Polio Wars (73 page)

In October 1944 Kenny organized what she called a “world premiere” for a Twin Cities audience of local physicians, clergy, members of social and civic organizations, and medical and science university faculty. The audience, estimated at 700, gave Kenny a standing ovation, and she was presented with several gifts of flowers during a reception in the theater's lounge. To reporters unable to attend, Institute board member Henry Haverstock described the film's “graphic scenes” and its story of “the progress of patients from the time they entered the Institute as cripples to the day they were released as normal, active individuals.” Although it was “technical in nature,” Haverstock believed “the film nevertheless carries a powerful emotional appeal.”
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Kenny then took her film on a tour that included Washington, D.C. and several towns in Illinois and Ontario.
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Kenny was convinced that the power of her film was its first reel, which would enable doctors and other professionals to hear her explain how and why her techniques worked, and thereby recognize the truth of her concept of the disease. “Many statements have been made concerning this work,” she warned, “by those who have preferred to view it from afar.”
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Thus, in an early scene,
The Kenny Concept
brought the viewer directly into the wards of the Institute to watch a “well trained” Kenny technician in a white gown and mask who was “familiar with the newer knowledge of the classification and typing of the muscular system” treat a patient with hot packs.
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She was also proud of her film's narrative arc. It showed patients whose “severe pain is overcome in three days,” and then after their “deformities” were “combated” the full function of their muscles was “restored” in 2 months. The patients then waved “goodbye to all treatment and hospitalization and walk out,” after a period of treatment that “prior to my visit to the United States” would not even have begun.
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The Kenny Concept
was structured around 2 sites: patients at the Institute—before, during, and after therapy—and Kenny in her office, seated at a desk like a kind of senior stateswoman, reading from her lectures to explain what the viewer had seen and why it was important. Despite the film's portrayal of Kenny as Institute director, Kenny reminded her audience that as a nurse she had not breached professional conventions, for all of her patients were examined in the presence of “medical men” who were members of the AMA.
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The patients (but not the therapists shown on screen) were named and personalized: Patsy, Allen, Robert, Rosemary, Colleen, Bobby, Vernon, Jack, Wally, and Virgil. And, viewers were assured, they were all real people, not actors.
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It is not quite clear how Kenny distinguished between acting and demonstrating, for she later sent each patient $50 for their participation in the film. “I am always only too happy to help you in any way in your lectures and clinics by being there if you need me,” one recipient replied, “because some doctors really do have to be shown.”
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Kenny was usually careful not to identify the patients with a surname, but she did boast to a group of university officials that after meeting a young man called Jack MacArthur and finding out that he was related to General Douglas MacArthur, “I felt it absolutely incumbent upon me to try do something for him.” In her film MacArthur's body was used to dramatize the harmful effects of orthodox polio care. He is first seen lying on a table while Kenny explains that “this patient did not receive treatment by the newer science.” To show “the devastating effect of peripheral involvement” (the term she used to imply viral infection in places outside the brain and spinal cord) MacArthur, flanked by Kenny and a nurse in white, tries to sit up. Then he is shown as completely recovered after 2 months of treatment for “peripheral damage.”
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Kenny saw this transformation as testimony not only to her method but also to her theory. She believed that the patients in the film, like her other patients at the Institute and around the country, were “clinical proof” demonstrating “that the concept of this disease infantile paralysis presented by me as the result of my research is correct.”
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For Kenny the film provided visual confirmation of her ideas, democratically available to anyone who watched the film. “Dr. Fishbein and anyone else may see living proof of the value of the newer science of dermo-neuro-muscular therapy introduced by me for the newer concept discovered by me,” she told one reporter. “This proof can be produced anywhere at any time in the documentary films.”
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To bring home the lessons of the film she wrote
A Brief Description of the Film Presenting The Kenny Concept
, a pamphlet intended to be handed out to audiences, reiterating that the film provided “indisputable evidence directly contradicting the theories upon which all previous treatment had been based.”
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As further evidence of a serious engagement with medical science, the film reproduced photographs of patients featured in Robert Lovett's
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
in order to show the poor results of orthodox care.

Kenny's theory that the polio virus attacked muscles more often than the nervous system was difficult to prove by showing only the body's clinical appearance. The American public was used to seeing cinematic dramatizations of germs as well as men in white coats and test tubes in laboratories.
The Kenny Concept
used bodies to talk about the polio virus. As the camera focuses onto Virgil's back, the narrator explains that “the virus evidently found a host in the spinal muscles alienating the abdominals.”
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(It was this kind
of statement that had annoyed the NRC committee visitors.) But it was difficult to demonstrate that what the viewer saw was actually the picture of a virus in the muscles.

Alienation was also difficult to demonstrate. In the case of Colleen, Kenny's voice explains, “the quads are stretched and the hamstrings are stimulated in order to bring about subconscious contraction and preserve the pattern of movement in the cerebrum.” But while stretching and stimulating could be shown on film, the other comments were simply words, as was the narrator's statement, “We are now ready to overcome condition of alienation of the quadriceps … by relaxing and contracting, the subconscious mind is reached, then it is necessary to get the brain power back to the point of attachment.”
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Such phrases and terms made sense only to a fully trained Kenny technician or perhaps to a professional who had attended one of Kenny's courses. For most audiences, these were serious-sounding words indicating the wisdom and skills of a polio expert, but neither they nor the images that accompanied them explained or proved the validity of Kenny's concepts.

In Kenny's staged lecture in the film she compares the comments of her medical critics to the evidence her audience has just seen. She quotes O'Connor admitting in August 1944 that the results of NFIP-funded researchers “had been negative.” She tries to denigrate orthodox treatment without demonizing its practitioners, saying “in this film you have seen fettered muscles crippling their victims even with the best and most conscientious treatment.”
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But her pamphlet attacked polio care more harshly, warning of the dangers of any modification of the Kenny method: “all investigators, whether antagonist or kindly disposed, have admitted that deformities have been eliminated in all patients receiving the unadulterated Kenny treatment.”
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Kenny was most convincing when she appeared as the active clinician giving a patient special muscle exercises, saying “Don't think of anything, don't think of anything at all, don't think I am doing anything with you. Now think with me, relax that, let your brain power extend to here. I am taking it back, don't you try to take it back, I am taking it for you.” Then she shifts from clinician to teacher and theorist as she turns to the audience explaining “it will take some little time to correct the mistake [of] non-treatment of in-coordination.” To reiterate the economic as well as physiologic necessity of functionality she features Wally, a patient who after 16 months of orthodox treatment could not sit up or feed himself, but is shown transformed after 16 months of Kenny treatment. Kenny, dressed in a white suit with a corsage, stands proudly besides Wally, now a young aspiring businessman in a suit, one hand casually in his pocket.
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Still, Kenny continued to believe that her film constituted proof of her theories. Her “documentary film,” she proudly announced during a fundraising event, presented “indisputable evidence and proof of my clinical findings. I have forgotten the weary 34 years of loneliness, humiliation and sacrifice in the joyouse [sic] consciousness that as a result of the knowledge gained by me through research, your child will walk again and play again—perhaps you yourself may again enjoy a happy normal life.”
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Most viewers who disliked the film said nothing to Kenny. But on occasion sympathetic doctors did try to help her turn her film into a medium that might convince a scientific audience. James Perkins, the head of the Division of Communicable Diseases of New York State's health department, had attended Kenny's course in Minneapolis in June 1942, and continued to be interested in her work. In May 1945, after watching a copy of
The Kenny Concept
with other officials in the health department's screening room,
Perkins wrote to Kenny to explain why he believed its use of dramatic cinematic conventions made it untrustworthy as a medical film.
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The strength of the film, Perkins assured Kenny, involved “those portions showing you at work at the bedside [which] make clear, as no amount of printed matter can, your mastery of muscle anatomy and physiology, as well as your understanding of the mental factors involved.” But there were certain aspects of the film that he believed would “hinder your cause rather than help it so far as the medical profession is concerned.” Two elements had left him and other physicians in his department with “mixed emotions”: the testimonials quoted in the film and the “direct comparison of your cases with horrible examples of deformities resulting from treatment by the orthodox method.”
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The testimonial, Perkins warned, was the strategy of choice for defenders of alternative medicine. The sincerity and social standing of these defenders did not give their words any greater credibility. At a recent hearing on the licensing of chiropractors in New York's state legislature, for example, the “most glowing and yet worthless testimonials were presented by such individuals as a retired brigadier general, an Army nurse, a Rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Metropolitan opera star.” These men and women were “absolutely sincere,” but their conclusions were “completely erroneous.” This technique, further, was likely to raise professional hackles. Physicians “are so well aware, through bitter experience, of the utter worthlessness of testimonials, that I think there is almost an automatic reaction
against
the device or method being advocated when testimonials are used.”
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Worse than the use of testimonials, Perkins argued, was Kenny's comparison of patients treated by her methods and patients treated with orthodox therapies. Not only did such scenes humiliate the unfortunate, but physicians found no scientific validity in this kind of comparison for, as “each group represents selected cases,” it did not prove “the superiority of your method.” Perkins tried to think of a way that her film could appropriately compare patients, and suggested that a comparison of cases could be valid “
if your cases and the orthodox cases represented strictly alternate cases meeting rigid diagnostic criteria upon admission to a given hospital
,” and then showing “final results in a consecutive series of cases admitted to a hospital and treated by you,
with no omissions made in the series.
” And perhaps at the beginning of this reel there should be “a certification by the chief of staff of the hospital that each case met certain (specified) criteria of diagnosis, and that every case meeting such criteria has been included in the series.”

Perkins regretted that “a carefully controlled study was not conducted on the value of your method when you first came to the United States.” But it was “too late now” for polio's clinical care had altered so profoundly that he doubted whether anyone “will be willing to treat the alternate cases in such a study rigidly in the manner practiced so widely prior to your coming here.” “Although I know some of the above remarks will not be to your liking,” he concluded, “they have been written in a friendly and constructive manner.”
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“Constructive, or even destructive criticism, is always helpful,” Kenny replied, noting that Perkins's criticisms of her film were the only ones “recorded up to date.” She defended her use of testimonials in the film as extracts from “the scientific reports of duly qualified medical practitioners” rather than from lay people. Nor was she willing to accept the idea that the film showed selectivity bias. The patients had been
chosen objectively, for they had been “examined in the presence of a group of medical men with Dr. Melvin Henderson as Chairman, and evidence was taken from the doctor who supervised both groups. These cases were selected owing to their similarity.”
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Kenny-trained professionals at the Institute had checked other patients who had been treated by orthodox methods and released “as complete recoveries” 3 years later, and found “there wasn't one normal child amongst the whole forty cases.” But patients treated with the Kenny method—“the same type of cases and treated under the supervision of the same medical man and presented to other medical men”—were, the physicians all agreed, “normal—as a matter of fact, better than normal children. This can be understood when you take in the findings of science.” In her mind a clinical trial would be torture rather than science. She would reject any “controlled study of a method of treatment that would condemn children to suffer pain from two to four months [when]… as you saw in the film this pain can be reduced to a few days.”
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