History Note
Each month of 2007,
Access Press will feature an important person in disability history:
local, regional or national
Sister Kenny
Bucks Medical Establishment to Treat
Polio
Elizabeth Kenny was born in
Warialda, New South Wales, Australia in 1886.
As a bush nurse, she
crossed the Australian outback, treating anyone who could not get
to a doctor. She did everything a physician
might do, from setting bones to delivering babies. Although Kenny
was never trained as a nurse, she earned the title while serving
as the Australian medical corps during World War I. (Neither was
Kenny a nun. Since nurses in England were traditionally nuns, all
nurses were simple called “Sister.”)
In 1911, Kenny, drawing
on her knowledge of the musculoskeletal system, treated her first
polio (“infantile paralysis”)
patient. She applied hot packs to spasming muscles, and the child
recovered; the twenty additional children Kenny treated all survived
without complications.
Common knowledge at
the time suggested that the person’s stronger
muscles pulled on the weakened or paralyzed muscles and created the
characteristic polio deformities. Kenny believed that the accepted
treatment, which was to splint the extremities and hold them rigid,
was counterproductive and actually produced both the deformities
and paralysis. Instead, she used hot packs to reduce muscle spasms. She
also moved the patient’s extremities as if guiding them through
physical therapy. Kenny’s methods, though successful, were
controversial with the medical authorities in Australia.
In 1942, Kenny established
the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis. In part because of the
controversy surrounding her theories, the National Foundation for
Infantile Paralysis never supported the Institute, although they
did fund both the training of Kenny therapists in at the University
of Minnesota and the staffing of therapists in polio wards. Today,
Sister Kenny’s methods continute to be a part
of rehabilitative therapy around the world. ![]()
Sources: www.teachspace.org and
www.diggerhistory.info
