Polio Wars (71 page)

McCarthy's and Gunzburg's depiction of Kenny drew on both the feisty independent professional woman typical of 1930s Hollywood films that had made Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell famous, and presaged the harsher stories of women in later films such as
Mildred Pierce
(1945). Although both knew Mary Kenny as Kenny's ward and one of her most accomplished technicians, neither McCarthy nor Gunzburg considered adding her character to the script. The writers tempered Kenny's fierce devotion to her cause with a sympathetic femininity. In McCarthy's original proposal Kenny, forced by a medical emergency to break a date with her fiancé, rides her horse “still wearing her evening gown with its beautiful long white satin train.”
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In typical Hollywood fashion Kenny's character is forced to choose between professional success and personal happiness. Throughout the film her fiancé returns, eager to marry her, only to be put off as Kenny copes with one epidemic after another. Finally, although he protests “I'm not going to let you throw yourself away on this work any longer,” she chooses helping the world's children over having her own.

The scriptwriters were aware that the story's drama needed to be balanced with moments of humor, a point John Pohl also made in 1944 after reading a version of the script.
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Gunzburg had considered depicting Kenny as an Australian naïf, urging McCarthy to consider that “the mere thought of Kenny in Manhattan offers comedy situations … hamburgers, automats.”
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Pohl suggested dramatizing Kenny's initial work at the Minneapolis General Hospital “showing you trying to demonstrate patients upon the stairway landing between two elevators … with the elevator unloading laundry, food carts, etc. and nurses and interns coming and going up and down stairs through your demonstration.” Pohl also proposed adding an episode whereby Kenny loses the special hat she has bought to meet the Queen of England out of a train window in Australia, and then finds it later on the head of an Aboriginal woman.
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In a later version of the script,
Queensland doctors mistakenly test Kevin for evidence of polio while he protests “Miss Kenny knows there's nothing wrong with me.”
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None of these episodes was used in the film, but there is a gentle comedy around a busy doctor mistaking Kevin for a patient he has no time to examine.

Questions about Kenny's nursing qualifications, the screenwriters recognized, were also being raised and, unusual for a nurse's autobiography,
And They Shall Walk
had said little about her training.
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The writers sought to resolve this issue unambiguously. The film opened with Kenny arriving home in her new nurse's cap and cape after graduating from an unnamed school. She continues to wear a version of a white nurse's uniform, when she is an army nurse and then in her practice afterward. To reinforce the idea that officials regarded her as a reputable professional, the film also suggests that Kenny was supported and sanctioned by the government. Kenny is shown receiving a letter from members of the London City Council who “want you in England,” and later has a request from the Australian government that sends a government plane.

But the film writers did not want to portray Kenny as too professional. Early- and mid-twentieth century nursing leaders promoted nursing to the public as an altruistic vocation rather than a career offering professional satisfaction. Thus, her physician-mentor tells her “you're a born nurse” and is frustrated when she turns down his offer of a hospital position to work as a bush nurse. In the film local rural families give her a black horse in gratitude for her 3 years of work with them because “you won't take a penny for what you've done.”

A Hollywood nurse was usually a clever supportive assistant whose innocent insight aids the more brilliant male scientist or doctor. The most successful part of the screenwriters' efforts to balance Kenny as a nurse and humane crusader were showing her in relation to dismissive physicians. She never strays far from the path of the good nurse, is soft-spoken with patients, and defiant but not disrespectful with doctors. When she is faced with her first patient with polio, for example, her professionalism is shown by her ability to ignore the girl's constant crying and not do anything until she hears back from her physician-mentor by telegram. As she develops her own theory of polio and begins presenting it to disbelieving doctors, she is sometimes clearly frustrated by their rudeness, but she is never openly angry.

Unlike Kenny's experience in Australia and America the film showed no adult patients or male therapists. The gender relations in the film are stark: all the nurses and technicians are women, all the doctors are men, and all the patients are children. During the 1930s a few films (
The White Angel
, Warner Brothers, 1936 and
Nurse Edith Cavell
, RKO, 1939) had gone beyond the “nurse-handmaiden” approach, but not many. During the war, stoic and courageous nurses were becoming familiar characters, central to movies such as
Cry ‘Havoc'
(MGM, 1943) and
So Proudly We Hail
(Paramount, 1943). Perhaps these movies and the recent success of MGM's
Madame Curie
(1943) explained RKO's willingness to stretch the conventions of commercial film storytelling and allow Kenny to be portrayed both as a healing nurse and a scientific innovator, challenging physicians to accept her concept of the disease. Both movies ended with a cautious feminist message: women scientists can achieve great things, but at a great cost.
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And then the screen writers had to deal with the question of how to depict the medical establishment. Gunzburg had at first wanted to dramatize an episode from Kenny's autobiography in which a medical antagonist steals her manuscript and tries to publish
it under his own name. To balance this picture of a bad doctor, Gunzburg was willing to portray Kenny as angry, explaining to McCarthy: “in justice to the medical profession, as well as to the humanization of Kenny, we have established that her temper was responsible for some of the misunderstandings and prejudices against her.”
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But the plagiarist did not appear in the film and neither did the anger.

In the film the dichotomy between medical right and wrong is exemplified by the 2 central male physicians. Aeneas McDonnell, Kenny's mentor and the “good” doctor, is the rural general practitioner and a man of the people. He has an old-fashioned unpretentious office, the final script suggested, unlike his medical opponent's office that “is large and very modern, full of scientific paraphernalia and new books.”
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In the words of one reviewer, he “speaks with a fine, thick Scotch burr and looks on Miss Russell as the greatest thing in medicine since Pasteur.”
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The “bad” doctor and Kenny's main antagonist is contemptuous Brisbane orthopedic specialist Dr. Brack. He is presented as elitist, rational, and inflexible. In the film's most memorable scene, based on an episode in Kenny's autobiography, Kenny confronts Brack while he is lecturing on the virtues of splinting to a group of nurses and doctors seated in a Brisbane hospital amphitheater. Kenny, simmering with frustration, interrupts him, asking why he refuses to meet with her and why he has colluded with the city health authorities to close her clinic. Brack invites her to speak to his audience. Although he tells Kenny that “as open-minded men of science we do not reject ideas without examination,” he dismisses her, saying her words “are not scientific terms.” Kenny replies that “the words I use describe the things I see.” When Brack asks her why doctors do not see them, she says “because you've got a book in front of your eyes” and turns to Brack's audience to remind them that “medical ideas change: your fathers bled their patients.” Throughout the scene a patient lies at the center, fully encased in splints, and when Brack warns Kenny not to debate “in front of the patient,” Kenny retorts “it's his life, not yours or mine.”

In another scene, the 2 doctors debate Kenny's work by arguing about the evidence of books versus bodies. “Are we to take her word or Sir Robert Jenkins?” Brack asks McDonnell, who retorts “you only recognize a fact when it's printed in a book.” Brack berates McDonnell for encouraging “a nurse to contradict the greatest medical authorities in the world.” McDonnell replies “If she'd been a doctor, she'd have followed the orthodox treatment. She wouldn't have done the things she did, she wouldn't have dared.” In the final script Gunzburg suggested that Brack ask McDonnell “do you often get these mad ideas about fake cures brought in by untrained people?”
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But in the film Brack does not say that Kenny is “untrained.” In one of the film's few references to Kenny's claim that she had identified a new disease, Brack comments: “If her ideas were correct she'd have discovered not a new treatment, but an entirely new disease.” McDonnell replies, “Well, I don't mind her discovering a new disease so long as she can cure it.”
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To explain his refusal to try her methods, Brack declares dramatically that “I will not experiment with the lives of children! … Guinea pigs, yes—children no.” His ethical qualms are presented seriously, and McDonnell says later with reluctant admiration: “He's a brilliant man, he's absolutely sincere. In his mind he's defending the rights of children.”

Near the end of the film Brack attacks Kenny, saying that “instead of aiding physicians you have the arrogance to try to teach [them] … in the opinion of many doctors you are no longer a nurse.” Kenny's self-sacrifice and nursely behavior, shown by many examples
before this, is intended to refute any such accusation, and she responds with quiet defiance, “I have given up too much to wear this nurse's uniform.”

The film's ending reinforces the idea of Kenny's sacrifice. As the AMA committee's critical report plays over the loudspeaker of a lecture room Kenny bravely continues to give a lecture to orthopedic surgeons. She returns to her office at the Institute, lonely and unhappy, having learned of McDonnell's death and now another medical committee's rejection. As she walks to the Institute's front gates a flock of happy children (former patients) come running to greet her singing “Happy Birthday.” They are all healthy children walking without crutches or wheelchairs, but it is a poignant scene, hardly a sign of uplifting success.
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Pohl felt that the scene showed that “the happiness and well bodies of children are of more importance than rebuffs from the medical profession,” but he did “not like to see Sister Kenny as a bitterly disappointed woman without a future.”
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Kenny agreed—this was not the ending she had imagined. She urged Nichols to use a scene based on one he himself had witnessed at the Institute where “doctors stood on chairs and tables to watch me correct a deformity.” The film, she suggested, could offer “a grand climax” such as when an orthopedic surgeon told the group of physicians that “the deformity had been corrected and function restored and said ‘Gentlemen, that is the answer to the accusations.' ”
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FIGURE 6.1
Still from RKO's
Sister Kenny
(1946) showing Philip Merivale as orthopedist Dr. Brack debating with Rosalind Russell as Kenny in a Brisbane amphitheatre. Courtesy of Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

In August 1946, after Kenny learned that the ending remained the same, she sent a telegram to RKO protesting that as it conveyed “a message of defeat,” RKO should “not release the picture” without a more positive ending, “otherwise it would not be my life.”
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By this time, however, the upcoming Kenny Foundation (KF) fundraising campaign was using footage of the film and claiming (inaccurately) that all the child actors except for Doreen McCann were “cured patients from the Kenny Institute.”
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More importantly, Kenny had staked her professional career on it. It was not easy to admit that she had lost creative control. A day later she sent another telegram presenting her change of heart as the result of speaking to calmer heads. Both Russell and Valerie Harvey, one of her technicians who was working as an advisor on the Hollywood set, Kenny explained, had disagreed with her assessment. She was “willing to take their verdict [that]… the ending of the film was satisfactory.”
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The KF campaign and Kenny's own extensive fundraising also made her earlier harsh depiction of elite women seem inappropriate. McCarthy and Gunzburg had planned to dramatize one of the few class conflicts in Kenny's autobiography through the figure of Lady Latham, described by McCarthy as a parody of a female British aristocrat with “three chins, a lorgnette and a nose perpetually pointed upward in disapproval.”
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In one script version McCarthy made Latham a trustee of the Toowoomba Nurses Home, where Kenny is finishing her training. “Elizabeth Kenny may be a good nurse, but she must be taught to keep her place,” Latham announces; her off-duty clothes are “too frivolous” and “beyond her station in life.” “No good Australian has any patience with that ‘station in life' nonsense,” young Kenny retorts. “We nurses resent people who give money to hospitals just for their own personal glory and amusement. Laymen should consider it a privilege to give such checks, but, after giving them, they should go away quickly and permit experts to run the affairs of the sick.”
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Gunzburg at first liked this character, adding “this was not to be the first nor the last society woman to become peeved when Kenny refused to permit them to bask in the sunshine of her career at [the] expense of her treatment.”
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But as wealthy women like Latham loomed larger in Kenny's fundraising, the character was dropped. One of the few references to the financing of medical care comes when Kenny learns that a donation from Kevin was paying for 10 beds at the Toowoomba Hospital.