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Elizabeth Kenny was born on September 20, 1880, in Warialda in New South Wales, Australia. Her father was Michael Kenny an Irish farmer settled in Australia, and her mother was Mary Moore and Australian native. She became interested in anatomy at the age of 17 when she was being treated for a broken wrist by Dr. Aeneas Mcdonnell in Toowoomba.
Elizabeth was taught by her mother at home before she could attend the schools in New South Wales and Queensland. Elizabeth received honorary degrees from Rutgers University and the University of Rochester.
After a period of bush nursing in the Queensland Outback, she served during World War I as a nurse to the Australian military forces, caring for the wounded on hospital ships. Her inventive talent emerged during this time, and she patented an improved stretcher for use in the field.
After the war Sister Kenny's attention was attracted to the treatment of poliomyelitis and cerebral palsy. A polio epidemic in Queensland in 1933 led her to concentrate her efforts in that field, and she opened a clinic in Townsville which was granted public recognition and government support the next year. From 1934 to 1937 she helped establish new clinics in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and, after a journey to Britain in 1937, in Surrey.
Sister Kenny's method was in opposition to the current orthodoxy, which generally called for the complete immobilization of polio patients, many of whom were placed in heavy splints. She maintained that the key to the disease lay in the muscular framework of the body rather than in the nervous or spinal systems; and her forcefulness and popularity inevitably made her into something of a cause célèbre.
A royal commission was appointed in 1935 to examine her ideas, and when it reported in 1938, the verdict of the commissioners was unfavorable. About the same time in London a committee of medical experts contradicted her theories, although public opinion remained sympathetic. Sister Kenny arrived in the United States in 1940 and was received enthusiastically. Her lectures in Minneapolis were given much publicity, and in 1941 a medical committee of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis declared itself in agreement with her basic practice and approach.
Elizabeth became a guest instructor at the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1942, and the Elizabeth Kenny Institute at Minneapolis was founded. Clinics using her treatment sprang up throughout the United States, and she was showered with degrees and approval.
In 1950 a special act of Congress was passed which enabled Sister Kenny to enter and leave the United States as she wished-a historic honor shared only with the Marquis de Lafayette. Although she claimed that over 85 percent of her more than 7,000 patients at Minneapolis recovered as against 13 percent treated in the more conservative manner, medical opinion remained divided. Sister Kenny died in Toowoomba, Queensland, on November 30, 1952.
Elizabeth promoted a controversial new approach to the treatment of poliomyelitis. Her findings ran counter to conventional medical wisdom; they demonstrated the need to exercise muscles affected by polio instead of immobilizing them. Kenny's principles of muscle rehabilitation became the foundation of physical therapy or physiotherapy.
Quotations:
"It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life."
"I was wholly unprepared for the extraordinary attitude of the medical world in its readiness to condemn anything that smacked of reform or that ran contrary to approved methods of practice."
"Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route."
"As a girl my temper often got out of bounds. But one day when I became angry at a friend over some trivial matter, my mother said to me, Elizabeth, anyone who angers you conquers you."
"It is easier to recount grievances and slights than it is to set down a broad redress of such grievances and slights. The reason is that one fears to be thought of as an arrant braggart."
"A measure of victory has been won, and honors have been bestowed in token thereof. But honours fade or are forgotten, and monuments crumble into dust. It is the battle itself that matters - and the battle must go on."
"The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written."
Elizabeth had adopted a daughter named Mary Stewart who went on to become one of her top researchers.
