Innovation

The Forgotten Champion of Polio Victims the World Over

How Australian bush nurse Elizabeth Kenny eased the suffering of infantile paralysis patients and invented physical therapy

Sister Elizabeth Kenny, circa 1917 (public domain)

When I was a child in the 1960s, it was not uncommon to see people with braces on their legs, their mobility dependent upon canes or crutches. They were survivors of infantile paralysis or poliomyelitis, polio for short. Polio is a highly infectious, debilitating, and sometimes fatal disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the United States has been polio-free since 1979 due in large part to the polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in the 1950s.

Students at a school for victims of the 1916 polio outbreak in Billings, MT, 1923 (image via ywhc.org)

Salk’s vaccine was one of the significant medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, but it was of no use to polio victims. They needed an effective treatment for what is still an incurable disease. For that, many found relief from an unlikely source: an Australian bush nurse with no medical degree or formal training. Her name was Elizabeth Kenny, but the world would come to know her as “Sister Kenny.”