The Stubborn Sister

When the young bush nurse drove her buggy up to a tenant shack on a cattle station in Queensland, Australia, she expected to find teething trouble or an upset stomach. Instead, she found the stockman's 2 1/2-year-old daughter lying crippled on a cot. One knee was drawn up, the foot pointed down and the heel twisted outward. One paralyzed arm lay across her chest. The nursing sister had never seen a case like it, so she drove miles to a telegraph office and wired a doctor for advice. His reply: "Infantile paralysis. No known treatment. Do the best you can . . ."

Elizabeth Kenny, then 23, did the best she could. Strips of blanket, dipped in boiling water and wrung out, eased the child's pain so that she soon fell asleep. When she woke she cried: "I want them rags that wells my legs." Sister Kenny applied more of "them rags." Soon she applied them to five more stricken children in the neighborhood. A year later she could report to her physician friend, Dr. Aeneas McDonnell, that the children had recovered without paralysis.

Reformer's Road. Sister Kenny snorted when Dr. McDonnell told her that what she had done was the exact opposite to standard medical practice in polio, which was to immobilize the affected limbs in casts or splints. She was sure that she had a better idea. Gently, McDonnell warned her: "Medicine is not kind to a reformer, but the day will come when the profession will ask you to teach it what you have learned."

That was in 1911, and the day was long in coming. Sister Kenny admitted that she was stubborn. Others thought her impossibly temperamental. By 1935 she had won lay support but had made mortal enemies of the doctors. A royal commission took 300 pages to denounce the Kenny treatment for polio. But in 1939 it was made available to all patients in Australia who asked for it.

Reformer's Victory. Sister Kenny came to the U.S. in April 1940. She brashly told medical experts that they were all wrong, and that she was the only one who knew the real nature of polio. The doctors, she argued, treated polio on the assumption that the affected muscles were simply paralyzed. According to Sister Kenny, what was really important was a muscle spasm, and the doctors with their casts and splints were only making it worse. Some medical groups were openly hostile. But in Minneapolis, city hospitals gave Sister Kenny a chance to show what her hot packs could do. By December 1941, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis accepted her treatment.

Within ten years, the treatment of muscle paralysis in polio was revolutionized. Kenny clinics sprang up across the U.S. and in other countries. In 1950, a grateful Congress voted to let Sister Kenny in & out of the U.S. at will, without passport or visa. But night & day work during the Minnesota epidemic of 1946 had undermined her health. Her right side paralyzed by Parkinson's disease, Sister Kenny went back to Queensland, longing for a last look at the jacaranda trees in bloom around her home in Toowoomba. There, this week, she died, aged 66. She had lived to see her jacarandas blossom and to see her life work bearing fruit around the world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.