Writing in the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine, Lucy Chase Woods advised other disabled “comrades” to “hold on to whatever physical independence you have with every ounce of strength you possess.” She urged them to “release yourselves from sensitiveness” for “in the long run it matters very little how you get up from a chair! What matters is your attitude toward it.”13 Here she was asking them to ignore their anger at the pity and horror they experienced and to cope by adjusting themselves as individuals to the discriminatory, able-bodied world.
Americans associated assistive devices such as wheelchairs with old or sick people, and braces and crutches were feared symbols of social inadequacy.14 Parents sometimes removed such apparatus when their disabled children went to the movies or to church or for some other social occasion. Above all, walking, as disability activists have pointed out, was the “Holy Grail of recovery,” proof that a patient had worked hard and overcome his or her disability.
Born in the 1880s and coming of age during the eugenics era, Kenny believed that some disabling conditions made people less deserving of citizenship and respect. She shared a prejudice against people with mental disabilities. To mock her critics, for example, she referred to facts “that can be proven to the most feeble minded lay person.”15 But she stressed the aptitude and resiliency of people with physical disabilities who were able, she believed, to combat paralysis with intelligent cooperation. Indeed, she argued, the efficacy of her work with cerebral palsy patients showed that—despite widespread assumptions—such patients were not mentally disabled. After all, she told Australian physicians in the 1930s, “imbeciles cannot be treated successfully.”16
Like all promoters of rehabilitative work, Kenny highlighted the social indignities faced by anyone visibly disabled, arguing that her work could prevent “a lifetime of disability and the humiliation of being an object of pity.”17 During the Great War she had worked with soldiers disabled by meningitis and battle wounds and since the 1920s with children disabled by polio and cerebral palsy. In her experience patients termed “incurable” could be helped to gain flexibility, muscle strength, and, sometimes, significant functional power. Her work therefore challenged some of the widely held assumptions about the rehabilitative prospects of the disabled and helped to bring patients with polio out of family back rooms and “crippled children’s homes.”
Kenny’s work made extraordinary transformations of paralyzed bodies routine by redefining “normality” and “deformity.” In the 1920s and 1930s orthopedic nurses had defended the use of plaster splints and casts as crucial to spare patients “the mental and physical pain of a hideous deformity.”18 But this was not how Kenny saw it. A deformed body, in her view, was a stiff, ungainly, weak body; in her work, recovery was measured by flexibility and strength, not the response of a particular muscle in a muscle test. She was proud of the number of her patients she had discharged “with a trace of restricted movement” whom she termed “fully recovered” as well as those who left the Institute “handicapped but not crippled.”19 A determined and optimistic clinician, she did not believe, as one orthopedic nurse pointed out, that “true paralysis” could be “distinguished from mental alienation until spasm of the opponent has been completely released and persistent muscle re-education given a satisfactory trial.”20
Medical observers noted that many of Kenny’s “recovered” patients had “flail” arms or legs and atrophied muscles. Such conditions were “certainly deformities,” the editor of Archives of Physical Therapy noted, yet the patients had “no contractures or misalignments of joints” or common signs of weakened muscles such as scoliosis.21 The Kenny treatment created a new dialectic of ability, combining functionality with a redefinition of normality within a disabled form. Her patients, Kenny argued, left her care no longer “deformed” although their muscles did not always have fully recovered function. When she referred to “the cruel aftermath of the dwarfed, deformed body so frequently seen in the crippled children’s schools,” she was identifying bodies that were visibly inflexible and not functional, leaving a child segregated from ordinary educational and social experiences.22 To identify the success of her own work, she pointed to evidence of the new kinds of bodies it allowed polio survivors. She made much of the fact that no child in Minneapolis diagnosed with polio from 1940 to 1943 had been admitted to the city’s “crippled” children’s school. The majority of her patients at the Institute, she reported in 1943, had “returned to normal life”; some had left “to live a normal life slightly handicapped”; and the “remaining 2 percent” with more severe paralysis were nonetheless able “to earn their own living” at home and were “living active, normal lives.”23
The bodies of her recovered patients also countered orthodox fears of overstretched muscles without proper resistance and reflexes, for “none have developed deformities.”24 Kenny’s medical supporters shared this view. “We have not seen one deformity, not even a foot drop, develop in patients under treatment despite the fact that no splints have been used,” Alfred Deacon reported in 1942.25 During an outbreak of polio in San Antonio, 2 physicians noted, only 2 patients who had refused Kenny treatment developed “considerable muscle contracture and beginning deformity.”26
The iron lung was another controversial polio technology that had been introduced during the 1930s to be used for severely ill patients with paralyzed respiratory muscles but it often had disappointing results.27 Kenny argued that iron lungs were usually unnecessary and “of very doubtful value.” She was not frightened of respiratory (or bulbar) paralysis, believing that patients could learn to breathe again with careful nursing and properly placed hot packs. “In many instances,” she claimed, the iron lung could “debar the patient from making a satisfactory recovery.”28 Her decision to take selected patients out of the iron lung and use hot packs to treat the spasm in their neck and chest muscles shocked and impressed many hospital staffs. Unlike many polio experts who continued to rely on the iron lung, despite many unsuccessful experiences, Kenny made it another symbol of harmful orthodox practice.
Kenny’s dislike of assistive supports fit with the widely popular view that braces, crutches, and wheelchairs were horrific marks that would relegate a patient to a life of discrimination. When she took off her patients’ braces, this action threatened not just the stability of orthopedic authority but also the patient’s physical autonomy. She promised an alternative stability based on supple and strong muscles. This was a new kind of body—a healthy body that was nonetheless disabled. She taught her technicians, further, to handle patients not as china dolls but as feeling, pliant bodies. Opera singer Marjorie Lawrence recalled how horrified she had been at Kenny’s initial examination in which “she laid me face downwards on the bed and grasping me by either ankle bent my legs as far as they would go. Then she rolled me over and endeavored to push my legs up and over until my big toes nearly touched my forehead.” At hospitals in Mexico City and Hot Springs, Arkansas, Lawrence had been handled “as though I would fall apart” and “doctors and nurses were forever cautious not to ‘stretch’ my muscles.”29 Kenny’s procedures demanded patient involvement, and although polio care continued to be medicalized, her methods were performed by technicians and sometimes family members in conflict with the wishes of supervising physicians.
In other ways, however, Kenny’s work reinforced conventionality, especially in her acceptance of traditional gender roles for her patients, roles that she rejected in her own life. Like many antisuffragists who took to the lecture stage in order to convince the public that a woman’s place was in the home, Kenny encouraged parents to see functionality for their daughters as the ability to marry and look after a house, while getting a job was the sign of success for their sons. Her own career choices were starkly different. She had not become a farmer’s wife like most of her sisters in Australia, and in the United States her work enabled her to achieve a middle-class life far from bush nursing in rural Australia.
During the 19
40s the power of Kenny’s view of disability was enhanced by her emerging reputation as a celebrity. Her 2 1943 books provided stories of her life and work as struggles against orthodoxy for the transformation of disabled polio survivors. Both books challenged medical skepticism and both sought to remake polio as a disease in which families and patients were crucial proponents in shaping medical care and defining scientific truth. Like First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a politically engaged and outspoken activist, Kenny was combative and authoritative.30 In 1942 women seniors at Hunter College were asked to identify the “greatest living women.” Thirty percent chose Eleanor Roosevelt and the remaining votes were split among Kenny, Chinese nationalist Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Anne O’Hare McCormick (a New York Times reporter who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 as a foreign correspondent), and Dorothy Thompson, known as the “First Lady of American Journalism.”31 When Kenny began to make friends in Hollywood and RKO announced it would make a film of her life starring Rosalind Russell, her celebrity status grew even further.
KENNY, ROOSEVELT, AND THE DISABLED
The most prominent polio survivor was Franklin Roosevelt, the man who had battled his paralysis and been elected governor of New York in 1928 and President in 1932. After he had bought Warm Springs in the 1920s and turned it into a polio rehabilitative center, he was fondly known as “Doc Roosevelt” for his efforts to show other polio survivors how to exercise their muscles under water. As president he regularly attended Thanksgiving dinners there and continued to use Warm Springs as a place of retreat, staying in his specially built “Little White House.” At Warm Springs he was feted as a success yet also recognized as a disabled man, an identity that he strove in every other part of his life to finesse.
Roosevelt was the first American president to make a disease “his disease.” His advisors made much of his transformation from polio victim to polio patron and featured his name, voice, and body in NFIP publicity. In 1943, for example, the National Foundation News showed Roosevelt seated, surrounded by Hollywood stars who had written, directed, and acted in a movie whose profits were to be donated to the NFIP.32 As a symbol of polio recovery, we know now, Roosevelt was a fraud. He had managed to gain the highest political office, but at the cost of having to pretend, at least in public, that he could walk and stand like an able-bodied man. Reporters typically praised his physical ability and love of sailing.33 A crippled body, a crippled mind, and a crippled life—this was the cultural equation that every polio survivor had to fight.
Kenny recognized how important Roosevelt was to the NFIP, to her patients and their families, and to polio politics nationwide. She had written to him several times in the early 1940s, explaining her work and reminding him that polio paralysis was “of national importance to your country.”34 In May 1943 Kenny asked the president’s secretary whether she could dedicate her autobiography to him. In the wake of the arrival of General MacArthur in Australia and the alliances between Australian and American forces fighting the Japanese expansion through the Pacific, Kenny and her “fellow Australians” considered Roosevelt “the saviour [sic] of our country.” She suggested a meeting in order to receive his permission in person.35 The answer to this request, O’Connor advised the president’s secretary firmly, “by all means should be ‘NO.’ ”36
Nonetheless O’Connor recognized that if he did not organize an opportunity for Kenny to meet Roosevelt it would seem like a snub. Reporters sometimes said that Roosevelt had taken a deep personal interest in Kenny’s work, and, while there is no evidence that this was true, the White House did receive a number of letters urging the president to recognize Kenny and allow her to introduce her methods at Warm Springs.
Finally, on June 8 1943 Kenny met the President in a carefully choreographed lunch with O’Connor, who had asked for 5 minutes to see Roosevelt beforehand for “there are some things about Sister Kenny that I should tell him.”37 Photographers took official pictures of the 3 of them: Roosevelt seated, Kenny standing over him, and O’Connor nearby. These pictures were used by Kenny and by sympathetic reporters for the rest of her life.38 She was unable to boast about the content of her meeting. In most other situations Kenny refused to take O’Connor’s advice but after this meeting she headed his warnings, perhaps because they were reinforced by the Secret Service. “I could not write and tell you anything about my visit with the President,” she told a friend a few weeks later, “O’Connor cautioned me that I was not to do so.”39 Still, although she dedicated her autobiography to the “Mothers of Mankind” rather than to Roosevelt, her book made much of her visit to the White House. She praised the president’s “deep humility” and “personal charm,” and recalled how she had been “inordinately excited at the prospect of sitting down to luncheon with President Roosevelt.”40
As for the President, we know little about what Roosevelt thought about Kenny and her work. O’Connor had advised Roosevelt not to agree to allow Kenny to dedicate her book to him, adding that she “writes awful stuff.”41 Warm Springs became a training site for physical therapy and incorporated aspects of Kenny’s work but not to her satisfaction—and she was never invited there. Only after Roosevelt’s death did Kenny, on occasion, refer to this 1943 meeting to defend her distinction between her work and standard physical therapy. “In conversation with the late President Roosevelt,” Kenny remarked in October 1945, “I explained my approach to this disease. He (Mr. Roosevelt) drew my attention to the fact that my work was not physiotherapy as he had experienced it, but was a more advanced science and therefore should not be confused with present day physiotherapy.”42 Roosevelt may well have noted how different her methods were from the ones with which he was familiar. Perhaps he had agreed that hers was a “more advanced science,” perhaps he was just being polite, or perhaps she made this remark up.
FIGURE 4.1 Kenny finally met President Roosevelt in 1943, photographed here with Basil O’Connor carefully positioned between them; Elizabeth Kenny with Martha Ostenso And They Shall Walk: The Life Story of Sister Elizabeth Kenny (New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 1943, 1960), opp. 256.
NOT JUST CHILDREN
A sentimentalized picture of “crippled children” had long defined the public image of polio, leaving adult polio survivors invisible. As the children of the polio outbreaks of the 1910s and 1920s became adults, and as new epidemics targeted teenagers and adults, the popular term “infantile paralysis” came to be seen as a misnomer. By 1943 U.S. army officers recognized polio as a problem among adult soldiers, not only their children, and demanded guides to managing the disease. During the 1940s the term “polio” was used to designate polio survivors and later as a shortened form for the disease itself.43
A growing number of teenagers and adults began to articulate how liberating Kenny’s work was. (Although the loin cloth she required her patients to wear, which looked uncomfortably like a diaper, continued to infantilize patients of all ages.) Survivors such as Henry Haverstock, known as Kenny’s “first” American patient, were quoted in national magazines and shown standing without crutches.44 Haverstock and Kenny’s other older patients spoke of how impressed they were with this new kind of clinical encounter: her refusal to treat patients as fragile, her willingness to perform tests that might be initially painful or demand significant muscular strength, and her matter-of-fact attitude, offering hope without pity.
“Crippled children” looking adorable and pathetic never left center stage in polio philanthropy. But letters from hopeful and sometimes angry teenagers and adults struck by polio found that Kenny’s methods fit their identities well as they confronted a world that rejected them in their efforts to gain economic independence and personal happiness. Adjustment was considered their task, not the responsibility of those who made them feel inferior and unwelcome. Buildings were impossible to enter, schools unwilling to accept them, employers unwilling to hire them, and “shut-ins” seen as a legitimate role.45 In December 1943, for example, 54-year-old Phil McGrath, a basket-chair ma
ker, celebrated his fiftieth Christmas at the Home for Incurables in Washington, D.C., where he had been brought as a 4-year-old child with polio and “never since left.”46 An identity as a disabled activist was possible, but it was a heavily constrained role. In the early and mid-twentieth century the adult Helen Keller fought for the rights of those who were blind and deaf, but, as her biographer Kim Nielsen has shown, whenever Keller ventured to discuss topics outside disability, she found able-bodied audiences suspicious, convinced that those speeches were written by others because she, as a disabled woman, was easily manipulated and politically naive.47
The NFIP made much of polio survivors who surpassed the ordinary. The January 1942 March of Dimes campaign featured Nancy Merki and Jean White, “two girls who fought their way back from infantile paralysis affliction.” Merki, 15, from Portland, Oregon, had won the world freestyle record, and was later an Olympic swimmer; White, 19, from New York, was a roller skating champion.48 But the NFIP seems to have been unclear about how these examples related to the majority of survivors whose recovery was less complete. At a reception at the Waldorf Hotel reporters were shown “a 5-year-old boy, hobbling along merrily on crutches” and behind him “tall, strong, good looking Nancy Merki” who looked “like the popular conception of the American high school girl.” “Someday, if all goes well and money keeps coming into the great fight against this bone-wrecking disease,” NFIP officials explained, “Jerry and kids like him will be as straight and as strong as Nancy.”49 But the discrepancy was not explained. Was it the right therapy? Or luck? Or hard work?
Like many adult survivors, Marjorie Lawrence discovered that, despite her celebrity reputation, her disability left her unemployed. In what newspapers called a “poignant scene,” Lawrence returned to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera to sing at a special testimonial concert “in tribute to the courageous spirit of Marjorie Lawrence.”50 Reporters described the “steps” she was taking and her belief that “I will walk again,” but this story of “a dramatic and successful ‘come back’ ” was never achieved.51 Once it became clear that she would be unable to walk, Lawrence lost her position at the Metropolitan although she continued to sing in concerts and on the radio. She entertained troops during World War II, and later taught opera at Southern Illinois University and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but she never again appeared in an opera.52 Neither the director of the Metropolitan Opera nor of any other opera company believed audiences would be comfortable with her visible disability.
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