Fifty six years ago this month, the Minnesota State Fair was cancelled. The reason was polio. Health officials worried large gatherings helped spread the disease. Polio was crippling thousands and there was no known cure or prevention. Through the l940's and early 50's polio struck 15,000 Minnesotans - 900 died. Many were consigned to a life with metal braces, crutches and deformed limbs . . . until Elizabeth Kenny arrived. The single minded, self taught nurse from Australia had a treatment that got paralyzed polio victims up and walking. She made Minnesota her home. Elizabeth Kenny emerged from obscurity and became America's most admired woman. Her remarkable story has few parallels in medical history. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson has more.

audio . . . Bing Hello friends this is Bing Crosby coming your way in the interests of the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation. As you undoubtedly know this year's fund appeal of the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation is now on.

Bing Crosby and other stars raised money for the Kenny Foundation in the l950's. Her name was golden.

Her polio treatment success stories were captured on film and seen around the country.

Kenny and the nurses she trained seemed able to perform miracles.

audio . . . Herbert Marshall soundtrack

Polio was frightening. It passed over most people but struck others with crippling effects.

audio . . . music from WCCO doc

Word of Elizabeth Kenny's treatment spread as polio's toll rose.

audio . . . l944

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A WCCO radio documentary chronicled the panic polio caused in Minnesota.

audio . . . l946

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Beaches were closed. People stayed away from public gatherings for fear of contracting the virus.

The Minnesota State Fair was cancelled in l946 to reduce polio's spread.

Polio was also called infantile paralysis because so many victims were children.

South Minneapolis residents Edwin and Evelyn Hande's children were two and six when they contracted polio, were treated by Kenny, and made a full recovery.

audio . . .can't you just envision kids with all this paralysis, wheel chairs or whatever, yes, and I credit Sister Kenny, I'd say that she was the one that I'd say did the trick.

Kenny was literally laughed out of the offices of the American medical establishment when she sought endorsement of her physical therapy ideas for polio victims. Vindication came when three prominent Minneapolis physicians took a chance on her. Some of their colleagues shunned them as a result of allowing Kenny to try her treatment. Dr. Jennine Speier, director of the Minneapolis-based Kenny Rehabilitation Services at Abbott Northwestern Hospital says her mentor, Dr. Miland Knapp, was one of them.

audio . . . Instead of like many physicians saying this is hogwash I don't understand her terminology, she doesn't know what she's talking about, he said I don't understand this, I have to learn more about it.

audio . . . motion picture sound trackmusic

Elizabeth Kenny's life - a crusading nurse, rising from obscurity to celebrity status - reads like a movie script. . . Which is exactly what RKO Radio Pictures thought in l946.

One of Hollywood's top stars, Rosalind Russell, immortalized Elizabeth Kenny's story in the movie Sister Kenny.

By l952, a Gallup poll showed Kenny was the most admired woman in America, edging out former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Kenny was modest about her success.

audio . . . This cannot be done with one's self alone. It is also written I can of my own self do nothing. This is true in my own experience.

audio . . . music fades out.

Like many other viruses, the one that causes polio lives all around us. Even before vaccines, most people were resistant and easily fought off its effects. But among people whose defenses were weak polio spread quickly.

Polio paralyzed Richard Owen in l940 when he was twelve and growing up in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of a physician.

Polio's symptoms misled many who tried to diagnose it. Owen thought he'd caught a cold or the flu.

audio . . . There's usually an illness with a fever as the person gets an upper respiratory infection or a gastrointestinal infection. Then there's a quiescent period for a day while the virus is working it's way through the blood stream and the central nervous system and in my case it was I was sufficiently well that I went back to school for day and then the next day I was paralyzed.

Eventually, Richard Owen was treated by Sister Kenny.

And through a quirk of fate the disease became the focus of his professional life.

Owen is a physician and the former medical director of the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis. He's retired and lives in Eden Prairie.

Polio has been around for centuries but Owen says it wasn't identified until the late 1800's.

audio . . . and in l916 they had a big one and the first group was Italian so there was an anti-Italian uproar.

The l916 outbreak sparked the notion the disease affected only poor people. That myth evaporated when polio spread among the rich and powerful.

Polio struck people all over the country but for reasons not entirely clear hit the midwestern United States hardest. Even then, it spared many, crippling only one out of a hundred who caught the virus.

Religious zealots explained the disease's mysterious and random nature as God's punishment.

Before Kenny's ideas were accepted, the standard medical treatment for polio victims was like medieval torture. Patients were isolated and immobilized, strapped into metal braces.

audio . . . they had me on a frame like device that made it possible for my legs to be spread apart and then my knees were bent in these things called Toronto splints, leather covered hunks of aluminum that were bent at the knee.

Twelve year old Richard Owen lay immobilized in splints and braces for nine months.

It would be three years before he got the Kenny treatment and was able to walk without braces.

audio . . . music from Sydney

Elizabeth Kenny grew up in rural Australia about the time the country's dance bands were playing, 'Oh Sydney, I Love You."

She was the daughter of lower middle class Irish immigrant farmers.

Australian medical doctors were scarce. Most health care was done by bush, or rural nurses.

Yale University history professor Naomi Rogers says bush nurse Elizabeth Kenny tended to farm families scratching out a living in Australia's vast rural areas.

audio . . . she delivered babies as did all bush nurses, she cared for young and sickly children, she examined women who lived in huts or shacks.

Rogers, a native of Australia, is writing a book about Kenny. She says the young nurse went on horseback to many of her calls but was impatient with the slow pace so Kenny bought a motorcycle.

audio . . . and she'd put her nurses bag in the side pouch of the motorcycle and roar off into the bush to see her patients.

There was little formal nurses training at the turn of the last century.

Kenny found a doctor in her hometown who taught her some of the basics of medicine. She was a voracious reader, always borrowing books about the human body.

Bush nursing was perfect, Rogers says, for the independent minded Kenny. There'd been a suitor or two but she declined to follow her sister's example of marriage and homemaking.

audio . . . Kenny just never liked taking orders from anyone and nursing was very appealing for a woman of that character because it was rare that there was much supervision other than what the nurse herself determined was necessary.

audio . . . movie with child crying "She's twisted into knots.... Yes, these muscles are contracted, they're pulling her into knots. You mean they're paralyzed If they were paralyzed they couldn't tense and pull...."

Kenny's first saw polio during Australia's epidemics in the early 1900's. A child she'd helped deliver a few years earlier came down with a fever, muscle pain and contortion that Kenny hadn't seen before.

Kenny approved the script for the movie about her life. In the movie, Kenny, portrayed by Rosalind Russell, telegraphs her mentor physician and asks what she should do.

His reply; it sounds like polio, no known cure, treat the symptoms.

audio . . . I'm gonna try moist heat, have you got an old blanket We're going to tear it into strips....

Strips of wool soaked in hot water became the basis for Kenny's therapy. Wrapping the hot strips around paralyzed limbs relieved the muscle pain. In England and the United States doctors were putting polio victims in casts and braces. There was little or no thought to helping them regain use of their limbs.

But Australia was an ocean away.

Word of the standard treatment hadn't reached the rural areas where Kenny worked.

The heat relieved the muscle pain but didn't bring paralyzed limbs back to life.

Kenny used her hands to search the victims arms and legs for any sign of movement.

audio . . . Dory, your leg just told me it can remember.

People attributed a healing touch to Kenny's hands.

Dr. Richard Owen says what was really happening is Kenny's fingers detected faint muscle movement.

audio . . . she had a great sense of how to hold a paralyzed extremity and make you feel you were using it.

Owen says by flexing polio victims limbs, telling them to move it and then repeating the movement day after day Kenny had hit upon a technique to jump start a polio patient's brain.

audio . . .your mind is remembering how you did something and it's sending messages down there and the movement is sending messages back.

Kenny said polio's paralysis was the result of mental alienation, and she called her treatment muscle reeducation.

Neither of those phrases and others she coined were in medical texts of the day. Kenny's jargon caused many in the medical establishment to dismiss her ideas.

audio . . . World War I Australia Will Be There

World War I pushed worries about polio aside.

The young Kenny signed up for England's nurse corps. She was given the military rank of Sister recognizing that many of the nurses, but not Kenny, were from religious orders.

After the war, Kenny resumed her polio treatment and her fame spread.

Eventually she took letters of recommendation from Australian doctors to America.

audio . . . siege of Leningrad

The second world war exploded as Kenny arrived in America. Polio was well known here due in large measure to its best known victim, President Franklin Roosevelt.

audio . . . FDR Japan

Roosevelt had been living with polio's effects for 20 years. He was wheel chair bound. Metal braces helped him stand.

Roosevelt had become a potent fundraiser for research into a polio vaccine. However an early vaccine was fatal, and Roosevelt pulled back on his support.

World War II's devastation eclipsed polio's rising toll. However anxiety over the disease's spread was rising. Physicians and public health workers were virtually helpless to stave off polio's advance.

When Kenny arrived in l940 she went to the American Medical Association. Yale University history professor Naomi Rogers says Kenny sought endorsement of her therapy from the AMA's director. . .

audio . . . who was very rude to her something she would never forget and treated her as an ignorant quack seeking money for her own gain.

Rogers says Kenny was dejected, tired and ready to return to Australia. She was on her way back to the west coast to board a ship home when she decided to stop at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Doctors there told her they had no polio patients and directed her to Minneapolis, one of the cities hardest hit by the disease.

audio . . .ambience of south Minneapolis

audio . . . I was out playing miniature golf in the back yard and leaned down to get a ball out of the cup and I couldn't get up.

Henry Haverstock, Jr. was a south Minneapolis teenager when polio struck him in l939. He was immediately given the standard treatment - put in bed and immobilized with casts and braces.

Haverstock's father was a wealthy Minneapolis attorney who spared no expense trying to get his son back on his feet. He sent him to Warm Springs, the Georgia treatment center made famous because President Roosevelt had used the mineral baths there in a futile bid to regain mobility. There was no improvement for Haverstock either.

One day, months after contracting polio, lying in his bed, fitted with braces, Haverstock remembers his father ushering a tall, broad shouldered older woman with snow white hair into his upstairs bedroom. Elizabeth Kenny asked Haverstock to carry his son to the dining room table where she examined him.

audio . . . she showed how I couldn't even be forced into a sitting position with my legs ahead of me because these braces had caused what she called a spasm, I was stiff.

Kenny told Haverstock's father if he wanted her to treat his son the braces would have to go. Haverstock became one of Elizabeth Kenny's first U. S. patients. Within weeks of starting her treatment he was walking.

Kenny's big break came when three University of Minnesota physicians intrigued with her results arranged a lecture. She was late. Dozens of physicians waited for her to appear. One of them, the late Dr. Miland Knapp in a l987 interview remembers Kenny arrived and went on a tear about the dismal treatment she'd received.

audio . . . she gave a two hour talk and spent the first hour and half was griping about the treatment that she'd been receiving from all the doctors, not only the United States, but England and elsewhere too.

Knapp was a prominent physician at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis General Hospital. He remembers after the harangue, Kenny used words he'd never heard connected with polio - muscle spasm, incoordination, mental alienation - Kenny's own terminology.

Knapp was skeptical but hungry for any treatment that showed a glimmer of hope for people immobolized in casts and braces. He took Kenny to see one of his patients - a grocer's son. Kenny examined his paralyzed limbs, recommended hotpacks to relieve the muscle stiffness and her physical therapy to restore movement.

The treatment worked. The boy recovered. Knapp was a convert. He gave Kenny permission to treat patients at Minneapolis General Hospital. He kept records of the results.

audio . . . fifty five percent of the patients turned out what we called normal and the others had varying degrees of weakness but all of 'em turned out to be pretty functional.

The results were like a bolt of lightening from a summer thunderstorm. Kenny was helping people, many of them children, consigned to a life with braces or a wheelchair to walk. And she now had the support of an American physician whose credentials were beyond reproach.

However, Kenny was nearly broke from her travels.

Miland Knapp let Kenny stay in his family home in Minneapolis.

He used his report on her treatment results to apply for grants but the wait for funds would be months.

Even so, Kenny, with missionary-like zeal continued to treat polio victims and take no money for her work.

A group of Minneapolis businessmen came to her financial rescue.

Ninety-eight year old Betty Henry remembers the fateful meeting where Kenny met Minneapolis' high rollers. Henry's husband Jim was a member of a downtown Minneapolis businessmen's club. He organized the meeting where Kenny described her treatment to an audience willing to put their money behind someone who claimed to be able to counter the panic sown by polio.

audio . . . and they gave her four hundred and twelve dollars a month which was a lot of money in the l940's.

Henry says after the dinner meeting her husband Jim gave Kenny a ride home.

audio . . . she says today is the first real meal I've had in five days outside of tea and toast.

Kenny's fortunes had turned and her star began to rise. However, not many people knew much about the woman.

audio . . . Oh we never really knew what Sister's age was.

Margaret Ernest who lives in Minneapolis was Kenny's office administrator.

Elizabeth Kenny was born in 1880 although she told people 1886.

Ernest says she was a formidable figure.

audio. . . broad and big busted and she carried herself you know like a queen.

Kenny was 59 when she arrived in Minneapolis in l940.

Ernest says she was a workaholic.

audio . . . it just seemed like she required very little rest. She was always up early in the morning and ready to go, and she'd be calling people at ungodly hours.

Kenny's caseload rose with polio's rising toll.

Evelyn and Edwin Hande were returning from a vacation in l950 when their six year old young son and two year old daughter showed polio symptoms.

audio . . . and he was kind of lounging in the back seat during the whole trip back, and when we got home, our little girl who was just learning to walk couldn't walk anymore.

They immediately took the children to Minneapolis General Hospital, already crammed with children paralyzed with polio.

audio . . . one of the doctors said we don't have any room for you and the other doctor said we gotta take 'em in so they were put in the hallways.

The Hande children were isolated with hundreds of other polio victims. The Hande's despaired.

audio . . . we couldn't get to see them, we couldn't do anything about it, it was a worrisome time, we were just sad.

Evelyn Hande says neighborhoods and families closed their doors.

audio . . . people weren't going to church, they weren't going anyplace, and I don't think anybody wanted to talk to us.

Edwin Hande says panic was rife among parents because so many of polio's victims were children.

audio . . . what I say if you think about anthrax today just think about what polio was then if you had a young family. Unbelievable. People were scared.

The Hande children made a complete recovery.

Doctors still groused, sometimes publicly, about Elizabeth Kenny's ideas. But many muzzled their criticisms and adopted her techniques. After all, they were yielding dramatic results and more importantly, invoking the Kenny name was a potent source of money for polio treatment and research into a vaccine.

audio . . . montage of Tim, Sons of the Pioneers.

A constellation of stars recorded radio public service announcements.

A vaccine to stop polio became widely available in l955. Until then, the Kenny method was still the best thing going to treat the disease.

Decades of nearly non-stop medical work, fundraising and lobbying had taken a toll. Elizabeth Kenny was sick. Parkinson's disease was eroding her vitality. She left the United States and returned to her hometown in northern Queensland, Australia where she lived the last years of her life. Elizabeth Kenny died in l952.

audio . . . sfx Sister Kenny Abbott Northwestern

Kenny's ideas are still in use around the world and at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. Victims of vehicle crashes, stroke and others who've lost use of their limbs come here to Kenny Rehabilitation Services to get muscle re-education. Director Dr. Jennine Speier says Kenny's use of her hands, fingers probing muscles weakened by polio for any sign of life, advanced understanding of how to help convince patients they can move.

audio . . . if the muscle has to lift the whole leg and the leg is partially paralyzed and heavy you can't really do very much. But if you put your hands there and support and suddenly that muscle will kick in. If you put in a position where it is easier you may actually stimulate the muscle to contract with some gentle tactile touch stimulation or the tapping activates the stretch receptors ...I think Sister Kenny was doing this but when she started she probably didn't even know what stretch receptors were.

Yale University history professor Naomi Rogers says Kenny's singular personality sets her apart as one of the most compelling figures of her time.

audio . . . a feisty, large, almost overbearing woman with gentle hands and a special understanding of a very frightening disease.

Polio is still a scourge with outbreaks in central Africa and India. Elsewhere polio is a disease of the past. Public health officials predict its eradication in a few years.

Fifty years ago, at the height of the polio epidemic in this country, thousands of polio victims regained mobility because of Elizabeth Kenny's ideas. A few medical histories note of her role. There's a small museum in her hometown in Australia. Her most visible legacy is in Minneapolis where a neighborhood, a school and a hospital rehabilitation center are named after her.