF or any other government agency, warning that “such a step might jeopardize a voluntary program which is achieving important gains.”47
O’Connor had a longstanding belief in free-market medicine, research, and philanthropy, and he had always been opposed to federated fundraising. With the power of the NFIP behind him he defended medical charities. Charity-directed medical research was, he claimed, the “American way.” The nation’s great philanthropic agencies were “a peculiarly American type” supported “by funds derived from the mass of the people [and]… led by individuals who join together for the common good … without any thought of emolument in terms either of money or privilege.” Any change would threaten the entire system of philanthropy, for the strength of these agencies was “their voluntary and independent nature.” Without naming Gunn and Platt’s study O’Connor decried their proposal for setting up “a central group with a permanent directorate which all agencies would join.” Each agency would then be compelled to accept the dictums of this directorate about when to seek funds and how to distribute them. This would lead to a loss of humanity in philanthropy and would be part of a wider, more dangerous form of totalitarianism in society at large. American charities required “integrity and independence” to ensure their continued work in “aiding and assisting the less fortunate so that they may participate in and enjoy our standard of life.”48
Fishbein made similar arguments when he praised America’s system of voluntarism in the organization of both philanthropy and medical care. The NFIP’s research program, he told a group of polio experts at Warm Springs, was “as fine a program of research … as any developed by any agency in the world in relation to any other disease.” Attacking the NFIP, he argued, was like attacking America’s fee-for-service medical system. People sometimes said, Fishbein remarked sarcastically, that health charities were not systematic or democratic. But they were “in accord with the democratic traditions of the United States”; rather than being communistic or socialistic, they were “an inspired effort arising out of the hearts and souls of a free people.” In defending both the NFIP and America’s current fee-for-service health system Fishbein added his own interpretation of attacks on government-directed research agencies. President Truman, Fishbein claimed, had vetoed an earlier version of the NSF bill because he could see that “the research developed with freedom and private initiative gave the better results.” As for the argument that there was too much money being collected for “one disease that afflicts so few people,” Fishbein dared his audience to “place a child with T.B. above one with infantile paralysis, or one with heart disease above one with infantile paralysis.” The NFIP’s attitude to polio should be “a model to be emulated in relationship to other diseases.”49 Prompted by an NFIP suggestion, Fishbein then wrote a JAMA editorial on medical research urging Congress to “omit any and all special commissions for specific diseases” from the current NSF bill.50
Fears that government-funded research could lead to socialized medicine was most starkly laid out before the House committee by Basil’s brother John O’Connor, a former New York Democratic congressman who was now an NFIP official. Even if the proposed NSF would be only a “government research bureau” collecting data, John O’Connor argued, “we believe [it] is the proverbial camel getting its nose under the tent and from that time on you have the whole animal, and the whole carcass, right in the center of the ring. You have got the government taking care of the personal disease of our people, a completely totalitarian idea that never was intended in America.” He asked the Congressmen to imagine their own families threatened by polio. In 1947, his son, who had just graduated from Harvard Medical School, had become a victim, and the father explained, “I did not want then, and I do not want now any Government representative whether he is a scientist or a doctor, treating me or my people under such circumstances. I want to get the best private treatment. And this proposed research by the Government is bound to develop by the Government taking over completely.”51
KENNY IN CONGRESS
As a witness at the Congressional hearings Kenny sought to benefit from the complicated medical politics of the times. She enjoyed the effusive, over-the-top language common in Congress and was able to tell her story in terms that fit well with the current congressional climate. Republicans, who had gained control of the House and Senate in 1946, found that supporting Kenny—an underdog battling a medical trust—made good politics and good press.52 Minnesota Republican Congressman Joseph O’Hara described relations among Sister Kenny, the NFIP, and some of the doctors as a “civil war.”53 New Jersey Republican Charles Wolverton, chair of the House committee, was especially concerned, and, reiterating many of Kenny’s own arguments, pointedly questioned NFIP officials about their refusal to fund her work.54 According to The Washington Times-Herald, Wolverton gave the NFIP “a severe tongue lashing,” warning that its refusal to support Kenny was “inconceivable” and that the NFIP had clearly “given her the run-around” when she offered to design an exhibit for the upcoming conference.55 “In all my experience on this committee,” Wolverton told Kenny on her second day at the hearings, “you have had more photographers interested in taking your picture than any witness we have ever had before the committee.” “I am afraid I do not make a very pretty one,” Kenny replied with unconvincing modesty.56 In fact, according to one commentator, the hearings had the aspect of a trial whose defendants were O’Connor and Roosevelt. Although the late President’s name was not mentioned, the critical questioning leveled at NFIP spokesmen and the relish with which Republican members listened to Kenny’s attacks on an organization founded by Roosevelt, heightened the feeling that both the former president and his New Deal were under attack.57
FIGURE 7.1 A proud and dignified Kenny was a witness at a Congressional committee hearing in 1948; “Sister Kenny Takes the Stand” Washington Times-Herald May 15, 1948.
Kenny made her work a symbol of medical populism. She sought to draw in her congressional audience by demonstrating her trust in the abilities of lay observers to judge evidence put before their own eyes. She showed her technical film at the hearings, noting that she had shown it the previous summer in Europe. This “documentary evidence,” she said in introducing the film, could be rejected only through neglect, ignorance, or prejudice. Kenny then recommended that the film be shown to all state health departments and that pamphlets be printed and distributed to inform every family about the Kenny concept.58
Kenny was aware that the State Department was sending out invitations for the NFIP conference to some 60 countries. Pressing her claim to be included, she spoke in terms of the new global health politics (the first assembly of the World Health Organization would be meeting in Geneva that summer), reminding the committee of her visits to both Western and Eastern Europe.59 Thus, she argued, her participation in the NFIP’s conference would give the federal government an opportunity to present to “governments of all countries … [a] link in the golden chain of friendship.” Turning this argument into a threat, she warned that friends could become enemies. While the gift of her knowledge might “cement the much desired friendships,” if it were withheld it was possible that “a bitterness
will enter the hearts of the people when the truth finally becomes known.” And the NFIP was at fault. Its refusal to allow her to participate in the upcoming conference was “perpetrating a grave injustice on the people of this country by assuming this attitude which, to me, is not American.”60 Many Congressmen caught the implications of the politics of medical openness. If the NFIP’s International Conference could carry “governmental implication … to the people of this country and other countries,” Massachusetts Republican John Heselton reflected, the committee should “inquire as to what further consideration has been given to the [Kenny] Institute’s request, and as to whether or not … there has been a run-around or a pigeon holing of this very reasonable request to participate in developing all the facts.”61
KENNY AND JUNGEBLUT
One of the most provocative moments in the case against the NFIP was the appearance at the hearings of a pro-Kenny scientist. Claus Washington Jungeblut, a bacteriologist at Columbia University, had been working as a polio researcher for the previous 2 decades, and had been funded by the Milbank Committee, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Birthday Ball Commission.62 Kenny had met him in January 1948 along with other Columbia scientists when she had shown her film at the medical school. She had immediately begun to claim him as an ally.63
Born in Minnesota but brought up in Switzerland, Jungeblut had received a medical degree in 1921 from the University of Berne and worked as a bacteriology assistant at Berne’s public health institute and later at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Fluent in German and English—which he spoke with a Swiss-German accent—he had been hired as an assistant professor of bacteriology at Stanford in 1927 and after 2 years moved to Columbia University to study polio. In the early 1930s William Park and his colleagues had established the failure of polio convalescent serum to protect children from polio, an insight followed by the disastrous testing of a polio vaccine that Park had helped to develop. These events convinced Jungeblut that polio was not like other infectious diseases and that its etiology was more complicated. He proposed that as patients’ previous exposures to the polio virus did not explain the patterns of paralysis, there must be additional “poliocidal substances”—perhaps in vitamins or hormones—that would explain why some children developed paralysis and others did not.64 Jungeblut became a full professor in 1937. His work was praised by the Queensland Royal Commission and 35 of his articles were cited in the NFIP’s collection Infantile Paralysis: A Symposium Delivered at Vanderbilt University April, 1941.65
Impressed by Kenny’s clinical results Jungeblut saw in her a new funding source and hoped to gain respect as a KF-funded scientist standing apart from the NFIP. But he did not want to go too far. During her testimony, for example, Kenny had mentioned her plan to set up a rival international polio conference and scientific council and boasted that “several outstanding scientists” were willing to be part of this council.66 But Jungeblut had already told Kenny privately that he was not willing to be part of any such council and that he thought a separate conference was a bad idea, fearing that few of his fellow scientists would be willing to proclaim such “open rebellion against the National Foundation.” “The course I have chosen for myself—not without considerable mental anguish—is to continue my experimental work,” he told her, “and hope that with further diffusion of knowledge the objective facts will eventually be accepted.”67
The NFIP had refused to fund his work, he explained at the hearings, because he worked with mice rather than primates. His research, in other words, was out of the mainstream compared to other virologists favored by the NFIP’s science advisors. Nor was he the only scientist in this position. There were, he claimed, “a considerable number of people who have either refused to go with the regimentation of research by the National Foundation, or otherwise have been pushed out by them.” He believed that a government agency would be more likely to be fair and disinterested than the NFIP “monopoly” or at least that such an agency could be organized with “devices that make this sort of thing impossible.”68 Kenny had similarly declared that non-NFIP-funded research was crucial for progress in polio science. “Despite the millions of dollars that have been spent on research and investigation,” she argued, “the findings that have been of greatest value to humanity concerning this disease” had been the result of work by Jungeblut, virologist Julian Sanz Ibanez at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, and herself, none of them “grantees of the National Foundation.”69
The characterization by Jungeblut and Kenny of a dangerously autocratic NFIP swayed some members of the House committee. “Too often the medical profession is too orthodox, and unwilling to recognize the individual who is traveling along a path that is different from what is recognized by orthodox medicine,” Wolverton told Jungeblut sympathetically, “yet … so many of our great inventions have come about in a most unexpected way … through the vision or the thought of some individual who was thinking differently than others thought.”70 Although Jungeblut had not referred to Kenny’s lack of medical training, a few Congressmen did—not to criticize but to show their explicit support of medical populism. Minnesota Republican Joseph O’Hara pointed out that a person’s lack of professional training should not necessarily undermine his or her scientific respectability: “[O]ftentimes the layman contributes something in the way of science to something in the way of relief that too often we might be inclined to be a little jealous of it or overlook it.”71 In his understanding of scientific progress every contribution should be valued, irrespective of physicians’ unreasonable envy.
Hart Van Riper was the NFIP’s most articulate defender at the hearings. He briefly criticized Jungeblut’s science – noting that “we are not going to solve the mystery of polio by working with mice” - but addressed the bulk of his testimony to Kenny’s assertions. The gist of his attack was that Kenny was unfit to participate in the upcoming conference or in any serious scientific meeting, and that she had no legitimate claim to scientific insight. While he noted that the NFIP had “not argued about the quality of her treatment,” Van Riper claimed that her work was not particularly new and was widely practiced under a variety of names throughout the country. He also identified what he considered 2 glaring weaknesses in Kenny’s claims to scientific respectability: her reluctance to abide by the conservative etiquette of the scientific establishment—exemplified by her speaking so brashly to the press of her “contribution”—and her inability to recognize the kinds of evidence professionals regarded as authoritative. “Miss Kenny is not a physician,” physician Van Riper explained, and “has made statements that certain things do not exist which, in the laboratory animal we can reproduce.” Further, he added, “unfortunately Miss Kenny feels that unless you accept her concept of the cause you cannot accept her treatment.”72 In short, she refused to separate her technical work—as healer and therapist—from her theoretical insights; she was not content to be lauded only as a nurse.
Although Kenny spoke often of her desire to obtain scientific confirmation of her theories through clinical and laboratory studies, she had always relied heavily on personal testimonials as evidence. These she described as “reports of unbiased medical men and the findings of science.”73 This kind of strategy did not impress the NFIP. In letters between conference organizer Stanley Henwood and Marvin Kline that formed part of Kenny’s Congressional evidence, Henwood dismissed any proposed submission that would be merely “a restatement of Sister Kenny’s contribution to the field of poliomyelitis” and requested instead “some concrete scientific evidence and not merely statements that are based on personal opinion.” He suggested that “actual scientific evidence” be submitted in manuscript form showing “the presentation of a sufficient number of case reports covering all of the patients treated with the end results as compared with cases in the same area treated by other methods.”74 In vain did Kline protest that the KF did not intend to provide a restatement but “to present scientific evidence confirming the contribution of Sister Elizabeth
Kenny [through]… the medium of visual education in six different languages” (that is, by showing her film The Kenny Concept). Kenny also quoted Henwood’s additional disapproving comment that her request to show a film was one of many from “several large institutions and personalities throughout the world who felt that their story should be told.”75
Kline along with Kenny and members of the KF Board recognized that nothing would convince the conference organizers to allow Kenny to participate and concluded that the reason was NFIP prejudice and elitism. “Owing to the many stumbling blocks presented we would assume that it is your intention to maintain your original attitude in considering scientific exhibits from the [NFIP] … grantees only,” Kline told Henwood.76
Kenny knew that her work appealed to antivivisectionists and to other antiorthodox critics. But in public she no longer acknowledged such alliances, and her friends noticed that when first meeting a physician she wanted to know “what kind of doctor is he?”77 At the 1948 hearings she made much of her commitment to professional orthodoxy. While Van Riper pointedly called Kenny “Miss” instead of “Sister,” he carefully did not call her a quack. His reluctance to attack Kenny this way reflected her national popularity, her shrewd use of the press, and the fact that, in the 1940s and 1950s, antivivisectionists remained a potent political force in some states.
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