Yesterday I watched an old B/W movie on TCM, “Sister Kenny”, staring Rosalind Russell, Dean Jagger, and Alexander Knox. The story, of course, was about Sister Elizabeth Kenny (“Sister” is what nurses were titled in Australia) who became a young nurse in the bush country of Queensland, Australia in the early 20th century years ahead of WWI.
At the beginning of her tenure as the local bush nurse Sister Kenny encountered a half-a-dozen children who had contracted Polio. After telegramming the hospital doctor over fifty miles away, and his response being that there was no cure or medicine for the disease and its resulting physical paralysis affliction and was told to just ‘treat the symptoms’, basically to only just make the child comfortable.
After Kenny’s intelligent observation of the constricting of the body’s muscles, she decided hot compress-wrapping of those areas to relax the muscles would bring the body out of the painful and agonizing twisted formations. However, she was puzzled when the child (her first patient a little girl) could not then move her legs or pull herself up to the sitting position after the hot-wraps had ceased the horrific body spasms. Kenny critically examined the legs and decided which muscles had ‘shortened’ as a result of the spasms and which had not. From there she decided they were not ‘damaged’ and paralyzed, but they had to be “re-educated” to move through physical therapy of the child.
Sidenote: Y’all know I’m a “The Waltons” binge-watcher. There is a two-part Easter episode in one of the earlier seasons (circa early mid-1930s) where mother Olivia Walton comes down with Polio. The local country doctor insisted she and the family resolve themselves to her inevitable physical paralysis for the rest of her life. To which eldest child and pre-college-age son “John Boy” wouldn’t take that prognosis and sought-out the local university professor and medical doctor who himself was paralyzed by Polio. He enlightened John Boy to Sister Kenny’s method of dealing with Polio, provided information on the method, and warned John Boy the medical community was resistent to Sister Kenny’s philosophy and methods regarding Polio treatment and that they considered her a “quack”. To which their country doctor proved the professor’s forewarnings. However, the Walton family persisted and the methods eventually had Olivia Walton on her feet and walking again back to normal.
Back to the real analogy I’m eventually going to make here…
Sister Kenny had strong opposition to the typical method of the doctor putting the Polio-addled legs, arms, and back/neck in splints to restrict the muscles in one position. Her method was to free them and to coax then into moving again. The story in the movie showed how the doctors in Australia not only did not agree with her philosophy and methods in dealing with Polio patients (to which these very vocal doctors claimed her patients did not have Polio, and kept her from treating active Polio patients in front of them to prove her point), but how she was persecuted for daring to question them (closing her clinics that she would establish for her treatment of post-Polio children who were in wheelchairs/crutches/splints). Kenny did not criticize the medical community/profession and acknowledged their due respect. She was only pleading for and expecting them to have open minds outside the antiquated and dangerous old orthodox treatment of the disease in their literature they were locked into. She desperately wanted them, as scientists and doctors, to have an honest open ‘scientific’ discussion and debate with her and her method and findings, not treat her with ridicule, disdain and, yes, disrespect. So much so that they scoffed at her terminology regarding the disease’s condition and description of the patients’ muscles during and after the initial onset of Polio: spasms to describe her direct observations the Polio attack on the muscles and incoordination, re-education, alienation to describe the condition of the shortened and atrophied— not ‘paralyzed’, muscles after the hot compress wraps had subsided the acute spasms… See where I’m going with this?
I could not help but recall how similar this was to what we have seen these last three years of the Fauci-led medical community and industry in dealing with COVID patients. The medical associations and boards threatened any doctors that did not carry and abide by the constructed narrative about the treatment of the disease. This was not only prior to any big pharma development of COVID drug treatments that are now available, but continues to this day in regard to therapeutics such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine both longtime affordable available drugs with little or no ramifications to the patient using them. Actually, from what my own doctor says, those are far less harmful to kidneys and other organs than the new COVID drugs (and the damn vaccines).
While the feeling of familiarity grew on me with the old movie it was this interaction and the words of the only doctor at the time that was on her side for years, Dr. McDonnell. Sister Kenny and her betrothed Capt. Kevin Connors are having a discussion with Dr. McDonnell about trying to get Kenny’s method for Polio made public despite the tactics of the medical community to obstruct and silence her. Connors believes they should go to the newspapers and give them her story. However, McDonnell warns that would give those adamant doctors ammunition to completely delegitimize Kenny irreparably, “cancel” her if you will. The Dr. Brack they’re discussing is Sister Kenny’s most vocal and stubborn opposition leading the way against her and her method:
Dr. McDonnell: “Brack’s in the warpath. Even my scalp feels a bit loose at the edges.”
Capt. Conners: “He’d look pretty silly if you took it to the newspapers.”
Sister Kenny: “Tell them everything. Kevin that’s wonderful.”
Capt. Connors: “He wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Dr. McDonnell: “If you were a quack, Elizabeth, that’s exactly what I’d tell you to do. You’d hang yourself in no time. Medical questions aren’t settled in the newspapers. You’d brand yourself as a fake in the eyes of every decent doctor in the country.”
Capt. Conners (Kenny’s betrothed): “You mean to say that every decent doctor in the country is a pig-headed fool?”
Dr. McDonnell: “Well now, look, Captain. Suppose a civilian came to you in the field and told you your military science was all wrong. You’d tell him to go to blazes, wouldn’t you? Well, the medical profession is society’s only defense against quackery. Our degrees, our licenses, our medical associations are a wall to protect society against vicious men who are willing to trade on human ignorance and misery.”
Isn’t that pretty much what the MSM, and the social media, did to any/all very knowledgeable and experienced viral doctors and scientists who dared go against the set narrative being regurgitated by Fauci, the CDC, the MSM, the ‘influencers’ on the left, etc.? I mean, Elon Musk’s Twitter Files have exposed the direct marriage and coordination between the federal government entities and the social media companies. And those scientists/doctors who dared do or say anything opposite of them were “canceled” … and private doctors threatened with license and board certification cancelation(s) if they dared prescribe, or even suggest patients seek, alternative therapeutics for COVID infection.
The COVID era has been shockingly brazen in its inability to approach the virus as a real scientific community of critical thinking and debate/discussion. The powers that have been during this time have continually sniped that anything outside what they themselves were promoting was “dangerously untested and unproven”, even though what they were having done, including their eventual vaccines, were exactly that … dangerously untested and unproven. And no amount of contrary compiled data has been permitted. A completely incurious and eagerly/willingly complicit MSM has made this medical conspiracy possible, and to this day with yet another unproven wet-market “animal” blame as the “origins” of the virus … not the bio-weapons viral lab in Wuhan, China working on the exact same virus. What an ass-backward travesty has been carried out these last three years on the public in this country and around the world … and the establishment gun-to-the-head self-inflicted wound to our collective medical community and government.
And I must bring up how strident the medical establishment has been in this anti-science abomination in the face of a virus that has destroyed lives on many levels while they’re refusing to allow anyone else’s methods for treating COVID patients and calling it “THE SCIENCE” … is the same establishment medical community going along with and allowing the abomination of irreversible surgical sex/gender mutilations and drug poisoning to stunt puberty hormones and medical castration of … CHILDREN! Along with the same cast of malpracticing dolts that have sold their souls to the “climate change” cult.
In conclusion, Sister Kenny was in-demand in other countries. Eventually, in 1940, she visited America and was finally allowed to present her case, with ‘curious’ questions but not criticism, to the medical community very willing to listen during the ongoing challenges of Polio. Kenny’s proven theory and methods became part of a foundation for a new era of physical therapy.
If you do not have Turner Classic Movies you can watch the movie, “Sister Kenny“, in full on YouTube here.
More background on Sister Elizabeth Kenny:
Elouise @ Telling The Truth Blog: Sister Kennyâs Battle
Off-subject sidenote:
This was atleast the third production (I’m sure there are more) I’ve discovered actresses Beulah Bondi and Ellen Corby together in…
“Sister Kenny”:
– Beulah Bondi played Sister Kenney’s mother
– Ellen Corby had a brief role as a hospital cleaning woman (uncredited and for lack of a published photo I took a TV screen shot complete with ambient daylight in my room reflecting in the TV screen and discoloring the center of the photo)
“It’s a Wonderful Life”:
– Beulah Bondi played George Bailey’s mother
– Ellen Corby played a young woman during the bank-run on the Bailey bank
In “The Waltons”:
– Ellen Corby played “Grandma Walton” (ironically decades later after briefly appearing in “Sister Kenny”, Corby as Grandma Walton took primary care with the Kenny method on daughter-in-law Olivia’s recovery from Polio)
– Beulah Bondi played “Grandpa Walton’s” sister-in-law “Martha Corrine Walton” in a couple of episodes
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(Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, right, shakes hands with Saudi national security adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban, left, as Wang Yi, China’s most senior diplomat, looks on during a meeting in Beijing, March 11, 2023. (Luo Xiaoguang / Xinhua via AP)
The Universal Spectator 
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