Polio Wars (54 page)

The March of Dimes campaign in January 1944, like earlier campaigns, had featured Kenny. But now it looked as if the NFIP had falsely claimed her as a symbol of its commitment to the battle against polio. “To the millions of Americans who contributed generously to the ‘March of Dimes' a week ago” the news that the NFIP “will not give $150,000 for the budget of the Kenny Institute … will come as a shock,” said the editor of the
Tulsa Tribune
. “She doesn't get a nickel from it.”
⁹
With headlines like “After 10 Years of Giving America Begins to Wonder” newspapers made this a story about money and arrogant medical men. A
New York Journal-American
editorial described Kenny's “discouraging and unhappy experience in the United States” as she “faced the skepticism and even the active hostility of some sections of the medical and scientific professions.” As a result, her work “has never had adequate financial support.” Yet leaving “is the very last thing Sister Kenny wants to do.”
¹⁰

The NFIP had always said it spent the “people's money”; now Americans began to demand accountability. Although he had “always supported the drives for funds,” one supporter warned NFIP officials, “if she leaves this country because of lack of funds to continue her work I will definitely refuse to continue to contribute funds.”
¹¹
“I have been a contributor to the ‘March of Dimes' ever since it was started,” an executive at a Tulsa oil company similarly told the chief surgeon at Warm Springs, “but I can assure you that if this editorial is true there will be no more contributions from me.”
¹²

In March 1944 nurse supporters in Chicago launched a movement to “Keep Sister Kenny in the USA” and to raise the $150,000 her Institute needed. Unusually, this group of nurses allied themselves with a group of disabled adult activists and a joint meeting was chaired by Harvey Church, president of the Disabled Persons Association of America. The meeting also featured Noreen Linduska, who had been disabled by polio during the 1943 Chicago epidemic and was a proponent of Kenny's work. “It is we who are disabled who know what a blessing the work of Sister Kenny is,” Church told reporters. “There is a place for her in America and a great need for her.”
¹³
Reports of this meeting in local papers featured the usual picture of recovered child patients, but in this case it was a fierce-looking group, holding a “Keep Sister Kenny Here” banner.
¹⁴
The
Sunday Mirror
reprinted this image juxtaposed with a photograph of Kenny lying in what looked like a hospital bed in a white hospital gown. “Bewildered and discouraged by apparent neglect of her method in America,” the caption read, “Sister Kenny manages to smile while recovering from a cold in Los Angeles. Her comment: ‘If America had taken heed when I first arrived I could return to Australia today—my work ended.' ”
¹⁵

Kenny's story of being rejected by the AMA and the NFIP reinforced what many Americans saw as a complex dynamic: the impotence of orthodox physicians to heal combined with their arrogance in attempting to monopolize legitimate health care. “You have found a way to relieve the suffering and tortuous crippling of our little children, while our great, scientific medical specialists stood by helpless, hand on chin, brow wrinkled,” a man from Chino, California, told Kenny.
¹⁶
Could “professional jealousy” explain the
antagonism of American physicians, asked a
Washington Post
editorial.
¹⁷
This hostility was a combination of prejudiced orthodoxy and professional exclusion, others suggested. “Where Sister Kenney [sic] made her mistake,” argued the
Citizen's Health News
of San Diego, “was in trying to get the ‘medical trust' to admit that a drugless method was superior to a medical method.” Kenny's struggle against “medical monopolists” was part of a wider fight for what the magazine called “Health Freedom.” “We are fighting all over the world for democratic principles but still have a totalitarian health set-up here at home.”
¹⁸
Physicians who were already jealous of Kenny were further motivated by the fear of economic competition, others assured her. “We must realize that anyone who cures anything, seriously jeopardizes the fee-splitting system of medicine,” wrote one man to Kenny. “Just think of the millions of dollars that have already been lost by you showing the world how to cure these little tots.”
¹⁹
Gender, money, and professional jealousy were at the root of her trouble, one woman reflected. “Just realize what is against you,” she told Kenny. “First the fact you are a woman, second anyone giving your treatment can't capitalize on it and get rich, third you lack a college degree and all that rot. (Just remember the greatest healer of all Jesus Christ wasn't an M.D.) And fourth the money interests who are reaping a harvest from the manufacture of braces etc are against you.”
²⁰
A few supporters went further by suggesting that the corrupting power of the AMA was robbing Americans of the ability to choose providers. “Without the Kenny treatment,” Robert Gurney, the father of Kenny's first acute patient in Minneapolis, told the
St Paul Pioneer Press
, “our son would have either passed away, or been a horribly deformed boy for the rest of his life.” Now he not only attended school but he could “shoot pool, kick a football, walk by himself, goes to shows with other boys and walks alone to a store over a block away.” “Has it come to pass that the doctors of this nation are going to say who will or will not treat us?”
²¹

FIGURE 5.1
First page of a 1944 comic book in the “Wonder Women of History” series. From Alice Marble,
Wonder Women of History: Sister Elizabeth Kenny
(Spring 1944) no. 8. Courtesy of D.C. Comics.

Supporters believed accusations about Kenny's personality were in fact veiled attacks on Kenny for acting in a way doctors found unfeminine. NFIP officials had said that Kenny was “hard to get along with,” the
Tulsa Tribune
mocked, but in fact she had simply refused to cooperate with certain doctors and NFIP officials. Was the NFIP unhappy because “she refused to leave the United States as soon as she arrived, as Mr. O'Connor suggested?” or because “she was not overawed by high medical authorities who did not want to be disturbed in the practice of letting sick muscles die in splints?” In fact her altruism proved she was not a charlatan, the paper noted. She had come to Oklahoma during the 1943 epidemic and asked for nothing but the travel expenses of herself and her assistant. The paper praised her as the epitome of the wholesome older woman untainted by the suspicious morals of the celebrities featured in March of Dimes publicity: “How different her attitude from the tearful pleas of mascara-ed Hollywood in the high-pressure campaign for the March of Dimes!”
²²
“You have fought your way through thus far with all the courage of a pioneer,” one letter-writer assured her in similar tones, placing her in the pantheon of American frontierswomen, “you have that fortitude and courage that never quits and never gives up, especially when the going is the toughest.”
²³

And why did the NFIP not publicly attack these antagonistic doctors? Was it because its medical advisors were all part of the same elite establishment? The news that Fishbein had told Kenny to leave was “a most outrageous insult to every thinking American citizen,” a woman from New York City declared. “I represent ‘the public' and am not known,” she told O'Connor; “You, however, are prominently known and I call upon you to make adequate reply to Morris Fishbein in the press.”
²⁴

Underlying some of this populist support was a broader dislike of Roosevelt and the New Deal. The NFIP had long battled public suspicions that it was too closely tied to Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. “It was too bad that you did not explode that news before the panhandling got under way for the President[‘]s Birthday,” one man told Kenny, “however the American people are at long last awakened to that fact that the National Foundation was nothing but a private affair.”
²⁵
A number of newspapers pointed out that O'Connor was “Mr. Roosevelt's former law partner,” and began to demand accountability of “the prodigious amount of money that has been collected during the past ten years.”
²⁶
The NFIP's close relationship with the AMA further horrified people who already disliked Fishbein. One man assured Kenny that “America needs you more than it needs the Morris Fishbein Tripe and his ilk.” “For years,” he argued, “well informed” Americans have known “that the American Medical Association, dominated by these Alien Shysters, was but a racket, it took a visitor to these shores to get that into the public press.”
²⁷
Similarly the Chicago Associate Nurses, a small group that had organized pro-Kenny rallies, argued
that attacks on Kenny were efforts “to break-down Nurse morale” and were instigated by “the Communist-Atheistic combine.”
²⁸
Fishbein knew a little about this organization and, he told O'Connor privately, “I am, of course, not troubling to notice this.”
²⁹

Such responses were clearly on the fringe of American politics. They illuminate some of the darker sides of American medical populism, especially its longstanding antisemitic strain, which, ironically, was shared by the AMA and America's leading medical schools. Although Fishbein never raised the issue publicly, antisemitism had tainted his own career making it impossible for him to ever be elected president of the AMA.

The Hearst papers, which had long been critical of the medical establishment, had from the outset seen Kenny as an opportunity to stir public outrage. During March and April 1944 a 5-part series in the
American Weekly
, the Hearst Sunday magazine, told Kenny's story with dramatic sentimentality. Drawing partly on the model of fighter pilot Robert Scott's best-selling autobiography
God Is My Co-Pilot
and partly on Kenny's 1943 autobiography, “God Is My Doctor” made her a courageous, religiously inspired nurse able to heal children and convert doctors and other nurses. The series compared “54 straight little bodies” without “a twisted or deformed limb” to children treated without the Kenny method “who walk with halting, tortured steps” or with “medieval contraptions of leather and steel.” Reporters had long implied that Kenny achieved her results through a combination of God and medical science, calling her successes “Kenny miracles.” Here Kenny was similarly chosen by the “Great Power” as an “instrument to ease pain and straighten little bodies and make them walk again.”
³⁰

The newspaper's images, even more striking than the colorful prose, intermingled recent photographs of Kenny and her Institute with sketches characterizing the tragic and hopeful moments of her life. A photograph of the Institute, captioned “Monument of the Australian Back Country Nurse's Faith in a Revolutionary Cure That Has Given Back to Hundreds of Little Victims the Ability to Walk,” was overshadowed by a sketch of angry-looking men in old fashioned collars, pointing at a young nurse looking up to the heavens with a baby in her arms, captioned “Medical Die-Hards, Refusing to Believe a Woman Could Succeed Where They Had Failed, Called Her a Quack, Charlatan—and Worse.” The story moved from Australia to the United States with Kenny looking proudly at a map on the wall of her office “studded with hundreds of red and blue pins marking the spots where there are Kenny technicians and where the treatments are being given.” A photograph of Kenny leaning over an infant, watched by the mother and a male doctor, was captioned: “Their Skepticism Wiped Out by Her Near-Miraculous Results, Doctors and Nurses Crowd Around While Sister Kenny Shows How to Re-educate Paralysis Damaged Muscles.”
³¹

Kenny was also featured in the
Wonder Women of History
comic book series, although with a less evangelical edge. Kenny is first shown teaching her brother Bill muscle exercises; she then chooses the “dangerous vocation” of bush nursing and faces a paralyzed child in the bush. From this point until she comes to America in the final 2 panels she is depicted wearing a nurse's white uniform. Amazed that her patients have recovered, her Australian mentor tells her “Sister Kenny, you've knocked our theories for a loop!” After World War I she finds that “few of the doctors were as willing as Dr. McConnell [sic] to fight the disease
her way.” A doctor standing over a child patient whose legs are in uncomfortable-looking braces asks Kenny: “Nurse, are you trying to tell me what to do?” and another doctor comments “it seems to work but it is against scientific theory!” She is then shown shaking hands with official-looking doctors in dark suits (perhaps health officials) who promise to “publicly endorse your method.” She gradually wins over “nearly the whole medical profession—except a few conservatives” whose 1935 commission “denounce[s]” her methods. While Kenny leaves for London hoping “maybe English doctors will listen,” Australian patients begin to demand that their doctors use “the Kenny treatment in all Australian hospitals.” Later Kenny, now in a large black hat, thanks young American physicians who offer “to devote a floor of the Minneapolis General Hospital to a demonstration of your method.”