1. Sister Elizabeth Kenny was a self-trained Australian bush nurse who developed an approach to treating polio that was controversial at the time.
51 Facts About Elizabeth Kenny
1. 2.
Elizabeth Kenny's method, promoted internationally while working in Australia, Europe and the United States, differed from the conventional one of placing affected limbs in plaster casts.
3.
Elizabeth Kenny was born in Warialda, New South Wales, on 20 September 1880, to the Australian-born Mary Kenny, nee Moore, and Michael Kenny, a farmer from Ireland.
4.
Elizabeth Kenny said in Who's Who in Australia she had attended St Ursulas College near Guyra, but this has never been verified.
5.
Elizabeth Kenny's father took her to Aeneas McDonnell, a medical doctor in Toowoomba, where she remained during her convalescence.
6.
Elizabeth Kenny later confirmed that she became interested in how muscles worked while convalescing from her accident.
7.
In 1907, at the age of 27, Elizabeth Kenny returned to Guyra, New South Wales, first living with her grandmother and then with her cousin Minnie Bell.
8.
Elizabeth Kenny earned the title Sister while nursing on transport ships that carried soldiers to and from Australia and England during the First World War.
9.
Elizabeth Kenny returned to Nobby during 1911 after spending time in Walcha assisting her cousin after the birth of her son.
10.
Many authors describe Elizabeth Kenny as working as a Bush Nurse, but this is not a term she applied to herself.
11.
In July 1912 she opened a Cottage Hospital at Clifton which she named St Canice's, where she provided convalescent and midwifery services, describing herself as Nurse Elizabeth Kenny, Certificated Medical, Surgical, and Midwifery.
12.
Elizabeth Kenny was behaving recklessly in describing herself as a certificated nurse as the Queensland Health Amendment Act had introduced stringent rules governing the registration of nurses and the registration of private hospitals.
13.
The story was romanticized in the 1946 film Sister Elizabeth Kenny, featuring Rosalind Russell.
14.
Recent scholarship has placed doubts on the veracity of Elizabeth Kenny's reporting of her first encounter with polio whilst working as a Nurse in Nobby or Clifton.
15.
Press reports from Australia in the 1930s quote Elizabeth Kenny as saying she developed her method while caring for meningitis patients on troopships during the First World War.
16.
In May 1915 Elizabeth Kenny announced she was closing St Canice to join the War effort in Europe.
17.
Elizabeth Kenny travelled at her own expense to London, where she hoped to serve as a nurse in the First World War.
18.
Elizabeth Kenny was not eligible to serve with the Australian Army Nursing Service as she was not a qualified nurse.
19.
Elizabeth Kenny carried a letter of recommendation from Dr McDonnell, which Victor Cohn believed assisted her in being assigned as a Nurse on the crew of the HMAT Suevic.
20.
Elizabeth Kenny served on these missions throughout the war, making 8 round trips.
21.
Elizabeth Kenny used that title for the rest of her life and was criticised by some for doing so, but she was officially promoted to the rank during her wartime service.
22.
Elizabeth Kenny claimed in her autobiography to have served for a few weeks as matron to a military hospital at Enoggera, near Brisbane, but an investigation in 1955 into Kenny's war service by the Officer in Charge, AIF Base Records, concluded there was no evidence of Kenny being attached to any military hospitals in Queensland during the war.
23.
In 1919 Elizabeth Kenny was honourably discharged and awarded a pension.
24.
Elizabeth Kenny's ailments were probably psychosomatic as she remained fit and healthy until she developed Parkinson's Disease in her late 60s.
25.
Elizabeth Kenny was unable to work as a nurse because of her lack of qualifications but was active in the local Red Cross.
26.
Elizabeth Kenny remained an active member of the local first aid service.
27.
Witnesses confirm that Elizabeth Kenny improvised a rigid stretcher from a cupboard door.
28.
Elizabeth Kenny later improved and patented the stretcher for use by local ambulance services, and for the next four years marketed it as the Sylvia Stretcher, in Australia, Europe and the United States.
29.
Elizabeth Kenny earned a substantial royalty from the sale of the stretcher, and is believed to have turned some of the profits over to the Country Women's Association.
30.
At that time Elizabeth Kenny, while travelling to sell the Stretcher, adopted eight-year-old Mary Stewart to be a companion for her elderly mother.
31.
In May 1931, Elizabeth Kenny visited the Rollinson family who owned a station, Allandale, west of Townsville.
32.
Elizabeth Kenny had befriended the Rollinsons in London in 1929 while promoting her ambulance stretcher.
33.
Elizabeth Kenny's success led to Kenny clinics being established in several Australian cities.
34.
Elizabeth Kenny was strongly opposed to immobilising children's bodies with plaster casts or braces.
35.
Elizabeth Kenny requested permission to treat children in the acute stage of the disease with hot compresses, but doctors would not allow that until after the acute stage of the disease, or until "tightness" subsided.
36.
Elizabeth Kenny instituted a careful regimen of passive "exercises" designed to recall function in unaffected neural pathways, much as she had done with Maude Rollinson.
37.
Between 1935 and 1940, Elizabeth Kenny travelled widely in Australia, helping to establish clinics, and made two trips to England, where she set up a treatment clinic in St Mary's Hospital near Carshalton.
38.
Elizabeth Kenny's success was controversial; many Australian doctors and the British Medical Association questioned her results and methodology.
39.
In 1934, Elizabeth Kenny made public claims about the success of her therapy that angered Raphael Cilento, who by now was the Director-General of Health in Queensland.
40.
Elizabeth Kenny replied publicly, fiercely taking Cilento to task for his criticisms.
41.
Elizabeth Kenny received honorary degrees from Rutgers University and the University of Rochester.
42.
Elizabeth Kenny joined for lunch US President Roosevelt, whose paralytic illness was believed to be polio, discussing his treatment at Warm Springs.
43.
In 1951, Elizabeth Kenny topped Gallup's most admired man and woman poll as the only woman in the first ten years of the annual list to displace Eleanor Roosevelt from the top.
44.
The Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation was established in Minneapolis to support her and her work throughout the United States.
45.
Some doctors changed their initial professional scepticism when they saw the effects Elizabeth Kenny's method had on her patients, both children and adults.
46.
Elizabeth Kenny was a determined and outspoken woman, which harmed her relations with the medical profession, but her method continued to be used and helped hundreds of people suffering from polio.
47.
Elizabeth Kenny worked with doctors at the Mayo Clinic and in Minneapolis and opened the Sister Kenny Institute in 1942.
48.
Elizabeth Kenny filled her final years with extensive journeys in America, Europe and Australia in an effort to increase acceptance of her method.
49.
Elizabeth Kenny tried, unsuccessfully, to have medical researchers agree with her that polio was a systemic disease.
50.
Elizabeth Kenny attended the second International Congress about polio in Copenhagen.
51.
Elizabeth Kenny was posthumously inducted onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001.