Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  FAREWELLS

  In December 1950 Kenny said a series of farewells. In Minneapolis the mayor gave her the city’s distinguished service award, and she tearfully thanked him and city aldermen for the beautiful home that had been “a haven of refuge” in “your beautiful city” for “ten very happy years.” She also thanked the KF Board members “for their splendid help … unbiased attitude and generous nature.”196 “Wherever I am,” she told New York reporters a few days later, “the American flag shall fly over my home.” “My mission has been accomplished,” she declared, with a touch of hyperbole, and she was returning “to my headquarters in Australia.” Now, “the women of the world will take this matter up and support and further this great cause.” “Of course,” she added with her typical spark, “they will need help from the men.”197

  Behind the scenes, however, Kenny was neither sentimental nor content. In a heated conversation with Marvin Kline, preserved by a transcript, she said she had been “very, very disappointed” to find students at the Institute with almost no knowledge of her work. Her teaching was falling away and being replaced with “a lot of innovations that are of no value.” She had heard that Huenkens had even said she was “mentally unbalanced,” and she threatened to “take my name off this place” if Huenkens remained head of the Institute, warning “it will be very difficult to get money when I am not here.”198

  After her meeting with Kline, she wrote a fiery letter to the KF Board’s new chairman, Minneapolis businessman George Crosby, warning that the KF needed a “thorough reorganization.” Angry at being more and more marginalized by the KF board, she began to construct an unusually personalized defense, as she reflected on the reason many of the Minnesota “gentlemen” had initially joined the KF Board: her care of their children. Henry Haverstock Sr. “would still be carrying his son about in his arms, instead of seeing him an independent, useful citizen, happily married.” Donald Dayton “would be looking at a very distressed young boy handicapped like his little wardmate … instead of a robust young footballer.” Crosby himself “would be bothered about the readjustment of spinal supports on one or more of his three very delightful children, instead of watching them growing [in] health and strength and beauty.”199 But simply recalling clinical successes felt unsatisfying, like signs of an earlier golden era, which was, she feared, disappearing.

  A KIND OF RETIREMENT

  Kenny moved to a house in Toowoomba on the edge of the Darling Downs in southeastern Queensland where she had first worked as a bush nurse. Set “amongst the hills I love so well,” her large picture windows gave “the most gorgeous panoramic view in the World, and I think I am qualified to say the World, for I have seen most of it.” But despite this beauty and tranquility she missed “the girls at the old Institute, and my home at 24-46 Park Avenue.”200 Although she had said she was retiring, her celebrity reputation followed her, and she was asked, she claimed, to open hospitals and agricultural shows, receive debutants, patronize fashion parades, and even stand for Parliament. While she let it be known that she did not intend to take any part in public functions, she continued to promote her work. She hired a secretary, began writing another autobiography called My Battle and Victory, and made recordings on a special machine of “certain phases of my work, which are not clearly understood up-to-date.” One Queensland reporter described her seated with her secretary at a table “strewn with documents and correspondence,” and the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune featured “Sister Kenny At Home in Australia” with photographs of Kenny with her secretary Betty Brennan in the garden of her Australian home on the summit of the Toowoomba range, gathering letters sent her from many countries each morning, and tape-recording polio lectures as part of her daily routine.201

  Henry Haverstock wrote hoping she was “having a good rest and not worrying too much about affairs over [here].”202 But Haverstock knew better. Kenny continued to fight the same battles: trying to compel the Minneapolis Board to cooperate with other KF centers and to encourage those centers she felt best embodied her vision. She continued to play politics from afar, and distance made her memory sharper not fonder. Money and corruption were constantly on her mind, turning her memories of earlier days into horrific tales of conspiracy. For months when she was first in Minneapolis she had been “on the bread line,” she reminded Haverstock, yet “when the National Foundation attempted to buy me … I refused to be bought.” KF official Henry Von Morpurgo had tried to gain her support with the offer of $30,000 and a house in San Francisco, she went on, but “I informed him there was not enough money in the whole of the United State of America to buy me.”203

  To try to force the KF to adopt her own vision of polio philanthropy Kenny began to envision an International League of Universal Sisterhood, which would be organized on a volunteer basis and therefore “be non-political, non-racial, and non-sectarian.”204 In an article published in the Woman’s Home Companion she urged readers to organize a Sisterhood of Service that would “show the world that democracy has more to offer than atomic bombs.” Prejudice, she warned, had harmed the expansion of her work. The medical profession “regards each new claim, each new discovery, with a skeptical eye,” an attitude, she admitted, that was “healthy in many respects” for it “sifts out much quackery.” But her work had been blocked by “the often unfeigned hostility on the part of stiff-necked doctors who could not believe that any important contribution to medical science could possibly be made by a member of the lowly nursing profession.” She assured American readers (perhaps too emphatically) that she had left with no sense of frustration or bitterness in her heart but “with a feeling of peace and contentment, the feeling that comes with a sense of accomplishment, of a mission fulfilled.” She now forgave “those who set up obstacles along the path of help” and was passing the torch on “to the women of America and of the world, bound together by the universal love of children.” In dramatic vignettes she used later for her second autobiography Kenny described Rita, a child she had saved, who became strong, grateful, and altruistic enough to return to the Institute as a nurse’s aide to help patients during Minnesota’s 1946 epidemic.205 Four photographs accompanied this article: the famous 1943 image of Kenny with Roosevelt and O’Connor; a universalized picture of Kenny dressed in black next to a patient watched by nurses and technicians wearing white; a recent picture of Kenny with Rosalind Russell; and, as a reference to her continuing power as a fundraiser, a picture of her at a KF campaign drive in a black hat, black dress, and corsage along with the TV star Faye Emerson.206

  Kenny sought to appeal to American women by combining gender, science, and healing, but this combination of attributes was rapidly becoming out of sync with the modern scientific medicine of the early 1950s. Jonas Salk, a young married man with medical training and scientific skills working in a laboratory, was about to become the nation’s ideal scientific hero. The idea of an older woman, fighting bravely for the life and health of children, while frustrated by a lack of clinical and institutional support, was losing its cultural force in North America and elsewhere.

  A NEW SISTERHOOD?

  In Australia, her return home was not as triumphant as she had hoped. Many Australians, Kenny discovered, were not impressed by her American connections, especially her claim that without accepting her work Australian physicians could not properly help patients overcome polio paralysis. Kenny’s fierce attitude also annoyed Australian reporters. When she held a press conference “she does the talking,” a Sydney paper noted, while “reporters merely take notes.” If a reporter had the temerity to ask a personal question, Kenny would pause, fix him “with a hostile glance,” and continue to dictate what she considered “relevant news.”207

  Indeed, many Australians interpreted America’s acceptance of Kenny and her work as a familiar pattern of American over exuberance. America claimed to have discovered her and was “unstinting in praise of her work,” noted one blunt and undeferential article in a Sydney magazine, but in Australia she had not b
een given a single “official reception.” The article made much of her temper, her eccentric behavior, and her tendency to belittle the work of doctors “when tact, discretion and good humor would have achieved more for her cause.” A young Queensland socialite who had traveled extensively told the magazine: “A girl’s poise hasn’t really been put to the test until she meets Sister Kenny … being presented to the King and Queen is mere kindergarten stuff.” As for her contribution to science, according to one physician, she “had served like an enzyme or ferment.”208

  On the other hand, Kenny’s effort to construct a global sisterhood of service was taken up by her most active Australian supporters in the early 1950s: the Country Women’s Association (CWA), a group Kenny had joined in the 1920s. Senior CWA officers had long considered her an underappreciated national treasure. In 1949 Pearl Baldock, the state president of Queensland’s CWA, suggested that Elizabeth Sterne, the CWA’s national president, contact the Prime Minister to show him the “scientific research [that had]… proven the long contested theory, put forth by Sister Kenny, to be correct.”209 Sterne does not seem to have followed Baldock’s suggestion, but later became an enthusiastic Kenny supporter. In 1951 after she had retired from the CWA presidency, Sterne urged Queensland’s premier and the federal minister for health to set up an independent investigation to “bring proof that Sister Kenny’s work, accepted by such well known clinics as the famous Mayo Clinic, is all that the world, outside Australia, has acclaimed it.”210

  Connecting with the CWA allowed Kenny to imagine a wider link with a well-established women’s organization with a global presence. In April 1951 Ruth Buxton Sayre, the president of the Associated Country Women of the World who was on a whirlwind tour of CWA branches in Asia and the Pacific, visited Kenny in Toowoomba. The organization was mainly concerned with the welfare of rural women rather than with broader public health issues, but its ideology fit well with the global activism Kenny had come to embrace. Like many women activists of the 1950s Sayre had urged hundreds of women during her lecture tour to “have a broader horizon and keep the international pot from boiling over just as she must look after the pot on the stove in her own home.”211 After meeting with Sayre Kenny grandly told friends that she was “handing the torch” to her. Sayre, she explained, would “assist in getting together the women’s councils of the United Nations” so that Kenny could “meet them and present evidence.”212 Sayre, however, made no mention of Kenny either during her travels or back in America.213

  A NEW FRAILTY

  Charles Chuter’s death in 1948 had left Kenny without a bureaucratic intermediary to convey her work to Queensland officials. But using her well-honed skills Kenny was able to link her CWA supporters with a group of new allies, mainly local physicians and hospital patrons of the Toowoomba General Hospital. She became a regular speaker at meetings of the hospital’s board, and convinced the board to urge the Queensland government to “have Kenny’s knowledge available to the people of the state.” At one meeting Kenny read extracts from the Lancet and the Czech physicians’ letter and then showed her technical film. Impressed, one board member said “the film spoke for itself”; another agreed that “if Sister Kenny had had a medical degree she would have been recognized by the medical profession”; and a third referred to “the battle that Louis Pasteur had to convince the medical world of the correctness of her theory relative to bacteria.”214

  The meetings of her Toowoomba allies grew larger. In August 1951, one meeting chaired by the city’s mayor included 2 physicians from the hospital, local officials, a member of the women’s caucus of the Sydney branch of the Australian Labor Party, and an organizer of a polio welfare society who was working to establish a Kenny clinic in Adelaide.215 The group proposed a new international organization—the International Organisation for Combating Poliomyelitis—with Kenny as its “Patroness” and asked her to approach Eleanor Roosevelt to be its president.216 Soon there were branch meetings in Warwick and Nobby, and 2 politicians praised Kenny’s work in the state legislature.217

  Such events confirmed Kenny’s optimism that she could establish a lasting international organization, but nonetheless it was a hard fight. Not only was she far away from the enthusiasm of her American supporters, but she was now aware, or had allowed herself to become aware, that her hand tremors and balance problems were not just the result of age or fatigue but a specific neurological condition: Parkinson’s disease. Still, she kept up a brave public façade, telling reporters who noted her trembling right hand that “I’m getting old. That’s all that’s wrong with me.”218 She blamed her growing infirmity on her struggles to have her work respected. Her inability to use her right arm, she told Henry Haverstock dramatically, was “a disability caused, so my doctors say, through agony of soul.”219 But to her intimate friends she acknowledged the specific diagnosis. Jarvis Nye urged her to rest. He agreed tactfully that she should be a consultant at some institution in Australia, for “your presence would attract the patients from far and wide,” but he warned her to “never do any of the actual work—you have done more than your share of that.”220

  Perhaps it was this new awareness of her own body that led her to put new emphasis on the power of her work to prevent what she called “deformities.” This was a change from her earlier emphasis on the bodies of her patients who she had hoped would achieve strength and functionality, even at the price of an ungainly appearance. Now she began to warn that polio’s psychological effects, which could lead to anger and depression, made it especially crucial to adopt therapies that allowed the body to appear physically normal. “A deformed body in many cases induces animosity in the person deformed against mankind,” she noted in a letter to the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, even a person “who otherwise may be of the most friendly type.” Knowledge of her work therefore had “social, economic and humane value.”221 Her attention to polio survivors’ adjustment reflected a wider movement in polio care, but it also undermined the appeal of her work to many disabled survivors.

  While Kenny recognized the limitations of her weakening body, she continued to believe in the power of personal appeals. Distance, she feared, was weakening the force of her message. Her letters to KF officials had unfortunately “found a home in the waste paper basket.”222 Only her physical presence, she was convinced, could sway the skeptical and the wavering. Her anger at the way her demands were being ignored by the KF directors was deepened by their refusal to provide her with the honorarium which, she had understood before leaving in 1950, was going to be given to her as a kind of philanthropic pension. Only after her Minnesota patron Margaret Webber died and left her a legacy did she feel financially confident enough to talk about placing a deposit on a piece of land to build a home “to meet life’s sunset.”223

  COPENHAGEN: KENNY’S LAST CONFERENCE

  As early as May 1951 Kenny had begun planning her next visit to the United States. After this plan was reported in the New York Times, NFIP officials told each other to “run for the hills.”224 The ostensible reason Kenny was traveling was in order to attend the Second International Polio Conference to be held in Copenhagen that September. “The situation in the world today is chaotic where Kenny treatment is being given or partially given,” she argued in one of her many reports, so “it is imperative that I attend the International Conference being held in Copenhagen in order that I may present this knowledge.”225 She hoped that the European connections she had made over the past 6 years would enable her to play a far more active part than she had done in the 1948 conference, and she wanted to hear the latest polio research to assess how seriously her work was being taken. She had tried to get a formal invitation to the conference through Leon Laruelle but, perhaps to ensure his own good working relations with European polio organizers, he did not provide one for her. Her trip was not funded by the KF but by part of the bequest from Margaret Webber, and in Denmark she stayed at a hotel as the guest of Rosalind Russell’s father-in-law Carl Brisson, a Danish movie star.22
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  She came to America in August 1951, a few weeks before the conference was to start. There she made the Parkinson’s diagnosis public. Her illness became part of her new somber persona. “Sister Kenny Said To Be Incurably Ill” reported the New York Times. Reporters now remarked openly on her body’s stance and gait as she gave interviews for what was supposedly her “last U.S. visit.” She said she had plenty of pain, adding dramatically “only God knows how much longer I may live.”227 On what was now called her gray (rather than white) hair, reporters noted that she was wearing the same hat (a “wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with cabbage roses”) that she had worn in Los Angeles a year earlier. Instead of the jaunty celebrity who had boasted of collecting hats, a solemn Kenny now said that there were “too many things to be done [and]… too little time … to bother about hats.” She said her trip was against doctor’s orders, but with a glint of her earlier wit pointed out that 20 years earlier 4 doctors had given her only months to live and now “they all are dead.”228 Privately, however, she admitted to her friend James Henry that she felt like a “useless hulk.”229