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
NOTES
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); Dav
is 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.
36. E. M. W. [Edwin M. Watson] Memorandum for the President, May 10 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute 1940–1944, FDR Papers. He also wrote to Kenny saying that the president “hopes very much that he will have a chance for a visit with you, but that the appointment should be arranged through Mr. Basil O’Connor”; Edwin M. Watson to My Dear Sister Kenny, May 12 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute 1940–1944, FDR Papers.
37. Basil O’Connor to Dear Grace [Tully], June 4 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute 1940–1944, FDR Papers; “The Day in Washington” New York Times, June 9 1943. O’Connor had proposed a lunch meeting with Kenny and the president several times; Basil O’Connor to Roosevelt, January 12 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute, 1940–1944, FDR Papers. See also O’Connor [memoranda of] February 1 1943 and April 1 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute, 1940–1944, FDR Papers.
38. “President Roosevelt Greeting Sister Kenny Yesterday” [Associated Press Photo] New York Times June 9 1943. Roosevelt told reporters later that they “discussed plans to train more Americans in the use of Sister Kenny’s method.”
39. Kenny “Report of Activities: June, 1940–1943,” FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute, 1940–1944, FDR Papers; Kenny to Dear Mary [McCarthy], July 5 1943, Mary McCarthy, 1942–1944, MHS-K.
40. Kenny and Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 268.
41. E.M.W. [Edwin M. Watson] Memorandum for the President, May 10 1943, FDR-OF-5188, Sister Elizabeth Kenny Institute, 1940–1944, FDR Papers.
42. Kenny to Dear Doctor Stimson, October 8 1945, Public Relations, MOD-K.
43. Edward Compere “Management and Care of the Infantile Paralysis Patient” Archives of Physical Therapy (December 1943) [abstract] Physiotherapy Review (1944) 24: 80.
44. Robert M. Yoder “Healer from the Outback” Saturday Evening Post (January 17 1942) 214: 18–19, 68, 70; anon. “Sister Kenny: Australian Nurse Demonstrates Her Treatment for Infantile Paralysis” Life (September 28 1942) 13: 73–75, 77; Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 227. See also Alexander Maverick, 118–119.
45. Seth Koven has pointed out that the role of “shut in” was restricted to the disabled members of wealthy families; Seth Koven “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain” American Historical Review (1994) 99: 1167–1202.
46. “Still in Wheel Chair: Polio Invalid Inmate For 50 Years” Washington Post December 18 1943.
47. See Kim E. Nielsen The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
48. “Mr. Smith Again Will Come To Washington—for Jubilee” Washington Post January 18 1942; “Nancy Merki, Girl Tank Star, Gets Bid to White House” Washington Post January 11 1942.
49. Considine “On the Line” Washington Post January 22 1942.
50. Lawrence Interrupted Melody, 219–226; “Marjorie Lawrence Real Star of ‘Tannhauser’ at Metropolitan” Christian Science Monitor January 23 1943.
51. “Diva Returns, Paralysis Beaten” New York Times December 29 1943; “Singer Wins Over Paralysis” Hartford Courant January 10 1943.
52. Lawrence Interrupted Melody, 227–230, 247–263.
53. See one example of an NFIP scholarship for an orthopedic nurse, who was a former polio patient; “Professional Advancement Expedited by Polio Treatment Scholarships” Archives of Physical Therapy (November 1944) 25: 687. See also the head of Nebraska’s Scotts Bluff County NFIP chapter who was a polio survivor; Mr. Stone to Mr. Wear, Memorandum: Re Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, August 17 1945, Public Relations, MOD-K.
54. F. P. Sahli to Gentlemen, December 12 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K.
55. Gudakunst to Dear Mr. Sahli, December 21 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K.
56. Neil M. Tasker “Infantile Paralysis Patient” National Foundation News (March 1943) 2: 20.
57. Robert W. Lovett “Orthopedic Problems in the After-Treatment of Infantile Paralysis” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (1917) 2: 693. See also Fishbein warning of public “ignorance” as the cause of both popular fears and also the use of “quack practitioners”; Morris Fishbein “The National Foundation Reports” [radio address], Columbia Broadcasting System, November 8 1940, Public Relations, Fishbein, MOD.
58. Lewis L. Clarke to Dear Mr. President, February 7 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K. See also a father who “studied everything I could find and believe I knew as much and more about the disease than does the average doctor”; Frank P. Fischer to Dear Sister Kenny, May 17 1943, Case Files-Misc., A-K, 1943–1946, MHS-K.
59. A Parent, “Our Son Has Polio” [1945], Ray of Light Letters, 1944, MHS-K.
60. Nurses had long recognized the importance of providing mothers with concrete instructions; see Jessie L. Stevenson The Nursing Care of Patients with Infantile Paralysis (New York: National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, 1940), 23–24. For other examples of mothers as primary rehabilitative caregivers see Ruth Esau, quoted in Silver and Wilson Polio Voices, 42; Katherine Pappas, quoted in ibid, 46.
61. Kenny to Mrs. Frank P. Fischer, March 3 1944, Case Files-Misc., A-K, 1943–1946, MHS-K; Georgia Fischer to Dear Sister, May 17 1944, Case Files-Misc., A-K, 1943–1946, MHS-K.
62. Mr. and Mrs. Howard Allen to Dear Sister Kenny, November 4 1943, Mrs. Howard Allen, 1944 [sic], MHS-K.
63. “Sister Kenny To Speak” New York Times February 4 1943; “News for Nurses: Sister Kenny in N.Y.” Trained Nurse and Hospital Review (February 1943) 110: 127.
64. Clarence R. Newman “Sister Kenny Here to Aid Polio Victims” Los Angeles Examiner [1943], Clippings, MHS-K. Her 1943 textbook, she proudly told lay supporters, “would be of tremendous help to all mothers and fathers on whom the burden of this work is thrust in many cases”; Elizabeth Kenny to Dear Mr. Harris, August 18 1944, Calvin Harris, 1944–1945, MHS.
65. Dorothy Ducas to P. J. A. Cusack Memorandum on Reader’s Digest article by LMM ‘Sister Kenny vs. the Medical Old Guard’, December 5 1944, Public Relations, MOD-K.
66. “Kenny Way” Newsweek (February 7 1944) 93.
67. Mr. and Mrs. Steven Hotinska to Dear Sister Kenny, January 28 1943, Requests for Treatment 1942–1945, MHS-K.
68. Betty Adler [Baltimore] to Dear Sister Kenny, January 28 1943, Requests for Treatment 1942–1945, MHS-K.
69. Mrs. Clara Conte to Dear Sister Kenny, January 31 1943, Requests for Treatment 1942–1945, MHS-K.
70. Dorothy Marie Meissner to Dear Sister Kenny, January 24 1943, Requests for Treatment 1942–1945, MHS-K.
71. Charlotte Gruber Birch to Dear Miss Kenny [1943], Requests for Treatment 1942–1945, MHS-K.
72. This attitude was shared by other polio experts; see also Florence Kendall’s view that people who worked with polio patients “can’t afford to be afraid or just couldn’t do their job”; Kendall, interview with Rogers, April 26 1999.
73. Marion Williamson “Review of a Polio Epidemic” Public Health Nursing (June 1945) 37: 312; Robert D. Blute, Sr., father of Margaret Marshall, quoted in Sil
ver and Wilson Polio Voices, 54; William Foote Whyte Participant Observer: An Autobiography (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1994), 133; Marian Williamson “Review of the Current Poliomyelitis Epidemic” [November 13 1944] Central File 1944–1945, Children’s Bureau, Box 103, Record Group 102, Infantile Paralysis 103-4-5-16-1, National Archives.
74. Patient quoted in Richard L. Bruno The Polio Paradox: Understanding and Treating ‘Post-Polio Syndrome’ and Chronic Fatigue (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 83. Even years later a polio survivor might face this. “Sometimes people would look at me like I had some kind of contagious disease,” one survivor recalled; Robert Gurney in Edmund J. Sass with George Gottfried and Anthony Sorem eds. Polio’s Legacy: An Oral History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 28.
75. Lora M. Lee “I Contact Polio” Dr Shelton’s Hygienic Review (July 1945) 6: 255. A physical therapist in Massachusetts recalled that she “had to scrub, before I went in, [and] after I came out, change my shoes”; Irja Hoffshire, quoted in Silver and Wilson Polio Voices, 23–24. See also a recollection of ward nurses wearing masks and floor length isolation gowns at Columbia University’s Babies Hospital in 1944; William A. Silverman Where’s the Evidence? Controversies in Modern Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.
76. Myra G. Lehman “Poliomyelitis Problems: The Alabama Epidemic” American Journal of Nursing (October 1946) 46: 690.
77. Kenny with Ostenso And They Shall Walk, 204.
78. Helen H. Ross “Physiotherapy in the Treatment of Infantile Paralysis: Kenny Method” Canadian Public Health Journal (June 1942) 33: 286.
79. See, for example, Charles J. Frankel and Robert V. Funsten “Use of Neostigmine (Prostigmine) in Subacute Poliomyelitis” Southern Medical Journal (June 1946) 39: 483.
80. Ratcliff “Minutemen Against Infantile Paralysis,” 80.
81. “A Date with the Future” [Buffalo], November 2 1949, Buffalo, NY, MHS-K.
82. Editorial “Fact and Fancy in Poliomyelitis” British Medical Journal (July 31 1943) 2: 142; “The Kenny Method In Poliomyelitis” Lancet (January 30 1943) 241: 148. Yet the editor felt it was necessary to refer to other sources of authority. The results of the new method had “been observed by other workers outside the Minneapolis group” and “spasm” had been “demonstrated and photographed.”
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