Celebrating Elizabeth Kenny

Today’s Doodle celebrates Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who founded an alternative treatment for polio known as the Kenny Method. Her exercises rehabilitated thousands of polio victims all over the world, and is considered one of the most effective forms of treatment prior to vaccines. The Sister Kenny Memorial House, which celebrates her life’s work, opened on this day in Nobby, Queensland in 1997. 

Kenny was born in 1880 in Warialda, New South Wales. She grew up in an impoverished farming community in rural Australia, where she received little formal education but was an avid reader who loved learning about medicine and human anatomy. 

Although Kenny did not have the option to attend medical school, at 17 she forged her own path by volunteering at a hospital in Guyra. After shadowing nurses and doctors for more than a decade, Kenny gained enough working knowledge to open her own nursing practice in Darling Downs, Queensland. 

In 1911, she encountered her first case of polio. She was unaware of the standard treatment at the time, which forced polio patients to lay in body casts for months which, in turn, caused muscle atrophy. This caused many polio victims to become permanently paralysed.

With her fresh perspective, Kenny realised the affected muscles were stiff, not permanently damaged. So she healed her patients by applying hot, wet compresses to the affected limbs, before having them perform gradual muscle strengthening exercises.

To the surprise of the medical community, her method worked! From then on, the exercises became known as the Kenny Method and news of this effective treatment spread far and wide. 

Kenny traveled to America in the 1940s to open rehabilitation centers such as the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis, which became a world-renowned center for polio treatment. 

Her alternative method was so effective that she received honorary degrees from Rutgers University and the University of Rochester. President Franklin D. Roosevelt even invited her to lunch to discuss his own treatment.

Impressed by the number of polio victims that the Kenny Method rehabilitated, President Harry Truman authorised Kenny to enter the U.S. as she wished without a visa, a great honor only previously granted to one other non-US citizen.