Polio Wars (50 page)

It may have been Berry Jr.'s frequent invitations that Kenny had in mind when she was quoted a few months later in the
New York Post
saying “if the legitimate medical professional doesn't want my method, osteopaths and chiropractors and practitioners of that sort will be glad to get it.”
¹⁵⁰
Kenny intended this statement as a threat to orthodox physicians, reminding them of the appeal of alternative therapies and the potentially greater challenge of Kenny as an explicit antiorthodox clinician with impressive public support.

World War II veterans played a major role in shaping disability care during and after the war, laying the groundwork for the disability rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. During the war when there was a lack of able-bodied workers physical disability was not considered a reason to limit employability; as one magazine article noted in 1944, “there are no cripples in wartime.”
¹⁵¹
But after the war ended and thousands of able-bodied veterans returned to the workforce, it grew more difficult to argue that a disabled body was not a defective body. While occasional popular films such as
The Best of Our Lives
depicted physically disabled actors who were themselves veterans, the wider public continued to see physical “normality” as a sign of civic “normality.”
¹⁵²
Numerous civic groups continued to urge employers to hire disabled veterans but less as a gesture of patriotic pride than as a kind of patriotic pity. Although, as one veteran who had been paralyzed by polio in 1942 reflected, “disability is mainly in the eye of the beholder,” there was, he added, often “a gap between a disabled person's view of his own disability and other people's view of it.”
¹⁵³
And this view affected more than employment. Disabled veterans, even those whose disability was the result of combat or a disease contracted while in the military, were less likely to marry than able-bodied veterans.

During the war military physicians redesigned hospital rehabilitation care to enable disabled soldiers to return to battle more rapidly. At the Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado, for example, there was a special convalescent ward where patents were “not pampered” or “permitted the lax discipline of the usual hospital ward, but are rehabilitated under a strict military regimen under the direction of army sergeants.” These patients supposedly “revel[ed] in this type of management.”
¹⁵⁴
Howard Rusk, who became one of America's main spokesmen for what came to be called vocational rehabilitation, set up convalescent training programs in air force hospitals to get men into physical condition to return to full duty in the shortest possible time. In these programs a soldier was “taught what he was doing and why he was doing it.” Rusk found this kind of care reduced the period of convalescence for soldiers with many infectious diseases, including pneumonia, measles, and scarlet fever. When veterans entered these programs the aim was “to restore them to active participation in their communities” and “to return to their daily lives as self-respecting, self-sustaining, dignified citizens with a definite community contribution to make.”
¹⁵⁵
The term “handicapped” developed as a positive term for recognizing restrictions in functioning but not as an indication for the inability to be educated or employed. Thus, the Handicapped Persons Industries of Buffalo, a toymaker that employed only disabled people, noted the “innate desire of self-respecting men and
women to earn an honest livelihood and live a life of usefulness, despite physical handicaps.”
¹⁵⁶
In Rusk's popular text
New Hope for the Handicapped
(1946) he argued that “one of the great social values of the war was a more widespread social acceptance of physical disability.”
¹⁵⁷

Physicians in civilian hospitals began to experiment with active rehabilitation even for postsurgical patients. In maneuvers that would have seemed familiar and perhaps ironic to Kenny, proponents began to talk about the benefits of postsurgical ambulation. Medical journals such as
JAMA
published articles warning of the danger of prolonged periods of bed rest as “anatomically, physiologically and psychologically unsound and unscientific.”
¹⁵⁸
Even
Time
devoted a feature to the topic, noting that specialists in obstetrics, abdominal surgery, arthritis, and heart disease all agreed on “The Evil Sequelae of Complete Bed Rest.”
¹⁵⁹

In an even more striking moment proponents began to describe standard postoperative practice in a way that conveyed both the ordinariness of the hospital ward and also its unseen dangers, much as Kenny had often done. Thus, Kristian Hansson noted in the
New England Journal of Medicine
that “it has become familiar to all to see wards full of patients lying flat in bed, absolutely quiet and guarded against moving by nurses.” This kind of medical practice, he warned, led to painful necks, aching backs, and stiff knees; lost muscle tone that could lead to atrophy; disturbed blood circulation that could result in congestion, edema, and perhaps thrombosis; and irritated skin that might lead to ulcers and bedsores. While Hansson did not want to propose any “radical” changes, he did make an analogy to Kenny's methods compared to previous polio care. Her methods may not have cured more patients but they had led to patients “in better general health and with better circulation and muscle function than the old immobilization treatment produced.”
¹⁶⁰

Immobilization in polio care—and increasingly for other medical conditions as well—came to be mocked as a practice of the sadly mistaken medical past. Thus, in a photo essay on polio's 100-year history
Hygeia
contrasted a naked girl crawling with “helplessly distorted limbs” to 4 photographs depicting modern polio care of 1947. “Today's young polio patient,” the magazine explained, did not “experience the immobilization that was endured by the child of a century ago.”
¹⁶¹

The notion of an independent, self-respecting disabled person spread slowly into wider medical and popular culture. A 1945 nursing article entitled “The Disabled Can Be Independent” reminded nurses about patients with disabilities “of long standing” where “little or nothing has been done to prevent or repair the havoc caused by wasted muscles, faulty posture or inactivity.” Such patients could gain confidence with the use of short training crutches (such as Kenny used) to accustom the body to a gradual change of position and shift in weight bearing and help develop the muscles of the upper body.
¹⁶²
Polio survivors played a crucial role in this transformation. Able-bodied Americans recognized the hard-working, overachieving attitude of many survivors. Thus, one school classroom had a contest to see who could do the most sit-ups and pushups. According to a New York reporter, when one boy did so many that nobody could beat him the other children said “Aw, what ya expect? He had polio.”
¹⁶³

A few physicians began retrospectively to blame patients for the continuing use of braces and crutches. Joseph Molner argued at a postgraduate course on physical medicine and rehabilitation in 1946 that such apparatus had “long been recognized
by the medical profession as capable of producing what virtually amounts to addiction among patients, or an obsession on the part of the patient to the effect that he cannot get along without the crutch or brace. Some of this is mental, some physical, some physiological, and mechanical.”
¹⁶⁴
On occasion, professionals recognized their own part in this problem. Warm Springs orthopedist Charles Irwin admitted in 1947 that “splints often produced more deformities than they prevented” and that too often in the past physicians had “made a superficial examination of an infantile paralysis patient and simply telephoned the brace maker to go by the isolation ward and fit him with the necessary braces.”
¹⁶⁵

1.
“Fred Snite, Jr., Again to Be Dad”
Washington Post
April 11 1943. Snite contracted polio in Beijing in 1936.

2.
“13 Blind Workers Are Pace-Setters In Aircraft Plant”
Washington Post
December 27 1942.

3.
See “Surgery Made Polio Victim Fit for Army”
Washington Post
February 21 1942.

4.
“Fighting Against Infantile Paralysis”
True Comics
(February 1944) 32: 26–29. For an additional analysis of this comic see Bert Hansen “Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
(2004) 78: 148–191.

5.
“Fighting Against Infantile Paralysis,” 26–29.

6.
Reinette Lovewell Donnelly “Watch Your Steps”
The Polio Chronicle
(February 1933) 2: 3.

7.
See Ralph M. Kramer
Voluntary Agencies in the Welfare State
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 58–61.

8.
Lucy Chase Woods “A Traveled Road”
Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine
(January 1943) 42: 21.

9.
James Yamazuki, quoted in Julie Silver and Daniel Wilson
Polio Voices: An Oral History from the American Polio Epidemics and Worldwide Eradication Efforts
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 21. Yamazuki was paralyzed by polio in 1949 and was in an iron lung.

10.
J. D. Ratcliff “Minutemen Against Infantile Paralysis”
Colliers
(October 9 1943) 112: 18.

11.
Mal Stevens [guest columnist] Considine “On the Line”
Washington Post
January 14 1942.

12.
“Radio Spot” January 20 1943, National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Box 96, Folder 1943, George L. Radcliffe Papers, MS 2280, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

13.
Woods “A Traveled Road” 20–21.

14.
See, for example, C. L. Lowman “The Use of Splints and Brace: Part 1”
Physiotherapy Review
(1943) 23: 57.

15.
Elizabeth Kenny to Ladies and Gentlemen, [July 1944], Am. 15.8, Folder 23 [accessed in 1992 before recent re-cataloging], UMN-ASC.

16.
R. W. Cilento “Report on Sister E. Kenny's After-Treatment of Cases of Paralysis Following Poliomyelitis,” Ms. 44/109, Fryer Library, 4.

17.
Elizabeth Kenny to Ladies and Gentlemen, [July 1944].

18.
Jessie L. Stevenson “After-Care of Infantile Paralysis”
American Journal of Nursing
(1925) 25: 729; and see “Infantile Paralysis”
American Journal of Nursing
(1931) 31: 1142.

19.
Jean Barrett “Her 30 Years War Made Sister Kenny Belligerent”
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
April 22 1943; see also Kenny to Dear Sir [O'Connor], June 13 1941, Public Relations, MOD-K; Kenny with Ostenso
And They Shall Walk
, 218.

20.
Jessie Stevenson “The Kenny Method”
American Journal of Nursing
(1942) 42: 904–910; Editorial “The Kenny Treatment for Poliomyelitis” Archives of Physical Therapy (June 1942) 23: 366.

21.
Editorial “The Kenny Treatment,” 364–367.

22.
Elizabeth Kenny to Ladies and Gentlemen, [July 1944].

23.
Kenny to Dear Dr. Gill, July 19 1943, Evidence Reports 1943–1952, MHS-K.

24.
Ibid.

25.
A. E. Deacon “The Treatment of Poliomyelitis in the Acute Stage”
Canadian Public Health Journal
(1942) 33: 281.

26.
Walter G. Stuck and Albert O. Loiselle “The 1942 San Antonio Poliomyelitis Epidemic”
JAMA
(July 24 1943) 122: 853–855.

27.
See David J. Rothman
Beginnings Count: The Technological Imperative in American Health Care
(New York: Twentieth-Century Fund and Oxford University Press, 1997); Daniel J. Wilson
Living with Polio: The Epidemic and its Survivors
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

28.
Kenny
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis
, 215.

29.
Marjorie Lawrence
Interrupted Melody: An Autobiography
(New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1949), 194.

30.
See Blanche Wiesen Cook
Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography
(New York: Viking, 1992); Cook
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II: The Defining Years, 1933–1938
(New York: Penguin, 2000).

31.
“Hunter Girls Hope To Join Air Force”
New York Times
February 8 1942.

32.
“ ‘Forever And A Day' To Help Tomorrow's America”
National Foundation News
(1943) 2: 19.

33.
See Hugh Gregory Gallagher
FDR's Splendid Deception
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985); Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe
FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability
(College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003); Theo Lippman, Jr.
The Squire of Warm Springs: F.D.R. in Georgia 1924–1945
(Chicago: Playboy Press, 1977); Turnley Walker
Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story
(New York: A. A. Wyn, 1953). For an argument that the American public may have been aware of Roosevelt's disability, see C. Clausen “The President and the Wheelchair”
Wilson Quarterly
(2005) 29: 24–29.

34.
Kenny to Dear Mr. President, September 2 1940, Public Relations, MOD-K; Kenny to Roosevelt, September 2 1940 [abstract], FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute 1940–1944, FDR Papers; Kenny to Dear Mr. President, September 6 1940, Public Relations, MOD-K; Kenny to Roosevelt, September 6 1940 [abstract], FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute 1940–1944, FDR Papers.

35.
Kenny to Major General Edwin Watson, May 6 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute 1940–1944, FDR Papers.