Read What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries Online
Authors: George Biro and Jim Leavesley
Tags: #What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries
In the polio epidemic of 1933, she used her royalties to open a free clinic in a Townsville backyard. There she treated patients disabled by polio. She replaced the conventional splints, braces and callipers with salt baths, foments, and exercises.
The following year the Queensland government appointed staff to work with Kenny to research unfantile paralysis. The ‘Kenny Clinic’ was the first nursing research clinic in Australia.
Her results impressed a few doctors, but most opposed her vigorously; one of the latter wrote: ‘This quack must be exposed.’ But Kenny clinics opened in Townsville, Cairns, Rockhampton, Toowoomba, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne.
One headline acclaimed her as ‘A new Australian Florence Nightingale’.
Her public support grew and grew, and not only in Australia. Grateful parents of children she had helped paid her fare to England, where she cared for inpatients at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Surrey.
In 1935, the Queensland Government appointed a Royal Commission of doctors to review the treatment of polio. After three years, they reported: ‘The abandonment of immobilisation is a grievous error.’ However, the report was never requested nor presented to Parliament.
The government nevertheless gave her a ward at the Brisbane Hospital. Here she could treat early cases of polio, who might respond better than older cases.
Kenny’s few medical friends convinced the government to pay her fare to the United States. Many American doctors rejected her explanations, with some accusing her of using hypnosis. But she did gain the use of beds at the Minneapolis General Hospital, and the support of three orthopaedic doctors. One of these, Dr John Pohl, wrote:
Before she came … you would have seen little kids lying stiff and rigid, crying with pain … We’d take children to the operating room straighten them out under anaesthetic, and put them in plaster casts. When they woke up, they screamed. The next day they still cried from the pain. That was the accepted and universal treatment … She said, ‘That’s all wrong.’
In 1941, the American Medical Association endorsed the Kenny treatment that the Queensland Royal Commission had rubbished five years earlier.
Doctors and physiotherapists from Greece, Russia, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and China flocked to learn her methods at the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis.
The
New York Sun
named her the world’s ‘Outstanding Woman of the Year’. In 1950, America awarded her Free Passage across its borders; an honour Elizabeth Kenny shared with French General La Fayette.
Many grateful people remembered that for over 20 years, she never took a penny for her work.
But Elizabeth Kenny herself and her teachings remained controversial. Her dogmatic belief in her own God-given gifts actually hindered her cause. She was merciless with anyone who dared to doubt her. Had she been gentler, could she have been more effective? Or would the critics have just ground her down?
She published two textbooks on her treatment of polio, as well as an autobiography and was awarded three honorary doctorates from leading American universities for her contribution to polio research. In 1951 she retired to Toowoomba, where she died a year later.
The
Sydney Morning Herald
mourned ‘the loss of one of our great ones’.
The influential
British Medical Journal
said:
The influence of Sister Kenny on the treatment of infantile paralysis has been exceedingly beneficial…in an empirical way she hit on much that was good in the treatment of poliomyelitis, and…wakened orthopaedic surgeons and physiotherapists the world over.
Sadly Elizabeth Kenny herself did not live to see this blessing by the medical establishment. The world has gradually accepted modifications of her teaching on the treatment of polio.
(GB)
Dr Paul White, the Jungle Doctor from Australia, earned for his work in the 1930s in Tanganyika, East Africa. There, despite his lifelong asthma, he was far more than a medical missionary: he was a surgeon, anaesthetist, pathologist, pharmacist, handyman and building supervisor.
Dr White learnt his first lessons in hygiene and public health as a small boy in Bowral:
Before dawn, each Friday, a shadowy figure would come to our outhouse and play his key part in our pan-and-fly hygiene system. He was also our mayor, carrying off all his ceremonial duties spruce and shining in his robes of office.
At a Christmas party, one of my mother’s staidest friends asked me for a poem. I recited one our mayor had left us:
‘Although the police keep order
There’s no more useful man
Than the bloke who comes at sunrise
And juggles with the pan.’
To my amazement, they stopped me.
In 1921, his widowed mother and young Paul moved to Sydney. At Sydney Grammar School, he became a runner, cricketer and active Christian. He started his medical course in 1929, at the height of the Depression.
Paul gained a University Blue in 1931 and 1932.
In my third year, I ran in the Intervarsity athletics. A Melbourne runner, Wellesley Hannah, beat me over the mile. Then I found that he was also a committed Christian. This friendship was to change both our lives.
As medical students, we followed the desperate search for weapons against the great killers like pneumonia and meningitis.
I felt especially bitter about meningitis which had killed my father.
By the time I graduated in 1935, I’d decided to work as a medical missionary in East Africa. First I spent one year at Royal North Shore Hospital, where our training included infectious diseases and obstetrics. For anaesthetics, we used the old ether with a rag and bottle.
As interns we earned eleven [shillings] and threepence a week and had every third weekend off.
In my spare time, I practised tracheotomy [emergency opening of the windpipe to bypass blockage] on an old piece of garden hose. Soon after, I had to do the real thing on a small boy who had severe diphtheria and couldn’t breathe.
He met many challenges during his preparations:
Most of our equipment was borrowed: if we couldn’t get it, we had to make it; if we couldn’t make it, we had to go without. Mosquito nets were crucial, since mosquitoes transmit malaria, yellow fever, dengue and elephantiasis.
Among the things he learned: keeping a corrugated-iron roof cool, making a surgical retractor from two bent spoons, driving through mud or sand, and plugging a hole in a radiator or petrol tank.
In 1937 Dr White, with his wife Mary and son David, sailed to Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Then to Dodoma and Mvumi.
Sechela the head nurse welcomed us with her story of a cobra emerging from its hole to watch her delivering twins.
Over 100 people came for my first outpatient session; some walked 50 kilometres. Relatives led the elderly who were blinded by cataracts. We had so few medicine bottles that people brought their own.
Those with malaria shivered in the scorching sun. Our only antimalarial was quinine, which we bought from the Tanganyika Post Office for two shillings per 100 tablets.
Our operating room of granite, cement and corrugated iron cost 120 pounds. A burly African pedalling a jacked-up bike which charged a battery, gave most of our light. We built our anaesthetic machine from a pickle bottle, a car footpump, a football bladder, the Y-piece from a stethoscope, an eye-dropper glass and rubber tubing. It worked really well.
I removed many cataracts; trachoma I treated with surgery and zinc sulphate drops that cost threepence.
Twelve times a day, out two water carriers made their round trip of over three kilometers. Each carried 36 litres in petrol cans. Twice a week, the mailbag came, along the paths where lions and rhinoceros prowled.
The dry season lasted eight months and ended in October with torrential rain. Within minutes, a parched riverbed became a torrent. Within two days, grass would grow. We built water tanks to see us through the next dry, only to see them cracked by an earthquake. In one hour, we helplessly watched three months’ water disappear.
Once sulphonamide drugs were discovered, we could fight the next epidemic of meningitis.
Our second child Rosemary was born in 1939. After my wife’s illness forced us to return home, Wellesley Hannah came to Tanganyika to take over from me. He stayed 20 years.
Dr White’s
Jungle Doctor
books numbered 54 and have appeared in over 100 languages. In 1977, he published an autobiography titled
Alias Jungle Doctor
. Later he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to religious welfare. Dr White died in 1992, at the age of 82.
(GB)
I did not set out to be a reformer; I … became involved with a law which was inflicting human suffering (Bertram Wainer)
Melbourne, 1968. She was 21, and had already had a baby at 15. Now she was pregnant again. Terrified of telling her father, she took an overdose and landed in a psychiatric hospital. Then she threatened Dr Bertram Wainer that she would kill herself if he didn’t terminate her pregnancy.
Not only did he do the abortion, but he told the Press, the Homicide Squad, the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General. Dr Wainer was relying on a 1969 judgment of Mr Justice Menhennitt: ‘A lawful abortion is one believed by the doctor to be necessary to preserve the woman from serious danger to her life or her mental health.’
Dr Wainer’s challenge did not provoke any legal response, but it marked his entry into the campaign that Australian women were fighting for the right to legal abortions done openly by capable doctors.
In the 1960s there were about 70,000 women having abortions in Australia each year; many abortions were performed by unqualified abortionists.
Dr Wainer fought against strict abortion laws and their narrow interpretation. He fought also against the police corruption that he felt was a consequence of those laws. By proving the extent of police corruption feeding on undercover and backyard abortionists, he forced society to face both issues.
His efforts helped to clean up the Victorian police force and to bring about a more liberal interpretation of abortion laws. (Nowadays, in most states of Australia, a woman can get an abortion on demand, in the early stages of her pregnancy, if her physical or mental health is in danger.)
Wainer’s outspoken views brought him abuse, vilification, threats and even attempts on his life. The Australian Medical Association found him guilty of unprofessional conduct. Rumours said he was mad and had a criminal background. Criminals shot at him and tried to run him over. For years he lived in fear of his life.
What made a man fight at such personal cost for the right of Australian women to have safe and legal abortions?
His background gives us some clue. His father died soon after Bertram Wainer was born in Edinburgh in 1928. His stepfather was an illiterate alcoholic. Bertram’s mother’s sweet shop failed during the Depression, forcing the family to live in the slums of Glasgow.
The Second World War added more traumas. During the Blitz, young Bert and his mother were caught in an air raid away from home:
… bombs (were) exploding around us, ack-ack screaming … fires devouring houses, incendiary bombs blazing … then the relief of reaching an air-raid shelter. We were told: ‘You can’t come in here, this is a private air-raid shelter … We have carpets and heaters and food. We can’t let just anyone in.’ The door slammed …
Bert Wainer never forgot this experience.
He left school at 13 to help his mother, and was still underage when he entered the army, where he served for the rest of the war. In 1949, the family migrated on free passages to Australia.
Supporting himself with a remarkable range of jobs, he somehow managed not only to matriculate but also to study medicine at Melbourne University. By the mid-1960s, he was a lieutenant-colonel in charge of a large military hospital.
After leaving the army in protest against the Vietnam war, Dr Wainer became a GP in St Kilda. In 1969, he went to the Press with evidence of backyard abortionists paying senior police large bribes for protection.
In June of the same year, radio station 2GB invited him to Sydney to debate abortion law reform. Before he left Melbourne, Dr Wainer told reporters that he planned to put before the New South Wales Chief Commissioner of Police (Norman Allan) evidence on abortion and police corruption in that state.
The threatening phone calls increased: ‘If Wainer goes to Sydney, he will never come back alive.’ The evening before the trip, a man offered to sell him protection in the shape of a shortened shotgun.
Dr Wainer and two trusted friends booked a flight on TAA, but actually took a tiny charter plane from Moorabbin airport. It might have been safer, but the unpressurised Piper Aztec took about three hours each way.
From Mascot airport, they took a convoy of cabs to the back entrance of 2GB. Sydney police didn’t know that Dr Wainer had arrived until they heard him on air.
Then they rang and invited him to police HQ, but he made them come to 2GB. Mr Allan did not come himself, but sent Superintendent Donald Fergusson and Detective-Constable Roger Rogerson.
According to Dr Wainer’s account, he went to hand Fergusson a sealed envelope with his information. The latter asked who his two friends were. When he heard they were journalists, Fergusson said it would be unethical to accept the information in their presence.
Dr Wainer replied: ‘The only possible reason … is that you will be forced to act upon it. [If] I want to report a crime or a murder in Sydney, [do] I have to crawl into a wardrobe with a policeman and whisper it in his ear?’
The tension rose, Fergusson refused to budge, and the futile meeting ended.
Leaving 2GB, the visitors didn’t risk ringing for cabs, but picked two at random. At the airport, Dr Wainer waited in the pilots’ room. Then, steeling himself for the impact of a bullet, he forced himself to walk, not run, to the plane.
Despite the dangers, he did return to Sydney. In March 1970, Dr Wainer appeared on the current affairs television program
Four Corners
. In May, on another television program, prominent journalist Michael Willesee asked Chief Commissioner Allan if he believed there were abortionists operating in Sydney. When he said ‘no’ Willesee offered him Dr Wainer’s list. When Mr Allan would not accept that, Willesee showed him films of an abortionist’s surgery, reportedly within one block of police headquarters, then interviews with patients who had had abortions there.