Sister Elizabeth Kenny (20 september 1880 - 30
November 1952) was an Australian bush nurse famous for her innovative treatment of Poliomyelitis (polio). She developed her clinical procedures for that disease between 1928 and 1940, well
before the vaccine Jonas Salk developed was tested and used to prevent polio.
Youth
Elizabeth Kenny was born at Kelly's Gully, a hamlet a few kilometers west of the village of Warialda, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Her mother, Mary Moore, was the granddaughter of James Moore, who was transported to Australia with
his wife ( at the governments expense )in 1828 from the parish of Leck near Letterkenny in
Donegal for stealing a horse. After he was given a ticket of leave in 1841, his family joined him in NSW. Kenny's father, Michael Kenny, who immigrated to
Australia in 1862, was from the Kilkenny region of
Ireland. After Kenny's parents were married in 1872 they moved to several locations in NSW,
including Guyra near Mary Moore's family, before settling down in the Village of
Nobby on the Darling Downs in Queensland near
Toowoomba. Elizabeth was one of eight children.
Eliza, as her family called her, was home schooled by her mother before attending schools in NSW, and finally Nobby. Some time
during her 14th year she fell from a horse and broke her wrist. Her father took her to Dr. Aeneas McDonnell in Toowoomba where
she was cared for during her convalescence. While there, she studied McDonnell's anatomy books and model skeleton. That began a
life long association with McDonnell, who became her mentor and advisor. She then became interested in how the muscles worked so
instead of using a model skeleton because they were only available for medical students she made her own. In 1907 she returned to
Guyra to live with a cousin. While there she may have received some basic nursing training from a local midwife, and the local
physician. She also brokered agricultural sales between Guyra farmers and markets to the north in Brisbane.
Work
In 1911 Kenny returned to Nobby and began working as an unofficial Bush Nurse. Soon, using the money she earned by brokering
potatoes, she opened a cottage hospital in Clifton, a village a few miles from Nobby, where she treated her first cases of
polio.
That episode was romanticized in Martha Ostenso's biography of Kenny, And they Shall Walk, and the 1946 movie
Sister Kenny starring Rosalind Russell.
Actually, there was an outbreak of what was thought to be Infantile Paralysis on the Darling Downs just before World War I, and
cases probably came to Kenny's cottage hospital in Clifton. After she followed the advice of a "Lodge Doctor" assigned to their
area she called McDonnell for assurance. He wired back, "...treat them according to the symptoms as they present themselves."
Sensing that their muscles were very tight, she did what the Lodge doctor advised and what mothers around the world did, applied
hot compress to their legs made from woolen blankets. Kenny wrote in her autobiography that a little girl woke up very much
relieved and said, "Please, I want them rags that well my legs." Several children recovered with no serious after affects. Many
years passed before Kenny treated anyone else who might have had polio.
When World War I began, Kenny volunteered to serve as a nurse. She was not officially qualified, but as nurses were badly
needed she was accepted and assigned to "Dark Ships", transports that ran with all lights off between Australia and England
carrying war goods and soldiers one way and wounded soldiers and trade goods on the return voyage. Elizabeth Kenny served on
these dangerous missions throughout the war, making 16 round trips plus one around the world via the Panama Canal. In 1917 she
earned the title of Sister, which in the Australian Army Nurse Corps is the equivalent of a First Lieutenant. She used that title
for the rest of her life. Some people faulted her for that, because in the British Commonwealth it is reserved for qualified
nurses, but Kenny was officially promoted to that rank during her Wartime service. During the final months of the war she served
for a few weeks as a matron in a soldier's hospital near Brisbane, but was soon honorably discharged with a pension. Even though
exhausted by her war service she supervised a temporary hospital in Nobby which was set up to care for victims of the 1919
influenza epidemic.
After the epidemic subsided she traveled to Guyra to recuperate, without success, so she returned to Europe to visit doctors
there. After her return to Nobby, she was called to Guyra to by one of her girlhood friends to care for her daughter who was
disabled with Cerebral Diplegia. Kenny's seven years of rehabilitative work with that child, plus her experience with sick and
wounded men during WW I was the foundation for her later work in polio treatment and rehabilitation.
Instead of settling down at home to what was most expected; spinsterhood dedicated to caring for her mother, Kenny continued
to work as a nurse from her mother's home. She was often taken to her patients in the side-car-motorcycle or automobile of a
family friend. When his daughter Sylvia was injured by falling into the path of a horse drawn plow he called Kenny for help. She
improvised a stretcher out of a cupboard door, fastened Sylvia to it and accompanied her the 26 miles to Dr. McDonnel's Toowoomba
office. Sylvia recovered, mostly due to Kenny's careful attention during that transport. Kenny improved the stretcher for use by
the local Ambulance services, and marketed it as the "Sylvie Stretcher", in Australia, Europe and America. She gave the profits
to the Australian Country Women's Association who administered the sales and manufacture.
During her sales journeys she met a family who, in 1929, arranged for her to come to their station west of Townsville to care for their niece, Maude, who had been disabled with polio. After 18 months
under Kenny's care Maude was able to walk, return to Townsville, marry and begin a family. The newspapers in Townsville took up
the story, calling it a cure. In 1933 several local people helped Kenny set up a basic polio treatment facility under canopies
behind the Queens Hotel in Townsville. In a few months, after more success with local children, she was able to move into the
bottom floor of the hotel. In 1934, the Queensland health department began an evaluation of her work which led to the
establishment of Kenny clinics in several cities in Australia. Her success, however, was not without controversy, as many
doctors, and the Australian Massage Association questioned her work and success.
It was during these years that Kenny developed her clinical method and gained recognition in Australia. She was adamantly
opposed to immobilizing parts of children's bodies with plaster casts or braces. At this time she requested that she be allowed
to treat children during the acute stage of the disease and use hot compresses as she did in Clifton before the war. However,
doctors would not allow her to treat patients until after the first stage of the disease or until tightness (she used the word
spasm much later) subsided. For that she instituted a carefully designed regimen of passive exercises designed to recall function
in unaffected neural pathways, much as she had done with Maude. Finally, on her own, she began treatment of a patient in the
acute stage in her George St. Clinic in Brisbane, and then transferred her to the Ward 7 Polio clinic in the Brisbane General
Hospital. That child, and then others, recovered with far fewer after effects than those placed in braces. In 1937 she published
a basic book about her work and began another, The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis in The Acute Stage, which was later published
in America.
Between 1935 and 1940 she traveled extensively throughout Australia helping to set up clinics. She also made two trips to
England where she set up a treatment clinic in St. Mary's hospital near Carshalton where there is a rehabilitation facility to
this day. In 1938 the Health Department of New South Wales subjected her work to a medical Royal Commission whose findings
condemned her unorthodox procedures as 'dangerous', 'damaging', 'costly', and 'cruel'[1].
In 1940 the Government of New South Wales sent Kenny and her adopted daughter Mary
(who had become an expert in Kenny's method), to America so that they could present her clinical method for treating polio
victims to American doctors. After a journey by sea from Sydney to Los Angeles, and by
railway to San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, back to Chicago, and to the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota she was finally given a chance to demonstrate her work in
Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota. Doctors Miland Knapp and John Pohl, who headed
polio treatment centers there were impressed and told her that she should "Stick around." They found an apartment for Kenny and
Mary, and a few years later the City of Minneapolis gave them a house.
Minneapolis was Kenny's "base" in America for eleven years.
During that time Kenny treatment centers were opened throughout America, the two most important being the Sister Kenny
Institute in Minneapolis, (now the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Associates,) a facility in New Jersey
Medical Center, and her favorite, the "Ruth Home," in El Monte California. She became an American celebrity, received
honorary degrees from Rutgers and the University of Rochester, had lunch with FDR, and was the subject of many articles in
American periodicals. In 1946 her story was dramatized in the film "Sister Kenny," starring Rosalind Russell, who had become her
close friend.
Her work was, however, controversial. During her first year in Minneapolis the National
Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) paid her personal expenses, and financed and arranged trials of her work. That
support ceased after a series of disagreements. Kenny was a very determined and outspoken woman, which irritated the director of
the NFIP and many doctors. As a result the Sister Kenny Foundation was established in Minneapolis to support her and her work
throughout America.
Headstone in Nobby cemetery
She filled her final years with journeys in America, to Europe and to Australia in an effort to gain further acceptance of her
method. She returned home to Toowoomba in 1951 where she died of complications from Parkinson's disease on 30 November, 1952. She
was buried beside her mother in Nobby cemetery.
Legacy
Between 1934 and her death she and her associates treated millions of polio victims throughout the world. Their testimonies to
Sister Kenny's healing work is part of her legacy; as is The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis, and Its Treatment, know as
"The Red Book," written by Dr. John Pohl in collaboration with Kenny. Her most enduring legacy is the Minneapolis Sister Kenny
Rehabilitation Associates, one of the leading rehabilitation centers in the United States; known for its progressive and
innovative vision. [800 E. 28th St. Minneapolis MN 55407]
In Kenny's home Village of Nobby the Sister Kenny Memorial House holds many artifacts from Kenny's life plus a considerable
collection of documents from her private correspondence as well as numerous papers and newspaper clippings. In Toowoomba the
Sister Elizabeth Kenny Memorial Fund Inc. provides scholarships to students attending the University of Southern Queensland who
will dedicate themselves to work in rural and remote areas of Australia. In Townsville her life was commerated in 1949 by the
unveiling of the Sister Kenny Memorial and Children's playground[2].
Her pioneering principles of muscle rehabilitation became the foundation of physical
therapy, (in some countries called physiotherapy). Today, the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute is one of the leading rehabilitation centers
in the United States, known for its progressive and innovative vision. She was a great woman.
Famous Patients
Bibliography
- Infantile Paralysis and Cerebral Diplegia: Method of Restoration of Function, Sydney: Angus & Robertson. 1937.
- The treatment of Infantile Paralysis in the Acute Stage, Minneapolis-St.Paul: Bruce Publishing Co. 1941.
- And They Shall Walk, Elizabeth Kenny and Martha Ostenso, Bruce Publishing Co, Minneapolis St Paul 1943
- The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis, and Its Treatment, John F Pohl, M.D., with Elizabeth Kenny, St. Paul, Bruce Pub.
Co. 1943.
- My Battle and Victory: History of The Discovery of Poliomyelitis as a Systemic Disease. London: Robert Hale, 1955.
References
- Alexander, Wade F., Elizabeth Kenny: Maverick Heroine of The Polio Treatment Controversy, Central Queensland Press, 2003.
ISBN 1-876780-24-X.
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