The reception from other professionals was more mixed. At a screening before residents, physical therapists, and nurses at the Brisbane Hospital, Chuter reported, “there was unanimous agreement that the picture had been wonderfully produced; the nurses were favourably impressed; the physical therapy staff still prejudiced; resident medical staff, silent.”183 Physicians at the University of Queensland’s medical school agreed that “the film was well presented,” Chuter informed Kenny, “and that it established that you had got ‘something’ ” but they also identified “exaggeration.”184
Lay viewers, in contrast, were markedly enthusiastic. Local officials in Brisbane were so impressed that they passed a resolution “demanding the Kenny treatment for this State.” Members of the Irish Association turned out in numbers, “notwithstanding that the night was stormy and wet,” and a friendly audience of around a hundred members of the National Council of Women urged Chuter to exhibit the film more widely.185 The film raised Chuter’s own reputation as an expert on Kenny’s work. A Brisbane assemblyman asked him to help a 15-year-old boy paralyzed by polio who was not, the parents believed, getting the proper treatment at the Brisbane General Hospital. In a response that suggested that Chuter saw the film as both a technical guide and propaganda vehicle, he organized a special screening for the parents and invited 5 members of Parliament and “a substantial number of other people.”186 Chuter became more convinced than ever that the film illuminated what he had long suspected: a division between thoughtful members of the public and prejudiced Australian professionals. “Lay audiences have been fascinated,” he reflected, while most doctors “have been shocked into silence … [and] some of them are floundering in an endeavour [sic] to find defects.”187
These responses to The Kenny Concept reminded Kenny that most Australian physicians, whom she had largely been able to ignore during her early years in Minnesota, were not impressed by her American success. Like Chuter, she saw her film illuminate a chasm between lay Australians and medical professionals. She had intended the film to end professional bickering, public ignorance, and the tyranny of distance. It needed, she felt, only viewers of good will and honorable character who would believe in what they saw. Why was it not reaching physicians? Were their prejudices stronger than their eyes? Or was there something in the design of the film that marked it as not scientific enough?
REEDITING THE FILM
Kenny’s technical film became her great hope, a way of simultaneously demonstrating and confirming her ideas. However, it carried many of the same failings as her textbooks and lectures: it juxtaposed sentimentalized language and dramatic vignettes with scientific terms, giving it a tone and style far from the typical medical films of the day.
Kenny at first refused to acknowledge these failings. But supporters such as Perkins, Bauwens, and Stanford convinced her that the etiquette of cinematic science required less talk of pain and emotion. By mid-1945 Kenny had come to acknowledge that she had to edit her film to bring it closer to the universal language of science.
She cut the film in half and found several doctors to translate the soundtrack into German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, French, and Italian.188 It was the first time she had ever responded positively to even mild criticism from anyone outside her immediate circle. She was beginning to feel that this film, remade with its narration in a number of languages and then sent all over the world, could stand as her legacy and as the concrete example of her contribution, satisfying enough to allow her to return to Australia and claim that she had achieved what she had set out to do in 1940. The new film could become a kind of global ambassador, and, she hoped, “draw attention to the indisputable presence of the disturbance in the peripheral structures and in this way perhaps scientific research may find out the reason for these disturbances.”189
Bauwens’s advice to take out the film’s “sensational” elements and his warnings against its “Hollywood” features spoke directly to the dangers of personality politics in science, which Kenny had exacerbated by accompanying her film during 1944 and early 1945. She now became more willing to separate herself from the promotion and explication of her work. Leaving the original version of the film in England and Belgium, and preparing the new version in various languages to be sent around the world without her—all were significant steps in breaking the link between Kenny herself and the Kenny method.
Bauwens was glad to hear that Kenny was preparing a shortened edition of the film and asked to look over the new version with a colleague to make “an abstract of the portions which I consider of the highest clinical importance.” The film, he believed, should be made available for distribution to any medical society or association “which might want the loan of it.” To achieve this he had put the film in the catalogue of the Scientific Films Association.190 Delighted, Kenny used Bauwens’s letter to confirm her claims that eminent physicians had recognized the authority of her work through her film. Her technical film, which presented “indisputable evidence,” she informed O’Connor, was now accepted by a British expert who had presented it to the “Scientific Film Association of Great Britain.”191 To the Chicago Herald-American Kenny noted that her film been adopted as a “great scientific document” by the “Royal Medical Society of England” and would be “made available to every medical society and university in the land.” British physicians, she assured Chicago supporters, had initially been skeptical before seeing the film. They had told her “we in England had been led to believe the Kenny treatment was evolved from some fantastic theory of infantile paralysis, but your film proved your treatment is based on definite clinical findings.”192
UPHEAVAL
Other events served to make Kenny even more dependent on the success of her film. In London, grieving for the death of her fiancé, Mary met Stuart McCracken, an Australian soldier who had been a German prisoner of war. They became engaged, and Mary left for Australia to marry and raise a family. Her move to Brisbane, according to her American friends, helped her free herself from Kenny’s tight control.193 Kenny had not wanted to have Mary leave, recognizing the emotional and physical sustenance Mary offered. Stuart, who years later became a fervent guardian of Kenny’s legacy, recalled the money Kenny had offered him not to marry Mary so she could help Kenny “carry on her work.”194 Although Kenny wished them “life-long” happiness she missed Mary terribly and felt bereft without her help.195 And there was further upheaval. Margaret Opdahl, her secretary since 1942, left the Institute for a new position at the Red Cross. Kenny had recognized Opdahl’s “ability to maintain harmonious relations [and] … trusted her with my most intimate and private affairs.”196 She was never able to replace her with anyone as reliable and loyal.
Local political alliances altered as well. Hubert Humphrey, the city’s new mayor, was, NFIP officials noted with delight, “not in sympathy with the Kenny Institute being run as a project of the Board of Public Welfare.”197 Still, although most of the Institute’s board members were Republicans, Democrat Humphrey found it politically expedient to work enthusiastically for the annual Institute fundraising campaigns. Kenny’s sense that only a small group of people were loyal to her—and that physicians in the city hospital and at the University of Minnesota were not—intensified. “I may be a little selfish,” she wrote to Marvin Kline after the results of the 1945 mayoralty election in which he had run and lost were announced, “but to be candid, I think now that you are relieved of your parochial responsibilities your sympathetic heart and your sound judgment will have more opportunity to reach out to wider horizons and help to bring joy and comfort and security to a greater number.”198 Kline remained on the Institute’s board as its senior executive, but, as the NRC committee had feared, he began to see the burgeoning Kenny movement as an opportunity to make as well as to raise money.
Kenny’s own sense of mortality exacerbated her dependence on the film. Not only did it have to stand for concrete and unambiguous achievement, it had to portray an Institute without politics where, she
recognized, she would not always be in charge. She took her film to the Mayo Clinic and showed it to Melvin Henderson and his colleagues, trying to ensure regional loyalties.199 She continued to feel that the situation in the United States was “chaotic” but that her efforts were starting to come to fruition. When she had finished editing and translating the film she wrote to President Truman that fall, “I [will] have fulfilled my obligation to my own country and presented my clinical findings by documentary film to research institutions where clinical presentation and scientific research can be instituted side by side.”200 “This is the crown of my life[’s] work,” she wrote to Chuter the same week, “I am sure when the scientists of the world see the indisputable evidence presented in the film, research will bring the conquest of the disease centuries nearer.”201
INITIAL REACTIONS TO THE KENNY CONCEPT
Kenny was delighted by the public response to her film. She loved the ovations and the postscreening receptions where she was treated as a celebrity.202 She was eager to hear the reactions of particular viewers, asking a Hearst newspaper executive whether “your Chief has seen the Documentary film and what were his reactions to it?” “Mr. Hearst had viewed the documentary film,” the official replied, “and thought it most impressive. He asked me to express his appreciation to you.”203
Kenny was especially interested in her film’s impact on professional audiences. She was not surprised when Morris Fishbein told the Institute’s public relations director that, as “the editor of a scientific magazine,” he was interested only in “controlled scientific evidence regarding the results of methods submitted by people capable of evaluating the results” and was therefore “not interested in Sister Kenny’s film.”204 Fishbein’s reaction—refusing to look—suggested the film might indeed have the power to sway its observers, a power she had frequently found in her own clinical demonstrations. One Iowa physician assured her that “Waterloo physicians were greatly impressed by the documentary film … Too bad there are so many ‘die hards’ but Pasteur had the same trouble in putting over his germ theory.”205
John Pohl liked the film but he felt its main strength was to help allies who wished to understand further details of Kenny’s work.206 Kenny technicians, similarly, tended to use the film to inform students who had already “grasped the concept.” They found that students who were finishing their training were able “to get so much more from it.”207
From the beginning, Kenny challenged critics to see her film and retain their skepticism. In early 1945 she urged the members of the AMA committee to return to Minneapolis to see her film because “they would find it most instructive, and I am sure that many of the opinions expressed in their report would in all honor be contradicted.”208 When physicians from the Minneapolis General Hospital published a report that was critical of Kenny’s concept in the state medical journal and stated that there was no proof that muscles had “direct virus involvement,” Kenny retorted that “if all of these gentlemen had kept themselves abreast of the results of research and had waited to see the documentary film” none of those comments “would ever have been written.”209
For some lay viewers the film’s impact was tremendous and positive. A North Dakota woman who saw the film after hearing Kenny lecture told her that “what you have done in the field of medical science seems to me like a great sermon, which I wish the world might hear.” Watching the film, she had “received a spiritual vision”: just as patients with polio were “crippled [so] … our spirits are imprisoned in braces and splints and corsets [for] … we use only a small fraction of the spiritual life which is rightfully ours.”210 Clara Russell La Roche, Rosalind Russell’s sister, showed the film to potential donors in New York City, and, according to her husband, the occasion spurred the founding of the New York KF chapter.211
While Kenny continued to see The Kenny Concept as appropriate for both professional and lay audiences, she also produced a 12-minute film The Value of a Life, designed specifically “for the lay person.”212 Institute officials found this film particularly useful to show to families and potential donors, but Kenny continued to show The Kenny Concept to members of the public as well as medical professionals who visited the Institute. 213
THE SILVER SCREEN
In 1946 Kenny was caught up in the excitement of the Hollywood movie’s premiere and promotion. She flew to New York to attend the movie’s premiere in Time Square, and spoke at a gathering of New York’s social elite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where she was presented with a large book of photographs commemorating the movie. “Wish you were here to go with me,” she wrote to Mary; “I have a new green evening frock to wear as I am not quite sure what these bally Americans will do to me at such a premiere.”214
According to the Minneapolis Star-Journal, traffic in Times Square was “a mad mix up” as more than 20,000 people “jammed in for a close look at arriving celebrities,” along with extra squads of policemen. Kenny arrived escorted by Russell’s husband Frederick Brisson. She told the crowd “it is a pleasure to see you here and I know you will see a fine film … It has been gratifying to be able to do something for your country, that has done so much for mine.” The crowd broke through the barriers and jostled the platform on which Kenny stood, “nearly throwing her off balance.”215 The northwest premiere the next month in Minneapolis rivaled the New York premiere “in color and fanfare,” as a crowd of over a thousand milled outside the RKO-Orpheum theater to watch local and regional celebrities enter.216
Advertised as “one of the world’s great stories of love, sacrifice and conflict,” the film was clearly made to capitalize on public curiosity about a controversial and popular figure, and on the celebrity attraction of Rosalind Russell.217 Although Sister Kenny did not do well at the box office, audiences and many film critics liked it. In November 1946 the National Screen Council, comprised of local civic film committees, gave it that month’s Blue Ribbon Award for family entertainment, even though the film’s average gross was lower than that of the council’s usual award choices.218 Russell’s performance was widely praised, and few were surprised when she received a Golden Globe award for best dramatic actress and an Academy Award nomination.219 The Oscar for Best Actress, however, went to Olivia de Haviland in To Each His Own.
The movie’s message was harder to assess. Howard Barnes of the New York Tribune called it “a fascinating documentation of a ceaseless and stirring medical struggle.”220 The Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph considered it “a sympathetic and indignant photoplay” with “a depth of feeling and sincerity that occasionally takes on a documentary tinge.”221
As sentimental as any March of Dimes preview, Sister Kenny drew its appeal from dramatizing the fear of ignoring the value of the Kenny method. On this occasion it offered the American public a heroic “woman in white” who provided alternative, perhaps even antiorthodox, solutions to puzzles the American medical establishment could not solve. The film’s image of scientific discovery—the outsider versus the conservative professional establishment—was, leaders of organized medicine realized, one that fit all too well with the public’s distrust of what it considered the overblown claims of America’s medical elite. Members of the audience would leave the cinema convinced they had the right to choose between experts to care for a child paralyzed with polio. This was, of course, an option they had always had, but one that was now recognized by Hollywood’s powerful silver screen. Kenny’s critics feared the movie would sway a public already eager to embrace a miracle worker.
James Hulett, Jr., a young sociologist at the University of Illinois, decided that the movie provided the perfect research subject to follow “the conflict between scientific medicine and the Kenny group as it affects the attitudes of the public.” He wrote to the NFIP’s national office to ask for “a reliable statement on the question whether the Kenny therapy represents anything new or ‘revolutionary’ that was unknown before Kenny ‘discovered’ it.” “My purposes in studying the Kenny movement are strictly objective,”
he assured NFIP officials.222
The NFIP had always paid close attention to movies about polio. In 1944 it had advised its Minneapolis chapter not to sponsor the film They Shall Have Faith (later renamed Forever Yours), produced by the B-studio Monogram. It was the story of a doctor’s daughter paralyzed by polio who defies her father’s old-fashioned splinting methods and is healed by the experimental treatment of Army surgeon Tex O’Connor. The NFIP headquarters concluded that polio was hardly central to the plot, which was “the usual Hollywood romance,” but suggested the chapter not sponsor the film, for “the picture will do no damage but is the type of thing which we should have no part of.”223 RKO’s Sister Kenny was different. Not only was polio central to the plot, but there was also an explicit discussion of medical orthodoxy, and the doctors who disagreed with Kenny’s ideas were the ones leaving children deformed.224 Further, Kenny had made the film her personal triumph. After talking with his staff, who noted that Hulett had written an “outstanding article on ‘The Kenny Cult,’ ” the head of NFIP’s Public Relations suggested that Hulett contact Maurice Visscher, Harold Diehl, and other members of Minnesota’s medical faculty who were “living as it were in the middle of the Kenny movement.”225 In the article Hulett published a few years later he saw the film’s success as the result of a misguided popular beliefs.226
Some reviewers turned to physicians to try to balance the film’s pro-Kenny stance. In the New York Herald Tribune Judith Klein noted the film’s “distortion and omission of facts,” a problem that “not only tends to shake public faith in the medical profession but also raises false hopes as to the universal effectiveness of treatment.” She referred to Pohl’s 1945 study of the numbers of Kenny patients who were left with extensive residual paralysis and she also quoted NFIP medical director Hart Van Riper. While Van Riper praised Kenny’s “brilliant results in treatment” and credited her with the demise of the orthodox use of plaster casts, he made it clear that praising Kenny as a clinician did not mean accepting her theories of polio. “If Miss Kenny had remained on the clinical side—instead of invading the laboratory field of the physician—the great schism between her and the medical profession would not have occurred.” The movie, he feared, might revive the feuding between doctors and Kenny. “Let’s not worry about cause,” Van Riper told Klein and her readers, “but concentrate on the treatment … there is no known cure for poliomyelitis.” After all, he concluded, “doctors cure very few people. The Lord cures them. Doctors just help Him along.”227
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