As stories of Kenny resurfaced in PPS newsletters and memoirs, a newly harsh memorialization emerged. Survivors remembered the messiness and pain of hot packs and the careless and brutal way they had sometimes been applied. As one survivor recalled, “two times every day the therapists took hot packs out of the boiling water. The wool was too hot for them to touch so they used tongs. Every time they threw them on my bare legs I screamed.” Others reported “they still feel fear when they smell wet wool.”116 In his memoir, Robert Hall, who had been a patient in an Omaha county hospital in 1949, described how the treatment cart, a shiny cylinder for heating the hot packs, emitted steam with such “an acrid, nauseating smell” that he had gagged. The packs were greased with a “jelly like substance, to keep you from burning” and then the “steaming and stinking” flannel pieces were placed on the skin. In his memory “the packs sapped my strength more than my polio did.”117 Dorothea Nudelman recalled other children on her polio ward screaming during hot pack treatment, and when she herself was burned she “sobbed out loud, wore myself out with it. The shock was as bad as the pain. I knew it could happen again.”118
Although Kenny claimed to take pain seriously as a crucial symptom that must be relieved, pain was a constant part of polio therapy, whatever method was used, even Kenny’s. Robert Hall’s memory of pain came with the use of a footboard, which the Kenny method used to anchor the patients’ feet, stretch the leg muscles, and “re-establish and … stimulate the normal standing reflexes.”119 “My hamstrings hurt more and more the tighter they became,” Hall recalled. Kenny had instructed her technicians not to use the footboard until the leg muscles were no longer in spasm, but the distance between Kenny’s prescriptive directions and routine hospital practice can be seen by the horrific example Hall reported of 2 men in his hospital ward who writhed in pain “back and forth across their beds with their feet anchored to their footboards.”120
In 2002 psychophysiologist Richard Bruno published The Polio Paradox, which sought to explain why polio survivors had been reluctant to link their new symptoms to their former experience with polio. Among other factors, Bruno drew attention to examples of abusive care suffered by survivors years earlier. In shocking vignettes he quoted survivors who recalled nurses who slapped them and turned off an iron lung to punish them for crying and physical therapists who lay on a patient’s knee to stretch the muscles in the leg while the patient screamed and who hit patients with rubber truncheons to make them stand up in their braces.121 Not all mistreatment, of course, took place on wards using the Kenny method, but some was a specific result of her treatment.
According to Bruno, some of Kenny’s techniques “to identify alienated muscles and … to get polio patients to ‘take up their beds and walk’ were painful, terrifying, and also dangerous.” On occasion polio survivors recalled Kenny herself as one of the abusers; in one recollection in Bruno’s book Kenny “slapped me on the face several times as a means of ‘defining my reflex response.’ ”122 This sounds quite different from the frequent descriptions of Kenny’s gentle hands and her reminders to technicians that “the handling of the patient should always be so gentle that pain is never caused as this arouses fear in the mind of the patient and defeats efforts to get his cooperation.”123
GLOBAL LEGACIES
In Australia in the 1980s both PPS communities and feminist scholars rediscovered Kenny. In 1983 feminist writers added Kenny to their list of Significant Australian Women, drawing with relish a picture of a “boastful and tactless” nurse who “rebelled against so-called respectability” and sought acceptance “on her own terms.” Her lack of formal education and her limited knowledge of anatomy had meant that some of her claims were “untrue and based on ignorance,” and she antagonized the medical profession “by exaggerating her success.” Unlike Australian physicians who had treated her with hostility, American physicians had “followed the lead of this self-taught, elderly nurse from outback Queensland,” and as a result “polio treatment in the United States changed almost overnight.” She had invented “a ‘respectable’ education and nurses’ training course,” but she had also “persevered against great odds to prove that ‘experts’ are not always right” and “brought about a revolution in medical treatment and relief and hope to people all over the world.”124 The authors also quoted Hollywood star Alan Alda who tried to make Kenny a feminist example, telling an Australian women’s magazine in 1980 about his experience as a boy paralyzed by polio: “If it weren’t for an Australian woman, Sister Kenny, I might not have lived … I got the Sister Kenny treatment—it was a very rough treatment with hot packs, but it kept me from becoming crippled. I might not have lived if Sister Kenny had not been inventive, creative and exploratory—all those things that men are supposed to be.” What this interview did not mention, but appeared in his later memoirs, was that this Kenny treatment had been designed and practiced by his mother who had been inspired by Kenny’s work as it was described in newspaper and magazine articles.125 In 1995, writing as a nurse activist and a historical sociologist, John Wilson provided a scholarly examination of Kenny’s work, arguing that many of her clinical insights were crucial for today’s nurses.126
In 2004, drawing on material provided by a polio survivor, a biographer, a psychologist, a cultural historian, and Mary Kenny McCracken, the Australian Broadcasting Commission produced a radio show entitled “Sister Kenny: Saint or Charlatan?” Hers was “a name that rings few bells these days” historian Michelle Arrow acknowledged. She was “a self-trained Aussie bush nurse” who “claimed she had the answer to polio, and Americans believed her.” On one side Betty Newell, daughter of Charles Thelander (chair of the 1938 Queensland Royal Commission), unsympathetically declared that “Kenny’s egotism was incredible … I think she actually believed her own propaganda to a huge degree.” Kenny had once sat at her father’s dinner table, Newell recounted, and told the family “I put my hands on the little withered limb and I feel my power going into it,” a statement that was followed by “silence at the dinner table.” In a quite different tone Mary McCracken recalled that Kenny would say “Oh, it’s useless to try and convince these blockheads,” and Mavis Bosswell, a former patient at the Townsville clinic, praised Kenny’s work, while admitting that in her case her muscles were too badly damaged to allow her to able to walk again. McCracken’s effort to defend Kenny’s significance could not overcome Arrow’s presentation of Kenny as part charlatan, part messiah, and a “great self-publicist.” University of Sydney psychologist Mary Westbrook, a polio survivor who had studied PPS, claimed that Kenny’s theory of polio “was just medically, anatomically, physiologically so unsound.” But like Cohn, Arrow was not interested in debating the scientific issues. She noted that while Kenny had never found a “cure” she had given patients “hope.”127
Despite her dream of a lasting legacy Kenny has only a few memorials in Australia or the United States. In Warialda, her birthplace, the local Baptist church has a memorial stained glass window that was a gift from the KF. In Townsville, where she had her first government clinic, there is an Elizabeth Kenny playground and also a memorial sundial. In Nobby, where she lived and later died, the town council and the Nobby branch of the Queensland Country Women’s Association established a memorial park, and the house where she lived with her mother and Mary has been opened as a museum with a Kenny mural nearby.128 To honor the fiftieth anniversary of her death, donors to the Australian Sister Kenny Memorial Fund, which has provided scholarships to nursing students with an interest in remote and rural nursing, established the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Chair in Rural and Remote Nursing at the University of Southern Queensland.129
There is no special museum in Minneapolis, although Kenny is still important for the city. In 1986 the Kenny Institute celebrated Kenny’s 100th birthday, discovering too late her true 1880 birth date. During the celebration Institute employees wore “Kenny” clothes as they showed children an iron lung, an odd choice considering Kenny’s longstanding d
islike of that technology. Institute medical director Richard Owen, a polio survivor, recalled the time in the 1940s when Kenny had visited the Indiana hospital where he had been a teenage patient; she was “an awesome lady, large physically and in aura.” Her ideas about early mobility and reeducation were still part of current therapies for spinal cord and head injuries, Owen said. While “she did not know the technical language of medical doctors” she made accurate observations, which others had missed, “that were totally correct.”130 Kenny’s place in the region’s history was cemented in 1989 when Leonard Wilson, who had rejected Myers’ article on Kenny for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences in the late 1970s, devoted 8 pages to her in his book on the history of the University of Minnesota’s medical school. Wilson portrayed Minnesota faculty members as hospitable and open-minded, especially dean Harold Diehl, who was “remarkably open to new ideas” and “a perceptive judge of character.” In Wilson’s assessment, “although her training was that of a nurse, Sister Kenny acted toward poliomyelitis as a Hippocratic physician” and university physicians “gave Elizabeth Kenny’s methods a full and fair trial when no one else would, to the immeasurable benefit of poliomyelitis patients during the fifteen years or so before the introduction of polio vaccines.” While noting that “many medical men were never reconciled to Sister Kenny, and attacked her repeatedly,” he did not name Visscher or Myers.131 Healing Warrior, a children’s book about Kenny published in Minneapolis at the same time, defended Kenny’s invention of professional credentials because she believed “doctors wouldn’t listen to her if they knew she was not an educated, certified nurse.”132
In 1992, Owen and other administrators organized a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Institute, calling on former patients and their families to offer their memories and honor “a pioneer in changing the way the world viewed polio treatment.” The Institute featured an exhibit on Kenny, a portrait of Kenny at the Institute was restored, students at the city’s Kenny School studied the Kenny story, and the state’s governor declared December 17 Sister Kenny Day. The city hosted an Indoor Wheelchair Tennis Tournament along with the International Art Show by Disabled Artists, an annual event partly sponsored by the Institute.133 In a local newspaper Henry Haverstock, Kenny’s former patient, reminded readers that “doctors could never quite understand or accept her theories, but they could not dispute the evidence of their own eyes.”134
It was during this anniversary that I first came to the Twin Cities to begin my research on Kenny. Like most Australians born in the late 1950s, I had not heard of her while I was growing up in Melbourne, but as a doctoral student in the United States working on the history of polio I became intrigued by the story of a woman from Australia who made her mark in America. In 1992 I had begun an academic position at Monash University in Melbourne and become committed to this project after a friend told me that Mary Kenny McCracken was alive, living in Queensland, and willing to be interviewed. I went up to see Mary and her husband Stuart and found them hospitable, a bit wary, and willing to show me papers and photographs that they had not yet given to the University of Queensland. The 5 years Mary had spent in the United States had left a profound impression on her; my dual background (born and raised in Australia but trained in American history in the United States) intrigued her.135 Other informants such as Richard Owen and Margaret Opdahl Ernst, Kenny’s first secretary in Minnesota, invited me to attend the Institute’s celebrations. I was asked to interview the former patients who spoke warmly of their memories of being treated by Kenny and her technicians and described in matter-of-fact ways their experiences of living with PPS.
As the Twin Cities reclaimed Kenny as part of their heritage I became part of a small group of scholars and informants. I was interviewed in 2002 by Minnesota Public Radio for a program on Kenny in which Richard Owen, now retired from the Institute, remembered being horrified when Kenny undid the strings of his loin cloth in front of reporters.136
Civic boosters in Minnesota also found a place for Kenny. A 2007 pamphlet celebrating the state’s 150th year anniversary described Kenny as “a force to be reckoned with—a statuesque woman with snow-white hair who did not suffer fools gladly” but also as someone whose “ideas are still in use around the world and in Minneapolis at the Sister Kenny Institute.”137 A special issue of Daedalus on Minnesota described Kenny as “one of the most prominent and popular people in Minnesota in the 1940s.” “She invented her nursing credentials along with her nurse’s costume,” one commentator noted casually, and “affected an intimidating public presence, dramatic hats and all.” “She was not a Minnesotan … but we claim her as partly ours.”138
In 2010 Minnesota’s History Theater put on the world premiere of “Sister Kenny’s Children,” sponsored partly by the Institute. Playwright Doris Baizley based her play on patient letters from the Minnesota Historical Society as well as Cohn’s biography and Kenny’s autobiography. Reviewers found the play inspiring and touching, but wondered about Kenny’s fame: “Was she a publicity hound, or a private person who reluctantly used her celebrity status to further the cause of her treatment centers?”139
FINAL THOUGHTS
In her final autobiography My Battle and Victory, Kenny suggested that “in the history of medicine … it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas”; rather progress was sometimes sparked by God’s “weakest minister.”140 Her contemporaries knew that she did not see herself this way at all. She wanted to be remembered as a major contributor to medical progress, as a world renowned scientist like Marie Curie. But by and large, that was a failed project. She was always an outsider with an exotic background, an Australian bush nurse who became an American celebrity. As an unmarried, middle-aged woman who fought unapologetically with male physicians and hospital administrators, Kenny did not fit neatly into any available cultural scripts. After her death, as in her life, she was often evaluated harshly, and she was largely written out of polio history along with disabled patients and clinical care. When she was remembered by polio survivors who experienced a reappearance of their symptoms, it was often with bitterness.
I have sought to present Kenny not as a heroic figure but as someone worth remembering. I hope this book adds another layer to the stories about Kenny: as a woman, a nurse, a clinician, and a scientific innovator. When historians seek to highlight a forgotten figure they are frequently accused of hagiography. I am uncomfortable with the notion of a commemorative biography, which tends to eschew ambiguity and to present the past from a single committed perspective.
This retelling of the story of Kenny and her work is framed as a way of understanding how American medicine was practiced in the 1940s and 1950s. Kenny’s struggle to gain respect forced both professionals and the public to debate how to assess clinical practices and medical evidence. Clinical authority, the public knew, was considered a matter of social status and institutional affiliation. Yet Kenny loomed large, in every way. She demanded an upheaval of polio care and the gendered power relations in medical practice and its institutional structure. She insisted that her distinctive understanding of polio was the result of clinical research, a field she saw as the integration of clinical observations with laboratory evidence. She borrowed scientific terms she heard around her and peppered her lectures with them. But she cared little for nuance. Her skill was as an integrative thinker rather than as a theorist. She developed her theories in a kind of collage, where the pattern as a whole was more important than the intricate strands; she did not try to assess their intellectual coherency. Battered by skepticism and patronizing dismissal, she developed a professional persona in which the distinctions between her work and medical orthodoxy were crucial. She heard remarks that similarities between the old and the new implied a lack of originality, perhaps even the result of borrowing of others’ ideas. Her defense of her work was sometimes illogical, but her arguments—irrational-sounding or not—
were always placed behind the supple, strong bodies of her patients.
She also claimed a distinct way of assessing efficacy that threatened standard techniques. Thus, while orthodox practitioners saw muscle testing as a way to measure her patients’ improvements and assess her claims of recovery, Kenny saw such testing as inaccurate and harmful to the patient. In a time before modern evidence-based medicine, she called for fair comparisons of her work with the methods of others, yet she rejected standard testing techniques in favor of demonstrations and testimonials and warned that she would not allow a single child to be subjected to the pain and suffering that the poor care of a controlled test would surely bring.
She demanded formal recognition for the changes she brought to the workings of polio institutions, and trained her technicians to see themselves as special experts deserving popular and professional respect. As one popular work in 1958 argued, in some hospitals the Kenny method “entered with a flourish through the front doors and with the official sanction of the board of governors”; in others her work was “admitted surreptitiously through the service door … in the rear, and the governing staff pretend[ed] to have no official knowledge of it.”141 Kenny’s work helped to ensure that clinical care captured the public imagination—at least until the NFIP was finally able in the late 1950s to turn the polio story into a new story of men in white coats, saving children through carefully prepared scientific vaccines—and the American public demanded her methods be used to treat their children, and were not satisfied when physicians claimed to have “improved” it. In short, her legacy was complex at best and at times completely paradoxical.
Like her colleagues, patients, and critics Kenny shared a deep respect for the power and prestige of medical science. She relied on the expanding government investment in biomedical institutions; indeed she sometimes tried to redirect such investments when she believed they were made incorrectly. Yet she also found she was not alone when she excoriated antagonistic and patronizing physicians and attacked the ways that disabled patients were dismissed as troubling or clinically uninteresting and therefore as proper subjects for institutionalization. Kenny was no microbe hunter but she claimed insight into polio science through her understanding of the bodies of her patients. Bodies were central to her work and central to the extraordinary publicity around it. Until the Salk polio vaccine, images of a Kenny-treated fully recovered child overshadowed NFIP posters depicting children awkwardly leaving their crutches or wheelchairs.
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