SISTER KENNY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 99, 28 April 1945, Page 11

SISTER KENNY

PATHOLOGIST ON HER METHOD

O.C. SYDNEY, April 17. Professor of Pathology in Queensland University, Professor J. Duhig, made a scathing attack on Sister Kenny follow- ' ing the reporr that an expert orthopaedic committee in America had rejected her claim of cure for infantile paralysis. The American committee's finding, said Professor Duhigj was almost identical with that of the Aus- | tralian committee of which he was a member. Professor Duhig said that Sister Kenny's methods were now the same as orthodox treatment, except that her fee was higher, but at one stage her methods were dangerous. "All that Sister Kenny now does she learned [from us and other medical men," said Professor Duhig. "For the two years the commission sat—l 936 and 1937—it observed 60 cases. Not one improved and one was made worse. Doctors who support Sister Kenny in America are of much poorer scientific and professional standing than those who reject her claim to novelty, originality or superiority. The book Sister Kenny was misguided, enough to publish in America is, to a medical scientist, drivel. She merely states in a roundabout, foggy, and rather mystical way, that a paralysed limb is one that won't work. The book abounds in such bombinating platitudes. As a scientist who has studied the subject deeply both here and'abroad, I must assert that Sister Kenny's methods merely incorporate the best in ordinary methods. Sister Kenny's asset is not a new medical treatment, but a powerful personality and the desire to exploit it. At the beginning of the work of the Queensland Royal Commission, Sister Kenny was so abysmally ignorant of the elements of the job that she forecast 100 per cent. -;ure in a girl with permanently paralysed legs of over 10 years' standing. She signed a statement making this forecast, and it can be inspected in the archives of the commission. The girl wasted two years being cured' instead of learning a trade. After two years cf Kenny treatment she was no better."