Elizabeth Kenny

Nurse

• Born: September 20, 1880
• Birthplace: Warialda, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: November 30, 1952
• Place of death: Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia

Also known as: Eliza Kenny; Sister Kenny

Significance: Elizabeth Kenny was an Australian nurse who developed innovative methods to treat polio. While her treatments helped thousands of patients, they provoked controversy among many medical professionals.

Background

Elizabeth Kenny was born on September 20, 1880, in Warialda, New South Wales, Australia. She was one of ten children born to Michael Kenny, an immigrant farmer from Ireland, and his wife, Mary Kenny, a native-born Australian of Irish descent. The family moved often when Kenny was young, eventually settling in Nobby, on the Darling Downs, a farming region in southern Queensland.

Kenny received sporadic education until she was a teen. Despite her limited education, she was a prolific reader. When she was young, she broke her arm and lived with a physician, Aeneas McDonnell, while she healed. There she took advantage of the doctor’s library and a skeleton and studied human anatomy and muscle structure. McDonnell encouraged her interest in medicine, and when Kenny was eighteen, he gave her lessons in medicine. He remained her mentor throughout her life.

Kenny supplemented McDonnell’s lessons by volunteering at a hospital in Guyra, New South Wales, and working as an apprentice to a local nurse. She did not, however, receive any formal nursing education.

Early Nursing Career

Around 1911, Kenny began providing nursing care to residents in the outback near her parents’ home in Nobby. There were few doctors in rural parts of Australia, and most people were treated by bush nurses—rural nurses focused primarily on pediatrics and maternal health. Kenny covered a wide area in her work, traveling by horse and not charging any fees.

In 1911, Kenny was called to treat a two-year-old girl who was ill with a fever, muscle pains, spasms, and twisted limbs. Kenny sent a telegram to her mentor, McDonnell, for advice on how to treat her. He informed her that the child had poliomyelitis, typically shortened to polio, for which there was no cure or vaccine at the time. Through experimentation, Kenny discovered that hot moist cloths relieved the child’s pain, and she applied them to her patient for several days. Once the child’s stiff muscles loosened, she gently moved the patient’s limbs and trained her to move them herself. The child eventually improved and regained mobility. This treatment for polio became the basis of what would be called the Kenny Method, which involved the use of hot compresses during the acute phase of illness, followed by muscle rehabilitation in which patients performed light, passive movements. Kenny soon had five other patients with the same symptoms, and she used the same treatment on them. They, too, recovered.

The first case Kenny treated in 1911 occurred during one of the many polio epidemics in Australia’s history. Polio is a contagious and potentially fatal virus that can cause nerve damage in the spinal cord, brainstem, or respiratory muscles, leading to temporary or permanent paralysis. Before the discovery and widespread use of the first polio vaccine in 1953, polio primarily infected children and young adults, proving fatal to some and leaving many others with lifelong paralysis and other disabilities.

On May 30, 1915, due to Australia’s involvement in World War I, she enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service. After being wounded in France, she worked on ships transporting wounded soldiers to Australia. She was promoted to the rank of sister (equivalent to first lieutenant) in 1917 and from then on, was known as Sister Kenny. After the war ended in 1918, she returned to Australia and was eventually discharged from the military in 1919.

Establishing Kenny Clinics

After her discharge, Kenny returned to Nobby and resumed treating patients with polio and cerebral palsy. In the mid-1920s, she invented and patented the Sylvia stretcher, a rigid backboard that securely held a person to prevent movement during medical transport. In 1932, she founded a backyard clinic in Townsville to treat people with polio and cerebral palsy. Two years later, the government funded a Kenny Clinic in Townsville, Queensland, and later in Brisbane. The clinics proved highly successful, and people came from different parts of Australia and overseas for treatment. Soon, additional Kenny Clinics were founded in New South Wales in Sydney and Newcastle, and Toowoomba, Queensland, all of which drew hundreds of patients and helped popularize Kenny’s treatment.

Kenny traveled throughout Australia and England to inform physicians about her methods, but many medical professionals rejected her methods because they defied the conventional treatment of polio, which at that time involved immobilizing limbs in plaster or splints for up to a year. Nonetheless, she established a Kenny Clinic in Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children in London in 1937. In 1938, the Queensland Royal Commission issued a report denouncing her methods and calling them dangerous. While a British report issued a short while later failed to support her methods, it said they caused no harm.

Hoping to popularize her methods elsewhere, Kenny traveled to the United States in 1940. Initially met with scorn by doctors in New York and Chicago, her ideas were accepted by doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and other institutions, and Kenny herself became widely famous and respected in the US. In 1942, she founded the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis to treat patients with polio. By that time, polio had become one of the most widespread childhood diseases in the world, with an average of forty-five thousand annual cases in the US in the early 1950s. Kenny’s clinics helped accommodate the surge in polio patients during this time, and her methods became standard practice for treatment in the US.

In 1950, Kenny retired and returned to Australia not long afterward. She died of a stroke at her home in Toowoomba, Queensland, on November 30, 1952.

Impact

Kenny’s treatments made a profound difference in the lives of thousands of people afflicted with polio before the discovery of a vaccine shortly after her death. While Kenny’s willingness to go against established treatments for the disease led to controversy, the effectiveness of Kenny’s methods also won over many medical professionals. While the beginning of widespread vaccination against polio in 1955 greatly reduced the need for treatment of active cases, many of Kenny’s methods—applying moist heat, exercising muscles, and muscle reeducation—were adapted for use in physical therapy and rehabilitation and are still used in the twenty-first century.

Personal Life

In 1925, Kenny adopted an eight-year-old girl named Mary, who later went on to assist with her mother’s anti-polio efforts.

Bibliography

Becker, Bruce E. “Sister Elizabeth Kenny and Polio in America: Doyenne or Demagogue in Her Role in Rehabilitation Medicine?” PM&R Journal, vol. 10, 2018, pp. 208–217, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1016/j.pmrj.2017.11.012. Accessed 31 Mar. 2023.

Brown, Curt. “Sister Elizabeth Kenny: A ‘Raging Tiger, Merciful Angel’ Who Challenged the Doctors on Polio.” Star Tribune, 25 Apr. 2020, www.startribune.com/elizabeth-kenny-1880-1952-sister-kenny-a-raging-tiger-merciful-angel/569952162/. Accessed 31 Mar. 2023.

Olson, Dan. “Fighting Polio with Gentle Hands.” Minnesota Public Radio, 22 Aug. 2002, news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200208/22‗olsond‗sisterkinney/index.shtml. Accessed 31 Mar. 2023.

Patrick, Ross. “Kenny, Elizabeth (1880–1952).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, 2006, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kenny-elizabeth-6934. Accessed 31 Mar. 2023.

Rogers, Naomi. Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine. Oxford UP, 2014.