Gender, History and Forgetting: The Case of Sister Kenny
with Professor Naomi Rogers
Wed, 28 October 2020
1:15 – 3:00 EST
This event is hosted by the University of Huddersfield's new Centre for History, Culture and Memory.
All are welcome to attend. Click below to register:
In 1992, Richard Owen, the director of the Sister Kenny Institute in St Paul, Minnesota, organized a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Institute, calling on former patients to offer their memories and honor a “pioneer” who had changed “the way the world viewed polio treatment.” The Institute held an exhibit on Sister Kenny while Minnesota’s governor declared December 17 “Sister Kenny Day.” St Paul and Minneapolis hosted an Indoor Wheelchair Tennis Tournament and an International Art Show by Disabled Artists. Many of Kenny’s former patients – most in their 60s and 70s - flocked to celebrate the Institute’s anniversary, reminiscing fondly of being treated by Kenny and her technicians and talking in matter-of-fact ways about their later experiences of living with Post-Polio Syndrome.
In many ways, that moment in December 1992 was misleading. The Anniversary celebrations, the responses by the state’s governor and city officials, did not indicate a lasting, energetic interest in Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952), a nurse from Australia who had come to America in the 1940s and transformed the clinical care of polio. In North America, and even in Minnesota, I came to recognize, there was little interest in Kenny or polio; this talk seeks to explain the forgetting of both the nurse and the disease. In the 1940s, Kenny was a celebrity, even the subject of a Hollywood film. By the 1950s and 60s, both Kenny and the clinical care of polio were largely forgotten amidst new stories of polio, its prevention through the Salk and then the Sabin vaccine now with new heroes: not nurses with their arms around children but male scientists in white coats.
Much of this forgetting of Kenny, I will suggest, was deliberately facilitated by the March of Dimes and by many of her critics who outlived her, in an effort to denigrate her critique of the gendered medical culture of her time, her alternative paradigm of the disabled body, and her respect for patient autonomy. Over the past decade, memorialization has frequently been seen as active and forgetting as passive. But here I want to suggest that there is also an active process of forgetting, in which certain ways of thinking about history is used to obliterate the memory of certain kinds of people or events, turning some selected memories into authentic representations of the past.
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More about the Host
This event is proudly hosted by the University of Huddersfield's new Centre for History, Culture and Memory. Our work embraces ‘culture and the past’ as well as ‘culture in the past’ – an approach that produces innovative, hybrid forms of historical research that often crosses boundaries.
We are historians, literary scholars, linguists, musicians and practitioners of art, design and healthcare. Our members range from postgraduate students and early career researchers to senior university leaders. Everyone is welcome! We hope that you'll be able to join us!
This exciting lecture will be held remotely over Zoom. A link to this event will be sent to all attendees a day before the event. Please direct any question to the Centre's Manager, Dr Chelsea Sambells at c.c.sambells@hud.ac.uk.
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More about Our Speaker
Dr Naomi Rogers, Ph.D., is Professor of the History of Medicine in the Section of the History of Medicine at Yale Medical School and the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University where she teaches undergraduates, graduate students, and medical students. Her historical interests include health activism; gender and health; disease and public health; disability; and alternative medicine/CAM. Her books include Dirt and Disease: Polio before FDR (Rutgers, 1992), An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia (Rutgers, 1998) and Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine (Oxford, 2014). Her current book project examines critics of medical orthodoxy since 1945 (Health Activism and the Humanization of American Medicine under contract with Oxford). In May 2017, she gave the Garrison Lecture at the American Association for the History of Medicine on “Radical Visions in American Medicine: Politics and Activism in the History of Medicine.”
Prof Rogers has taught at Yale since the mid-1990s and has courtesy appointments in the History Department and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.