Polio Wars (75 page)

In Australia, as polio outbreaks became more frequent during 1945, Kenny's film gained a small audience, although mainly in Queensland. Charles Chuter, the Brisbane civil servant who had remained her friend and ally since the 1930s, became the film's Australian agent, promoter, and interpreter. Chuter considered donating the film to the Queensland government, but he knew the dangers of bureaucracy, and in order not to “risk the film being relegated by the State Health Department to the ‘mud of oblivion' ” he decided to show it first to “representative” audiences and provide short introductions himself.
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Chuter struggled to find occasions for physicians to see Kenny's film. Most of Kenny's clinics had closed during the war, and Sir Raphael Cilento, her longstanding enemy, was still head of the Queensland's state health department.
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Australian physicians were well aware of the 1944 AMA report, and Chuter had heard that many were now saying “the Kenny bubble has burst in America.”
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Reflecting this widespread antagonism, University of Queensland pathologist James Duhig, a former member of the Queensland Royal Commission, refused to see the film. He had become one of Kenny's most vocal antagonists. He described her textbook to the
Brisbane Sunday Telegraph
as “drivel” and argued that American doctors who were Kenny supporters were “of much poorer scientific and professional standing than those who reject her claims to novelty, originality, or superiority.”
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Duhig then informed Chuter that “in view of the highly condemnatory reports of her ideas and methods, particularly in the manipulation of statistics, I would remain extremely sceptical even if I saw the film.”
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Charles Thelander, who had chaired the Commission, also refused to see the film, telling Chuter “he would not believe a word Kenny had to say.”
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Chuter was able to convince a few other former members of the Commission to attend a screening, along with the head of the Brisbane branch of Australia's medical society, who later assured Chuter he was sure that his colleagues would want to see the film although, he admitted, “there is strong opposition.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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?

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Although Kenny wished them “life-long” happiness she missed Mary terribly and felt bereft without her help.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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