At RNSH, the Board fitted out a clinic to Sister Kenny’s precise specifications. Requests for appointments poured in from the local community, across the state and nationally. The Board of Directors, partly to appease the Honorary Medical Staff, requested that the Council of the Institute of Medical Research (IMR), the forerunner of the Kolling Institute, appoint a medical committee to examine a selection of cases from the clinic before and during treatment. The committee would then report its findings to the Board and the NSW Parliament. Dr Wilson Ingram, Director of the IMR, chaired the committee, which consisted of seven medical men, including several orthopaedic surgeons. Sister Kenny agreed to select 25 cases representative of those seen in the clinic. However, she was not prepared to disclose her methods until the committee reported favourably upon her work! The first report was presented to the NSW Parliament on 15 May 1936. The committee examined 25 cases, a mixture of children with polio, acute and chronic, as well as cases of cerebral diplegia (cerebral palsy). A more comprehensive report with detailed individual case studies was published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1937. The examiners agreed that the clinic was well organised, that there was improvement in muscle strength in all cases of infantile paralysis and in coordination in those with cerebral diplegia. They also found that patients were very optimistic about their treatment. Much of the success, however, the committee attributed to Sister Kenny’s dominant personality. While expressing some regret that the study had not included a ‘control’ group or been conducted over a longer timeframe, the committee concluded that the “Kenny method” involved nothing more than techniques commonly used by trained masseuses (the forerunner of physiotherapists); that Sister Kenny’s methods did not represent a ‘breakthrough’; and that the treatment of these patients belonged “to the sphere of the orthopaedic surgeon”. The committee went further and recommended the building of a 300-bed special orthopaedic hospital. Within the grounds, they envisaged a school, a hostel, occupational therapy workshops and training facilities, and a splint factory! Needless to say, these facilities never eventuated. In 1940, Sister Kenny left Australia for the United States, where she was welcomed as a hero. A full-length Hollywood movie, Sister Kenny , starring
The movie poster for “Sister Kenny”, released in 1946
Rosalind Russell, was released in 1946. (It also screened at RNSH). The Kenny Clinic continued at RNSH in her absence, with generous support from the Federal Government, until 1948, when its accommodation was needed to house the new intake of medical students. Her clinic was finally absorbed into the Orthopaedic Department. Sister Kenny died in Toowoomba in 1952, just a few years short of seeing the introduction of a vaccine for polio, developed by Jonas Salk in 1954 (Australia in 1956), followed by an oral preparation developed by Albert Sabin in 1963. The last polio epidemics in Australia occurred in 1956 and between 1960 and 1962. Australia was officially declared polio-free in 2000. At RNSH, the appraisal of Sister Kenny’s technique involved a most unusual clinical trial. There is little chance that this trial would have progressed through a modern ethics committee!
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