Polio Wars by Naomi Rogers Page A

long before her death, chosen in a Gallup poll as America’s most admired woman, outranking former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Yet by the mid-1950s she was almost forgotten. Crosby’s 1953 autobiography
Call Me Lucky
never mentioned her. 2
    Kenny’s was a life of passionate outrage. She spent years defending her work, inspiring her patients, and attacking prejudice. She knew how to stir up controversy and how to play medical politics using the media, the public, and politicians. Challenging established medical knowledge on its weak points and inconsistencies, Kenny was a quick study, adopting insights pointed out by her critics and making them integral to her work. Her feisty style mocked the deference nurses were expected to show physicians but she could also make fun of herself as a middle-aged woman. With what was called her Irish humor she thanked one group of doctors who greeted her at an airport carrying roses, telling them it was gratifying to receive flowers from doctors while she was “still here to smell them.” 3
    This book tells the story of Sister Kenny and the Kenny method. Kenny’s battles with American medical professionals illuminate the medical politics that lay at the heart of American medicine, even during its Golden Age. After her struggles with government bureaucrats and medical professionals in Australia Kenny was neither shocked nor fazed by the need to pull strings and gain influential allies in order to alter clinical care in the United States. Polio was a high-profile disease, and responsibility for its prevention and treatment rested on diverse authorities: local and state health officials and the U.S. Public Health Service; individual physicians, nurses, and physical therapists; civic and charity groups that ran hospitals and “crippled children’s homes,” did surveys, and set up services for families with disabled members; and the NFIP, which supported its activities through an annual national fundraising campaign known as the March of Dimes and numerous regional campaigns organized by its local and state chapters. Kenny’s heated battles with the NFIP and organized medicine captured the public imagination. Standing outside the elite scientific community, she sought to gain its respect through clinical and laboratory confirmation of her theories of polio. Simultaneously, however, she resented being held to standards of scientific rigor that she suspected were imposed more strictly on her because she was a woman and a nurse and because she dared to question the expertise of male orthopedic surgeons.
    This book also focuses on the limber, healthy child patient featured on the 1945 container. Here is a dramatic, if sentimentalized, depiction of the results of a special kind of clinical care, yet the container does not show any doctor, hospital bed, syringe, or other symbol of medical science. For the American public the most powerful omission may have been the familiar picture of a polio patient: the crying child in a hospital bed with arms or legs in plaster casts; the fearful child waiting for an orthopedic operation; or the “recovered” child discharged with crutches or braces, all images typical in March of Dimes campaigns. On this “Sock Polio” container, health has been achieved in another way, through compassion and care based on a distinctive understanding of the body shared by Kenny and her staff but not by other professionals.
    In an era when nurses were seen as the recipients of medical science rather than its designers, Kenny knew that her claims to a new understanding of polio were controversial before their content was even known. At first she presented herself as a supplicant to scientists, seeking their assistance to explain the meaning of the new symptoms she had identified and the reasons her methods worked. Her 1941 textbook had the temperate title
Treatment of Infantile Paralysis in the Acute Stage
. But as the Institute