Polio Wars (101 page)

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 been 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

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

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.
²²⁶

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

Before heading to Copenhagen Kenny spent time with her American friends. She was greeted at the airport by Russell and her husband and spent 5 days at the El Monte Kenny Hospital resting at her special cottage. On her flight from Australia to California
she had traveled with Jack Hall, a Pan-American pilot who had spent 3 months in an iron lung in Melbourne. In a typically dramatic gesture she described Hall's experience and noted that he was now seeking proper care at El Monte.
²³⁰
In New York Kenny stayed at her favorite Delmonico Hotel and told reporters that a third volume on her work was necessary as she had not had “sufficient opportunities to explain her theories to medical men.”
²³¹

While reporters in Los Angeles and New York still came to Kenny's press conferences and repeated her pronouncements, their reporting was now more dutiful than eager. Debates around Kenny's work no longer sparked professional fire and its newness had been tamed through 10 years of clinical adoption. Scientists still debated just how the polio virus traveled around the body, but despite the work of a few innovative virologists the scientific understanding of polio had not altered significantly. Although John Enders' 1948 work suggested that Kenny's insistence that scientists must look beyond damaged or destroyed neurons might not be so unscientific, the idea of polio as a non-neurological disease was largely ignored by most clinicians and laboratory researchers. Indeed Kenny's claim that polio was a muscle or skin disease sounded ridiculous. This was partly a reaction to Kenny as a nurse and an exaggerator but it also reflected a wider neglect of Enders' work. Until 1952 the ability to grow the polio virus in nonneurological tissue was considered by most of Enders' peers to be just another intriguing experimental finding.
²³²
A discussion of the pathogenesis of the polio virus in
Modern Trends in Pediatrics
(1951), for example, failed to mention Enders' work, and the author stated confidently that the virus multiplied in the walls of air passages and the alimentary canal and then “passes readily along the nerves to the central nervous system.”
²³³
Nor did O'Connor refer to Enders' work in a fundraising appeal at the Waldorf-Astoria, although he did boast about other NFIP-funded research projects that had led to the isolation of at least 3 types of polio virus.
²³⁴

In September 1951 the NFIP, in cooperation with the Danish National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, held its second international conference in Copenhagen. Five hundred delegates from 38 countries attended the 5-day conference, which was jointly hosted by the Nobel Prize winning Danish physicist Niles Bohr and Basil O'Connor.
²³⁵
Along with 32 American polio experts sponsored by the NFIP, the conference also attracted a number of physical therapists who came to attend both the polio conference and the first World Confederation of Physical Therapy, which was meeting concurrently.
²³⁶