Naomi Rogers. Polio Wars: Sister Elizabeth Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine.

Abstract

If you asked most Americans to tell the story of the nation's experience with poliomyelitis, they would relate the same familiar narrative. First emerging in epidemic form during the years around World War I, the disease scourged the nation with increasing regularity over the middle third of the century before being brought under control and subsequently banished by vaccines developed by two pioneering American male physician-medical researchers: Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Yet if you asked Americans in the early 1950s—when the disease was at its peak—who was the most important and best known polio combatant, they likely would have mentioned Sister Elizabeth Kenny, a transplanted Australian and irregularly trained “bush nurse.” Arriving in the spring of 1940 with the intent of introducing her unorthodox techniques for treating those in both the acute and recuperative phases of polio, Kenny quickly established herself as a therapeutic innovator whose ideas and methods might be disputed but could not be ignored. Indeed by 1951, when Americans picked her in a Gallup poll as the woman they most admired in the world, she had become a household name, the subject of many effusive magazine and newspaper articles and of a 1946 Hollywood film biography in which she was played by Rosalind Russell.