What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries by George Biro and Jim Leavesley Read Free Book Online

Nurse, she rose to Staff-Nurse, and later to Sister. While serving in France, she herself was wounded, and won a British War Medal.
    After the war, Kenny returned to bush nursing. According to the accepted teaching of the day, since polio weakened affected muscles, these weak muscles needed splinting. Without splinting, people believed, the unaffected strong muscles would pull the weak ones out of place. Doctors ‘knew’ all this. With her usual total confidence, Elizabeth Kenny disagreed: ‘No, I see only tight, shortened muscles in spasm—your splints and casts are illogical; throw them out.’
    She invented and patented a stretcher that enabled people in shock to receive treatment while being transported.
    In the polio epidemic of 1933, she used her royalties to open a free clinic in a Townsville backyard. There she treated patients disabled by polio. She replaced the conventional splints, braces and callipers with salt baths, foments, and exercises.
    The following year the Queensland government appointed staff to work with Kenny to research unfantile paralysis. The ‘Kenny Clinic’ was the first nursing research clinic in Australia.
    Her results impressed a few doctors, but most opposed her vigorously; one of the latter wrote: ‘This quack must be exposed.’ But Kenny clinics opened in Townsville, Cairns, Rockhampton, Toowoomba, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne.
    One headline acclaimed her as ‘A new Australian Florence Nightingale’.
    Her public support grew and grew, and not only in Australia. Grateful parents of children she had helped paid her fare to England, where she cared for inpatients at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Surrey.
    In 1935, the Queensland Government appointed a Royal Commission of doctors to review the treatment of polio. After three years, they reported: ‘The abandonment of immobilisation is a grievous error.’ However, the report was never requested nor presented to Parliament.
    The government nevertheless gave her a ward at the Brisbane Hospital. Here she could treat early cases of polio, who might respond better than older cases.
    Kenny’s few medical friends convinced the government to pay her fare to the United States. Many American doctors rejected her explanations, with some accusing her of using hypnosis. But she did gain the use of beds at the Minneapolis General Hospital, and the support of three orthopaedic doctors. One of these, Dr John Pohl, wrote:
    Before she came … you would have seen little kids lying stiff and rigid, crying with pain … We’d take children to the operating room straighten them out under anaesthetic, and put them in plaster casts. When they woke up, they screamed. The next day they still cried from the pain. That was the accepted and universal treatment … She said, ‘That’s all wrong.’
    In 1941, the American Medical Association endorsed the Kenny treatment that the Queensland Royal Commission had rubbished five years earlier.
    Doctors and physiotherapists from Greece, Russia, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and China flocked to learn her methods at the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis.
    The New York Sun named her the world’s ‘Outstanding Woman of the Year’. In 1950, America awarded her Free Passage across its borders; an honour Elizabeth Kenny shared with French General La Fayette.
    Many grateful people remembered that for over 20 years, she never took a penny for her work.
    But Elizabeth Kenny herself and her teachings remained controversial. Her dogmatic belief in her own God-given gifts actually hindered her cause. She was merciless with anyone who dared to doubt her. Had she been gentler, could she have been more effective? Or would the critics have just ground her down?
    She published two textbooks on her treatment of polio, as well as an autobiography and was awarded three honorary doctorates from leading American universities for her contribution to polio research. In 1951 she retired to Toowoomba, where she died a year