Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine

With this impressive study, Yale professor Rogers (Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR) brings into brilliant, uncompromising focus the politics, culture, and science behind this complicated, crippling disease. During American medicine’s mid-20th century “golden age” researchers were finding cures for once-deadly illnesses, and a “feisty, uncontainable woman” was at the center of an evolving understanding of polio and its treatment. When the 59-year-old Sister Elizabeth Kenny, a “bush nurse” from Australia, came to the U.S. in 1940, polio was approaching record levels. Kenny rejected standard therapies—immobilization and rest—in favor of applying hot packs and training and strengthening muscles. Though some of her methods were adopted, her critics claimed that what was good about the Kenny treatment was not new and “what is new about it is not good.” Kenny—“an outsider with an exotic background, an Australian bush nurse who became an American celebrity”—was a confident woman in a culture that believed nurses should be doctors’ handmaidens. But what she wanted—and failed to get—was a place in the scientific pantheon that included Marie Curie. Rogers’s absorbing account of Kenny’s medical contributions, philanthropy, and influence is a remarkable resource for students of the medical, political, and social history of the pre-polio vaccine years. (Nov.)