Polio Wars (59 page)

The committee's skepticism turned to suspicion in describing John Pohl. During the NRC visit Pohl had not hidden his frustration with both the NFIP and the medical school. He was, the committee noted, the physician most directly involved in policymaking at the Institute, although he worked there only part time, visiting for about an hour on some days. What was clear was that the committee members neither liked nor trusted him. The early report draft noted that when he had been offered the post of Institute superintendent he had asked for a $20,000 salary, an amount that seemed high. While Pohl and other local physicians associated with the Institute might “honestly believe in the technique,” the early draft noted, “the Committee has reason to believe that the motive of personal gain may enter into this picture.”
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“Today the University, Sister Kenny and the students all seem to be dissatisfied,” the committee concluded in its final report. There was “deep and serious disagreement[s] and personal dislike and distrust not only between the groups but also between many of the individuals within each group.” The university wished to continue courses on polio's treatment “but on a broader basis and with complete academic freedom.” The medical faculty of the University of Minnesota had been “enthusiastic at first” and “impressed in various degrees with the theory and the practice of the Kenny method,” but many were “now hesitant to go along with the movement.” Kenny rejected the idea of broadening the Institute's courses and instead wanted to teach courses that would “be limited strictly to the Kenny concept and method of treatment.” She also felt the present courses were too short and should be lengthened to 2 years. Yet physical therapists and nurses studying at the Institute expressed wide dissatisfaction with the current courses “as too long for the content.”
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Politics, the committee's report concluded, were at the heart of these divisions. City officials were “sincerely enthusiastic” but also not “blind to the incidental benefits to Minneapolis, to the Minneapolis General Hospital and to political careers.” Local physicians benefited from an association with the Institute “either directly or indirectly.” Most believed “that the method is productive of some good results” although “some may frown on the dogmatic position of Sister Kenny” and “some doubt the theory.” The public support on which Kenny and her allies relied was, the committee believed, genuine but naive. Citizens “in favor of anything which will increase the use and spread of the Kenny method not only in Minneapolis but in the United States and throughout the world” were “not aware of existing scientific doubts” and did not “appreciate the complexities of the situation.”
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Finally the committee turned to Kenny herself. She had been hospitable and patient. But she also “revealed certain very significant attitudes to the problem under study.”
Not only had she expressed great disapproval of the NFIP and its president but she had “belittled additional research,” stating that “30 years ago she had done all the research necessary.” Yet, notwithstanding such a statement, the grant application had requested funding for “Clinical Research” and “Neurological Research.” The committee was not convinced that Kenny grasped the complexities of polio science. It praised her knowledge of the anatomy involved in her treatment but warned that she lacked “fundamental information of scientific medicine.” As an example the committee cited her statement in the film she showed them that “the muscle is the host to the virus.” Most of all, the committee disliked Kenny's prominence at the Institute. “Her unusual personality dominates the whole scene,” its final report warned. “She
is
the Kenny Institute and there is no possibility of the control of anything by anyone else for she controls everything and everybody. Her statements are empiric and final; there is no argument.”
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The NFIP, the committee concluded, should not dissociate itself from the Institute, partly in order to protect “what is good in the Kenny method” from being “lost through unfortunate associations,” and partly because the committee feared that if the Institute's fundraising campaign expanded “the duplication of nationwide drives” it would have “an effect upon public confidence.” The Institute, in the NRC committee's view, was not and could not be a proper site for scientific research. The NFIP should promote Kenny's work only in the narrowest sense: as a useful method that should be available to American patients treated by properly trained technicians. The NFIP should continue to fund courses for technicians, but it should make sure that all applicants were qualified physical therapists, not nurses without physical therapy training. No money should be given to the Institute for the maintenance of patients used solely as teaching or research subjects. And, most important, there should be no grant for either basic or clinical research unless the Institute, at some time in the future, could provide “conclusive evidence of a competent investigative staff and adequate laboratory facilities.”
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The NFIP thanked the NRC committee for their work but did not immediately respond to the Institute. It kept the NRC report secret, as the NRC committee had requested, and continued to watch the responses in Minnesota.

In November 1944 the Institute's board of directors, confident that a public movement was behind them, organized the first separate Kenny campaign. The NRC was just finishing its report and it seemed likely that it would lead to a rejection by the NFIP, but nothing had been publicly announced. The Kenny campaign was coordinated by a public relations firm based in Minneapolis, and its slogan was “Pennies for Kenny.” Kenny reigned as the campaign's celebrity.
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Although the drive was restricted to Minnesota, she went on tour, taking with her a new technical film demonstrating her work at the Institute. Dressed in black lace with orchids on her shoulder and accompanied by Mary Kenny, Kenny entered auditoriums and ballrooms to low murmurs of “there she is,” “look, there is Sister Kenny,” “here she comes.”
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She used this tour not only to attack the NFIP and laud the Institute but also to reposition herself in race politics. During the late 1930s the NFIP had scrambled to respond to civil rights activists who pointed to the neglect of black polio survivors. Convinced by Warm Springs' white trustees that the center should remain a whites-only institution,
the NFIP had established a small polio hospital at the Tuskegee Institute that opened in 1941. It was designed to be both a treatment center and a place to train African American orthopedic physicians, nurses, and physical therapists unable to gain access to specialty training programs in hospitals around the country.

During the war an emerging African American middle class helped to make problems of polio care visible, especially the racist policies implicit in almost all hospital care. Some municipal public hospitals such as the Minneapolis General Hospital admitted both white and black poor patients; most private hospitals were restricted to white paying patients. Initially affiliated with the city hospital, Kenny had accepted African American patients from the outset, as the
Reader's Digest
's depiction of Suzy had shown.
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With the founding of the Institute, a city building under the supervision of the city's board of welfare, Kenny continued to accept both black and white child patients and also a few African American nurses for training, such as Chicago nurse Lulu Boswell who later worked at the Tuskegee polio hospital.
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In other cities indigent black patients with polio received the Kenny method in public infectious diseases hospitals such as the Isolation Hospital in Memphis.
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References to Kenny and her work began to appear more frequently in the black press. The
Chicago Defender
featured a photograph of a grinning 11-year-old Jean Andrews on her way to Minneapolis to receive treatment at the Institute, and one of its health columns praised the Kenny treatment as “undoubtedly helpful in lessening the paralytic deformities.”
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Before the end of the war there were only a few black celebrities involved with polio fundraising. But in 1943 African American boxer Ray Robinson, an enthusiastic supporter of March of Dimes campaigns, was featured in the
New York Amsterdam News
in a story about a black girl who “was among the first to be benefited by the Kenny treatment at the Minneapolis General Hospital.”
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The racist assumptions Kenny had grown up with were clearly visible in her autobiography where she portrayed Australian Aborigines as savage and comic.
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In other remarks publicized in 1943 Kenny had referred to the limited number of black patients she had treated by noting the possible shielding affects of “pigment.”
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Such views were not challenged by the white businessmen and professionals she worked with in Minnesota. During the 1944 drive, however, perhaps pressured by the Fadell firm, Kenny became more aware of the importance of race politics in polio. After she showed her film in Washington, D.C. she proudly quoted a statement from John W. Lawlah, the dean of Howard University's medical school, that “there is no mistaking the results which we have seen in this picture … it is up to us as scientists to follow the lead Sister Kenny has given.”
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In Minnesota the organizers of the 1944 campaign sought the support of local African Americans. Milton G. Williams, the black publisher and editor of the
Twin City Observer
, agreed to work as the campaign's state chairman of “Negro participation.” The
Observer
, a Republican paper for black Minnesotans, set up a campaign committee and published pictures of Kenny and her Institute. Williams' editorials noted that the Institute had treated “a number of Negro children” and that in Minneapolis her treatment had “been given to all and sundry regardless of race and creed.”
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Kenny appeared at a meeting at the St. James A.M.E. Church in St. Paul where she “held the audience spellbound as she reviewed her struggles to initiate her treatment of polio.” She asked that “a Negro physician” come to her Institute “to learn her system” and showed part of her film featuring a black girl treated at the Institute.
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Despite its entry into race politics, the campaign's most successful appeal was to white Minnesotans, especially white Republicans. Cans bearing the slogans “Pennies for Kenny” and “Give, and Be Thankful They Shall Walk” appeared at private bridge parties, movie nights, and society teas. Funds were raised at a wrestling show, a boxing match, bowling lanes, and the annual Gopher football dinner. The state's Republican Party made the campaign part of its annual charitable program, and the Minneapolis Association of Manufacturers donated the proceeds of its annual trade dinner at the Radisson hotel to the Institute.
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Earlier that month Mayor Kline had been accused of ignoring the “open flaunting” of the city's gambling and liquor laws and had appeared before a Hennepin County grand jury where he declared that he would not “tolerate any type of pay-offs.”
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Kline's connections with liquor dealers, nonetheless, helped him convince Earl Haskin, the state liquor commissioner, to become honorary chairmen of the Kenny campaign's liquor industry division. When the campaign organizers declared November 21 as Sister Kenny Day, liquor dealers in the state agreed to donate 25 percent or more of their gross receipts for the day.
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During the November campaign
Reader's Digest
published “Sister Kenny vs. The Medical Old Guard” by Lois Miller. There was no effort to balance this story with statements from skeptical physicians: here were unambiguous heroes and villains. Kenny's work was “revolutionary,” Miller announced confidently, for “it discards previous concepts and treatments.” And it was more than a departure from clinical practice: it threatened the hierarchy and complacency of the medical profession, for “it was developed not by a doctor, but by a nurse.” Kenny, “a strong-minded woman” with “no time for politics” did have, Miller admitted, “an unfortunate faculty for treading heavily on sensitive toes.” Miller retold the AMA report as part of Kenny's “long struggle against stubborn and reactionary elements in the medical profession.” The AMA committee, Miller argued, had urged physicians to reject the Kenny treatment but offered “nothing in its place other than a return to the old method of using splints and braces.” In fact, Kenny's methods were in widespread use although—in phrases that sounded just like Kenny—“not always used properly” as many technicians and nurses “have not had sufficient training or experience.” The minority who continued to decry the Kenny treatment admitted that “they had no firsthand knowledge of it” and “had never tried it clinically.” During heated debates at the 1944 AMA meeting, one doctor said “I wonder what we have on trial here—Sister Kenny's personality or the Kenny treatment.”
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Miller did not repeat Kenny's comment about the economic basis of orthopedists' antagonism, but she did use evidence Kenny often quoted: the closing of 2 classrooms by the Michael Dowling School in Minneapolis, a school for physically disabled children unable to attend public schools. The rooms were no longer needed because all 91 patients with polio paralyzed between 1940 and 1943 were able to return to their regular schools.
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It was a powerful comparison between an ordinary schoolroom filled with able-bodied children and empty classrooms where despondent crippled children were once confined.

Simultaneously the
American Mercury
published its own story of Kenny by muckraking journalist Albert Deutsch. In “The Truth About Sister Kenny,” Deutsch reveled in “the Amazonian figure of the gray-haired, steely-eyed, strong-jawed Elizabeth Kenny.” Money was at the heart of this new fight, Deutsch guessed, noting that Kenny had turned down “many tempting offers of financial reward,” and that the NFIP had “given but niggardly
financial support to her activities while cashing in handsomely on the publicity she has received.” Orthopedists, Deutsch believed, saw Kenny as a competitor and were angered by her claims that her methods used early enough “could have saved many patients.” “This deep personal resentment” was manifest throughout the AMA report whose “bias is so obvious that it succeeds only in weakening the impact of certain criticisms which are not without merit.”
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Deutsch noted that Kenny was “a difficult person,” although she showed her child patients “consummate tenderness, inspiring courage and rare devotion.” But he also guessed that many of the doctors who “call her arrogant, arbitrary and domineering” resented “the reversal of their authoritarian role toward the nursing profession, with a lowly
nurse
telling the doctors where to get off!” Deutsch defended Kenny's belligerence as the unsurprising result of her experiences with refractory physicians. “Can the medical profession justly expect only sweet reasonableness from a woman who, after years of personal sacrifice, feels that its blind opposition has cost the lives or health of thousands who might have been saved had she been given a chance to demonstrate her method in time?” He did not, however, agree with Kenny's complaints that physicians had refused to assess her work. He had spent much of his career exposing the cruel and neglectful care of patients in state mental institutions and was no fan of organized medicine, having “occasionally crossed swords with Dr. Fishbein myself,” but he did believe that
JAMA
had “thus far provided a balanced forum for Kenny controversialists.”
¹⁶⁰
These articles magnified Kenny's voice in response to the AMA report, critiquing both the NFIP and AMA orthopedists.