Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  In Minneapolis the delicate balance between the Institute and the local NFIP chapter was constantly upset by national policies. In early 1949 the head of the Minneapolis chapter was taken aback to learn that the national office had informed Kline that it would no longer pay for patient care at the Institute. This ill-advised policy was, Minneapolis officials protested, clearly the result of not having consulted local officials. Altering this policy “would rupture the harmonious relationship” between the Institute and the NFIP and “would prejudice all Minnesotans against the National Foundation.” Many local officials might then have to resign from the NFIP and its March of Dimes January campaign “would fall flat.”158 So tricky were public relations around this issue that University of Minnesota president J. L. Morrill expressed his regret and embarrassment at having to decline the opportunity to serve as a formal sponsor of the NFIP’s state drive. If he did this, he explained to an NFIP official, “it would be very difficult for me thereafter to decline similar service and connection with the Kenny campaign,” which for personal and professional reasons he would prefer not to do.159

  Attacks on the NFIP were also voiced by the Citizen’s League, working with the newly invigorated California KF chapters.160 State politicians responded to this public pressure. California’s Republican Governor Earl Warren served as the honorary chair of the KF’s Northern chapter and proclaimed state Sister Kenny days, as did the mayor of San Francisco for that city. Judge Georgia Bullock, who had been appointed to the state’s high court by a Republican governor in the 1930s, urged full support of the KF campaign.161 According to Sonja Betts, head of the Citizen’s League, NFIP officials “have blocked Sister Kenny at every turn, and with their money and power are exercising every strategy to prevent her from getting in on the West Coast.” Betts planned to seek the aid of both Republican and Democratic California politicians for a Congressional resolution to increase funding to the Public Health Service and to earmark part of those funds to fight polio. “The National Foundation is strong and powerful, but it is time the people took the matter into their own hands and fight to get the Kenny treatment here if we are ever going to get any relief from the ravages of polio,” Betts told reporters dramatically.162

  FIGHTS IN CENTRALIA

  Unlike the thriving center in Jersey City and the growing nucleus of supporters in California, the Kenny clinic in Centralia, Illinois, proved a disappointment. The clinic’s first administrator resigned in early 1948, and, although the clinic’s medical board appointed a successor, the Minneapolis KF board refused to approve him. The KF board claimed it was still waiting to receive formal approval of the clinic from the state’s crippled children’s division. The state agency hesitated to approve sending patients to the clinic, arguing that the clinic needed more permanent specialists, specifically a pediatrician and an orthopedist.163 John Lucian Matthews, a labor leader on the Centralia clinic’s board of directors, urged both Kenny and Kline to back the clinic’s board in its efforts to maintain high standards. “Labor like the physicians in this area,” Matthews told Kenny, “have a warm spot in their hearts for you.”164 Although Matthews and other directors urged her to visit the clinic, Kenny initially refused, saying that Kline would visit and assuring her supporters that she had “every confidence in his ability to meet the wishes of the medical profession [and to]…solve any difficulties which may have arisen.”165

  As the calls for help from Centralia continued, Kenny finally acted. She contacted Illinois Governor Dwight Green, warning that if the situation were not cleared up “it will be my painful duty to recall my Staff from the Centralia Clinic and place them in other Centers and in other States that are so eagerly awaiting the service now being given to the State of Illinois.” The “repeated stumbling blocks” around the formal certification of the clinic by the state’s crippled children’s division had prevented the clinic from receiving the funds “donated for purposes of caring for the children afflicted by the disease,” funds that were in the NFIP “coffers.”166 In August, 2 months after the 1948 Congressional hearings, Green arranged a meeting at his campaign headquarters attended by Kenny, the mayor of Centralia, clinic officials, and the director of the State Division of Services for Crippled Children. Green was in the midst of his campaign for his third term as Illinois’s Republican governor, and he may have hoped the meeting would distract voters from the uproar over the mining accident in Centralia the year before in which 111 miners had died, one of the nation’s worst mining disasters.167 Before the meeting Kenny travelled to Centralia where she spoke to a crowd of an estimated 5,000 including hundreds of workers who had helped to renovate the clinic.168

  At the meeting hosted by Green, physicians on the Crippled Children Division’s advisory board noted that state officials could not “purchase medical care in an institution where only one method of treatment of crippled children is practiced.”169 The director of the Crippled Children Division reiterated his agency’s policy: the clinic must have a board-certified pediatrician and orthopedist living and practicing in Centralia. The clinic’s selection of a pediatrician from St. Louis and an orthopedic surgeon from Chicago did not meet these requirements for these physicians were not suitable for emergency care.170 Centralia was a small coal-mining town without the medical facilities of nearby larger communities; its physicians were frustrated but not surprised when all the pediatricians they asked to serve at the clinic—in one estimate 50—turned them down.171

  The Centralia community refused to accept this decision and believed that Kenny could alter the clinic’s fate. In 1949 while Kenny was in Australia John Lucian Matthews, who had contracted polio in November 1948 and been treated at the Centralia clinic, flew to Toowoomba to see Kenny about keeping the clinic open.172 Kenny’s limited influence became clear when the clinic’s new administrator announced that Kenny had ordered the clinic to remain open pending her return from Australia in early 1949. Kline contradicted this immediately, saying the KF would no longer back the clinic, as it was unable to “economically meet the foundation’s medical standards,” and he began to arrange for current Centralia patients to be treated at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. He also said that the town of Centralia was too small and not close enough to a medical center, arguments that supporters pointed out could just as well have been made about Warm Springs.173 Suddenly, however, a polio epidemic in June 1949 changed this story. The state department of public health agreed to fund the clinic—now called the “Centralia Polio Center”—along with assistance from the NFIP and the KF. But when the epidemic ended in September the center closed again and did not reopen.174

  The Centralia center collapsed despite backing by a local medical society, grateful parents, and an enthusiastic community. Kenny alone had not been powerful enough to alter antagonistic bureaucrats backed by unhelpful prominent physicians, and the KF board in Minneapolis had not supported her. If she had another opportunity to open a new Kenny clinic she was determined to shore up all of these alliances from the outset.

  THE HOPE OF GOVERNMENT POWER

  The Congressional hearings in 1948 did not lead to the formation of a federal Polio Institute or convince Congress to support the idea of a federal Kenny clinic. Nonetheless, Kenny remained convinced that the regulatory power of government could help to promote her work and counter the influence of the NFIP. Both in America and especially on her trips to Europe Kenny focused more and more on a particular group of experts: public health officers. Hers was a vision of medical power based partly on her success in 1930s Queensland when she had the ear of bureaucrats within the state ministry of health, and also on her awareness of the power of federal and state officials within the expanding New Deal and Fair Deal administrations to control access to facilities for the care of disabled and infectious disease patients. Conscious of the tricky medical politics of her time, she carefully avoided speaking to European audiences about the organization of medical care, the status of nurses, or other health policy issues.175 It is possib
le that she did not see that her visits to European hospitals and health departments bore the imprimatur of an appearance by an American dignitary, but it is likely that the respect she received stemmed from that perception. Her discussion of polio care, just as epidemics were becoming a growing health problem in Europe, attracted attention from both European physicians and the public.

  In America, as Kenny recognized, medical populism had deep popular and political roots. A number of congressmen and members of the public shared her sense that laymen and women should play a role in directing medical policy (including scientific research) to ensure fairness and objectivity. In the 1940s and 1950s, the expansion of government investment in medicine and science provided a new platform for the articulation of populist critiques of professional elitism and monopoly, phrased in the Cold War language of democracy and freedom.

  To be sure, Kenny, Congress, the AMA, and the NFIP all agreed that modern scientific research was the best way to fight polio. However, populists such as Kenny and her supporters demanded that science be linked to medical freedom, which in Kenny’s case meant freeing her patients from braces and crutches and from the crippling effects of elitist orthodoxy. Populists wanted more than the freedom to chose the medical treatment they wanted; they also wanted some say over the kinds of research that would be funded. For Kenny twentieth-century science was a resource, not a threat, and she confidently demanded the right to the vocabulary and technology of the laboratory. Clinicians’ access to the fruits of laboratory science, she warned, was blocked by the monopoly of the NFIP and the AMA. Only the government, responding to popular outrage, could ensure a true democracy of science. Kenny’s demands for scientific respect and her self portrayal as an isolated outsider attracted a public suspicious of corporate elitism. Perhaps medical freedom could be ensured by government fiat, opening the doors of hospitals and laboratories so that the resources of medical science would be available to all.

  The excitement of being a Congressional witness, surrounded by eager reporters, Congressmen, and members of the public was not matched by Kenny’s personal experience. By the late 1940s Kenny was in a newly isolated position. In the years after the war most of her Australian technicians left the Institute. Mary Farquarson, Kenny’s niece from Queensland, had replaced Mary Kenny as Kenny’s assistant and companion in 1946. Unwilling to endure the restricted social life Mary Kenny had led, Farquarson married a local Minnesota businessman in 1949 and began to raise a family.176 Bill Bell, Kenny’s nephew and technician who had come from Australia to work with her in 1941, moved to New Zealand where, backed by the minister of health, he introduced Kenny’s work in hospitals across the North Island, and began to work at a hospital in Wanganui designated for Kenny’s work. Bell, who combined Kenny’s “crusading zeal and optimism” with his own “persuasiveness and tact,” later trained his sons to work as Kenny therapists.177 Only Valerie Harvey, the former Brisbane nurse, remained in the United States, practicing at the Jersey City clinic. Harvey was convinced of the value of Kenny’s work, but she had a gentler and more patient style, and many technicians considered her a better teacher than Kenny herself.178

  Most disappointing for Kenny was the quiet retreat by her beloved ward Mary. Back in Brisbane Mary was not continuing to fight for the expansion of the Kenny method in Australia. Instead Kenny found that her ward was “very happily married” and “a very busy housewife.” Mary was also no longer putting Kenny’s needs ahead of her own. Thus, while Kenny was “very pleased” that Mary had a husband and a home, she complained throughout the late 1940s that she had written several letters and received no reply. “I get anxious when I don’t hear from you,” she admitted.179 With so many members of her family and medical associates so far away Kenny leaned on her close Minneapolis friends like James Henry. But the Institute and the city no longer felt like home.

  NOTES

  1. Kenny, May 14 1948, Hearings before the Committee on interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, 80th Congress, Second Session on H.R. 977 [Cancer and Polio Research] … H.R. 3257 [Cancer Research Commission] … H.R. 3464 [Cure of Cancer, Heart Disease, Infantile Paralysis, and other diseases] … May 13, 14 and 19 1948 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 97, 114 hereafter Hearings; Gerald Gross “Sister Kenny Has Her Say Against Polio Foundation” Washington Report on the Medical Sciences (May 17 1948) 50: 1. Part of this chapter is a version of Rogers “Sister Kenny Goes to Washington: Polio, Populism and Medical Politics in Postwar America” in The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America ed. Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2004), 97–116.

  2. Kenny to Mr. President, Mrs. Webber and Gentlemen, May 24 1948, Board of Directors, MHS-K.

  3. Marion T. Bennett, Hearings, May 14 1948, 108. Bennett, a Republican Congressman from Missouri, was in the House 1943–1949.

  4. Victoria A. Harden Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887–1937 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 181.

  5. Quoted in Homer W. Smith “Present Status of National Science Foundation Legislation” JAMA (1948) 137: 18. The NSF bill of 1947, for example, had included special disease commissions to be directed by an eleven member board made up of 6 “eminent scientists” and 5 representatives of the general public; see Donald C. Swain “The Rise of a Research Empire: NIH, 1930–1960” Science 138 (1962) 1233–1237; Toby A. Appel Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945–1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 34–35.

  6. See J. Merton England A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957 (Washington DC: National Science Foundation, 1982), 85; Daniel J. Kevles The Physicists: A History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1977), 363.

  7. John Burnham “American Medicine’s Golden Age: What Happened to It?” Science (1982) 215: 1474–1479; and see also Allan M. Brandt and Martha Gardner “The Golden Age of Medicine?” in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone eds. Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London: Harwood, 2000), 21–37.

  8. A study of all sources of American medical research funding during 1947 found 45% from industry, 28% from federal, state, and local governments and 13% from foundations; Smith “Present Status of National Science Foundation Legislation,” 19.

  9. Harry M. Marks “Cortisone, 1949: A Year in the Political Life of a Drug” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1992) 66: 421.

  10. Clarence A. Mills “Distribution of American Research Funds” Science (1948) 107: 127–130 [reprinted in] Hearing before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representative Eightieth Congress Second Session on H.R. 6007 and S. 2385 [on a National Science Foundation] June 1, 1948 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948), 138–142.

  11. Morris Fishbein to My Dear Basil, February 23 1948, Public Relations, AMA, MOD.

  12. James Harvey Young The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 360–389; Eric S. Juhnke Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norma Baker and Harry Hoxsey (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 76–86, 140–142.

  13. Charles M. Barber “A Diamond in the Rough: William Langer Reexamined” North Dakota History (1998) 64: 2–18; Glenn H. Smith Langer of North Dakota: A Study in Isolationism, 1940–1959 (New York: Garland Press, 1979); Agnes Geelan The Dakota Maverick: The Political Life of William Langer, also Known as “Wild Bill” Langer (Fargo: Geelan, 1975); Lawrence H. Larsen “William Langer: A Maverick in the Senate” Wisconsin Magazine of History (1961) 44: 189–198; Ted Kincaid “Senator Langer Sponsors Polio Study Measure” Washington Times-Herald September 1 1944; Amendment, S.J. Res. 147, 78th Congress, 2d Session, Children’s Bureau Central File 1941–1944, Record Group 102, Infantile Paralysis 4-5-16-1, National Archives.

  14. William Langer May 7 1945 Congressional Record Appendi
x, 79th Congress volume 91, part 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), A2110; Langer “S. 800: A Bill to provide for the establishment of a National Infantile Paralysis Clinic,” 79th Congress 1st Session, March 28 1945, Mayoralty Files 1945–1948, Box 10, Kenny Institute, Humphrey Papers, MHS; J. Earle Moser “Langer Seeks U.S. Supported Kenny Clinic” Washington Times-Herald March 29 1945; “$20,000,000 Fund to Foster Kenny Plan Proposed by Langer” Washington Evening Star, March 29 1945; see also David A. Horowitz Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 151–152.

  15. Mrs. Eugene Meyer “Judgment Day for the Private Welfare Agent” Public Opinion Quarterly (1945) 9: 338–345.

  16. Ralph M. Kramer Voluntary Agencies in the Welfare State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 114–115.

  17. See Scott M. Cutlip Fund Raising in the United States: Its Role in America’s Philanthropy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965); Kramer Voluntary Agencies in the Welfare State; Richard Carter The Gentle Legions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961).

  18. David Dietz “Cost of Fighting Polio: Why March of Dimes Is Needed” New York World Telegram January 29 1946.

  19. Richard H. Shryock, American Medical Research: Past and Present (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1947), 165 n 20. These statistics were taken from a paper by Henry S. Simms read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1944.

  20. Horace A. Brown “Organization of a Voluntary Health Agency” (thesis, Masters of Public Health, Yale University, 1953), 67–69; Bernhard J. Stern “[Review of] Voluntary Health Agencies” American Sociological Review (1946) 11: 757.