Read Polio Wars Online

Authors: Naomi Rogers

Polio Wars (10 page)

Delighted to have a chance to speak to O'Connor, Kenny spent “almost two hours” talking and explaining. Years later she would tell audiences eager to hear the worst that O'Connor had treated her coldly, but in the early 1940s while her relationship with the
NFIP prospered, she reported that she had enjoyed meeting him. O'Connor carefully explained to her the NFIP policy of awarding grants only to individuals based at an institution that had requested funding from the NFIP and then only if the project “met the approval of the [NFIP's] medical advisory board.” Kenny was convinced by “the sincerity of purpose” behind this policy and “the soundness of its argument.” It was, she concluded, “only natural that a lawyer would hesitate to dictate a policy to men who were specialists in the field of medicine.”
98
O'Connor later recalled that after that first meeting he said to Don Gudakunst, the NFIP's medical director, “I think she's a crackpot, but I'm not so sure she may not have something.”
99

Kenny decided she would go to Chicago to visit the AMA's Council on Physical Therapy as Cusack had suggested and then fulfill her obligation to visit the Mayo Clinic, which her Brisbane allies expected her to do.
100
Kenny suspected that representatives of America's organized profession would be no more open to her than their British and Australian counterparts. She was right. In Chicago, Howard Carter, the secretary of the AMA's Council on Physical Therapy, greeted her with the unfriendly remark: “I don't understand just what it is you want. I was under the impression that you belonged to some religious order and had something to sell.” Ignoring the confusion over her title Kenny focused on the accusation that she was just a greedy charlatan. On the contrary, she replied tartly, she had “something to give to America if America were willing to accept it.” Skeptical, Carter made an appointment for her with John Coulter, head of the Department of Physical Therapy at Northwestern University's medical school.
101
A respected specialist in physical medicine, Coulter appeared genuinely interested. He asked Kenny to autograph his own copy of her 1937 textbook and invited her to meet the 2 women physical therapists with whom he worked. Kenny had always sought out the most senior male experts involved in polio care—usually orthopedic surgeons—and she recognized that she was being put in her gendered place as a female technician. Coulter's therapists told Kenny that for her method to make sense the disease in Australia “must differ radically from that found in any other part of the world.”
102
Prepared for this argument, Kenny replied that she believed she could prove “the disease was the same everywhere” but that she “was the only one who had recognized its true symptoms.” One of the therapists retorted scornfully, “do you mean to tell me that I have been massaging monkeys for two years for symptoms of a disease that does not exist?” In words that may have been softened in her later recollections, Kenny replied that such therapy was “certainly doing damage.”
103

Disheartened by her experiences in Chicago, Kenny traveled on to Rochester seeing “nothing ahead but to return to Australia.”
104
She contacted Mayo Clinic orthopedist Melvin Henderson, using her letter of introduction to him from Herbert Wilkinson, the Queensland neuroanatomist who had written the preface to her 1937 textbook.
105
Henderson was courteous but wary. He had already been president of the American Orthopedic Association and the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgeons, and was the director of Mayo's nursing school at Colonial Hospital, one of Mayo's affiliated hospitals where he was chief of staff. He privately assured Wilkinson that he would be glad to see Kenny but warned that all his Mayo patients were private and would therefore not be suitable for “demonstration purposes.”
106

Henderson introduced Kenny to his colleague Frank Krusen, one of the founders of a group of physicians practicing physical medicine (later the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation). At the Mayo Clinic Krusen directed the nation's
first 3-year physical medicine residency program. He had written physical therapy textbooks for physicians and nurses and also directed the Mayo Clinic's physical therapy training program, which had graduated its first class only a year earlier.
107
Krusen talked to Kenny “at intervals” for 2 days and was, he admitted a few years later, “taken aback by her belligerent attitude.” However, learning that the Queensland government had sponsored some of her clinics and that a few Australian physicians were enthusiastic about her treatment, he and Henderson decided that some physicians should “observe her work more closely.” Sensing, however, that Kenny might not be easy to work with, they urged her to go to Minneapolis where there was a large public hospital as well as a state orthopedic hospital.
108

In the Twin Cities Kenny was, for the first time, able to treat American patients, although only the “hopeless” ones. Her clinical results, more than her written testimonials, intrigued a few, well-connected local surgeons, including Wallace Cole, head of the University of Minnesota's orthopedic department.
109
At the Gillette State Hospital, renowned as one of the few state-funded orthopedic hospitals in the country, Kenny saw familiar conditions: “little patients lying in their beds, the old look of resignation on their faces, their frail bodies strapped into frames or laden with splints and casts” and “the pelvic tilts, the apparent leg shortening, the dropped feet, the stiff and distorted spines, and the useless abdominals.” At the Shriners Hospital she removed the splints and braces of a boy with a deformed spine who had made no improvement in 5 months and pointed out the “muscle condition” that “must be treated.” At the Children's Hospital in St. Paul she examined another boy left with deformed feet “despite the best efforts of the supervising surgeon” and after treating him for just a few days was able to demonstrate clinical improvements that impressed the hospital's medical staff.
110

It was against this background of desperate parents and intrigued surgeons that Kenny gave a lecture to physicians at the University of Minnesota in which she spoke of the treatment she had “evolved” for “symptoms which were the opposite of those generally accepted.” These symptoms, she argued, had not just been overlooked but contradicted the accepted picture of polio paralysis. “I can clearly see the difficulty you are experiencing in attempting to follow the lectures I am giving,” she told the physicians in her audience, but “if you wish to be successful [you have to]… disregard all measures… you have been taught.”
111

Unlike the many times when her conclusions had failed to convince her listeners on this occasion Kenny began to feel encouraged.
112
Miland Knapp, head of the university's physical therapy department, admitted later that he and his colleagues “did not have the slightest idea of what she was talking about when she started.” But Knapp, a patient man, tried to understand what Kenny was saying.
113
He invited her to St. Barnabas Hospital to see one of his patients, a boy with a paralyzed arm in splints where “after several months of ineffectual treatment, doctor, patient and parents were on the ragged edge.” Kenny took off the boy's splint and demonstrated several clinical signs that Knapp “had not previously recognized.” Under her care the boy began to improve and a few months later was able to shovel snow for his family. Knapp was shocked by the patient's initial improvements for he had been taught that if an arm in an airplane splint was brought down “even once” it would lose the positive effects of several months care. He and his wife invited Kenny and Mary to stay at their house for about 2 weeks. They enjoyed Kenny's
“wonderful sense of humor,” but disliked the casually domineering way she treated her ward, demanding, for example, that Mary go to bed at 8 pm.
114

Physicians like Knapp and Cole were members of a local and regional elite, with prestigious university and hospital positions, and Henderson and Krusen were prominent national figures. While doctors who specialized in physical medicine struggled for professional respect, orthopedic surgeons were known for being conservative and insular. The responsiveness that Kenny experienced in Minnesota was surprising.
115

Certainly, as Kenny spoke of “deformities” and their prevention, she was careful to remain respectful of surgery itself, telling her audience that her methods would not provide a substitution for the orthopedic operations typically performed on patients with polio once their disabilities were clearly not going to improve. Further, it was clear to many of her listeners that whatever their other benefits, her methods would dramatically alter an aspect of polio care that made the bad situation of paralysis worse. Instead of stiff patients lying in pain in splints or a frame, her patients lay comfortably in their hospital beds.

CLINICAL AND POLITICAL ACUITY

Kenny had met the right people—Basil O'Connor, Kristian Hansson, and John Coulter—and she did not act like a quack. But neither was she a deferential nurse. She spoke confidently about the physicians who had attacked her work and the medical traditions she was challenging. Most of all, her hands and her way of working were transformative. She became, many people commented, a different person when she worked with patients, speaking gently and with great patience. And her words of hope were so different from the pessimistic tone that most doctors used in offering their prognosis to patients and families.

Kenny's challenge to polio care aptly pointed to a vacuum in medical research and clinical practice. Her methods seemed initially an innocuous and promising way to redirect polio therapy. But Kenny was not willing to have her work adapted; she wished to transform understanding of the disease and its treatment, and she made her claims to therapeutic change explicit and assertive. Taking off casts and splints was dramatic and provocative. What she was offering, she reiterated, was not a simple progression of improved practice. To understand why she received the impressive results she did her medical audiences needed to see polio and the paralyzed body
her
way. Claiming innovation has always been a powerful step in the history of medicine. Kenny wanted to be recognized as an important innovator. In her later stories she portrayed herself as the ridiculed discoverer whose work could be valued only by the open-minded scientific observer, a familiar figure to anyone who had seen the movies
The Story of Louis Pasteur
or
Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet
. But in 1940 she tended to emphasize less the process of discovery than the process of acceptance, telling one audience she was “most grateful to have been so happily placed in a hospital where I receive the whole hearted cooperation of the Medical and Nursing staff” for “the world looks to America for many things, more especially for reformation in the treatment of the disease anterior Poliomyelitis.”
116
But increasingly such gratitude was not enough.

A turning point came when orthopedic surgeon John Florian Pohl invited Kenny to examine one of his private patients, Henry Haverstock Jr., who had returned from 4 months at Warm Springs still unable to walk or even sit up. Born in 1903, Pohl had worked as a school teacher before studying medicine at Minnesota's medical school, and then continued his studies with orthopedist Arthur Legg at Harvard. He now had a successful private practice and directed the city hospital's polio wards but had no formal teaching position at the medical school and was little known outside the state.
117

Pohl's patient was 17 years old, the “charming and brilliant son” of a local lawyer, facing a future without a college education or professional career. He had come home from Warm Springs wearing locked braces on both legs extending to his hips, a metal stomach corset, and braces on both feet and his left hand. After removing all the apparatus and examining him, Kenny told his parents that he was “suffering painfully because the true symptoms of the disease had never been treated.”
118

Kenny then initiated a policy that put her in good standing not only with Pohl but also with other local physicians with wealthy private patients. Instead of saying that she would treat the boy in his home, she demanded that he be admitted to a hospital where she would treat him, thus setting herself up not as a financial competitor of the boy's doctor but as a professional ally. At the hospital where Pohl sent Haverstock, however, Kenny later reported, “two very prominent orthopedic men” complained to the hospital's director that “if he didn't get rid of that ‘quack'—meaning me, of course—the hospital would be ruined.” Fortunately, Kenny reflected, the director overruled them.
119
Within a few months Haverstock could raise himself with his hands to a sitting position, get off the treatment table, and walk with the aid of 2 half-crutches.
120

Kenny's work with Haverstock was also a turning point in her relationship with the city's business establishment. Haverstock's father became a powerful supporter and introduced her to local businessmen and their wives. The son later graduated from the University of Minnesota and became a lawyer; his physical and professional achievements provided dramatic evidence of the veracity of Kenny's claims.

Impressed by the enthusiasm of Pohl and Knapp, Cole, the university's senior orthopedist, asked the NFIP to pay for a study of Kenny's method at the University of Minnesota. In this era of informal research funding, there were few forms to fill out. O'Connor agreed to finance Kenny's living expenses for 6 months as long as the NFIP was “kept informed of Miss Kenny's work.”
121
Her sponsors also had to gain the support of city officials, for Kenny claimed that her methods were most effective with patients in the acute stage of the disease. As such patients were considered contagious, only the city hospital, unlike the University of Minnesota's hospital and most other voluntary hospitals, accepted them. Pohl introduced Kenny to the city's Board of Public Welfare where in a “deep, matter-of-fact monotone” she read “letter after long letter” by Australian doctors, patients, and parents. “Her braggadocio struck us as a breach of professional decorum,” one official recalled, yet as “our best local medical men thought she had something valuable to offer,” he and the rest of the board agreed to allow her to treat patients in the city hospital.
122
Knapp also arranged for her to give a series of lectures, which were attended, according to Kenny, by “eager, intelligent young doctors and physiotherapists who were always ready with questions the moment I had ceased speaking.”
123
Back in Brisbane, Chuter, delighted to hear of her success, teased her by asking if she had yet met President Roosevelt, and
remarked that it was “humorous” to think that not so long ago she was dismissed as an unlicensed “masseuse.”
124

Other books

Fifteen Weekends by Christy Pastore
The Silence by Sarah Rayne
Tangled Dreams by Anderson, Jennifer
Saints by Orson Scott Card
Flirting with Sin by Naima Simone
Winter Song by Roberta Gellis
Lady and the Wolf by Elizabeth Rose
Dead Water by Barbara Hambly


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024