Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One

1 A Bush Nurse in America
2 The Battle Begins
3 Changing Clinical Care

Part Two

4 Polio and Disability Politics
5 The Polio Wars
6 Celluloid

Part Three

7 Kenny Goes to Washington
8 Fading Glory
9 I Knew Sister Kenny

About the Author

Naomi Rogers, PhD, is a tenured Associate Professor in the Program for the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University where she teaches medical students, undergraduates and graduate students.

Reviews

Winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing's 2014 Lavinia L. Dock Award for Outstanding Research and Writing.
"With this impressive study, Yale professor Rogers brings into brilliant, uncompromising focus the politics, culture, and science behind this complicated, crippling disease... Kenny - 'an outsider with an exotic background, an Australian bush nurse who became an American celebrity' - was a confident woman in a culture that believed nurses should be doctors' handmaidens. But what she wanted - and failed to get - was a place in the scientific pantheon that
included Marie Curie. Rogers's absorbing account of Kenny's medical contributions, philanthropy, and influence is a remarkable resource for students of the medical, political, and social history of the
pre-polio vaccine years." -- Publishers Weekly
Thanks to Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine, a new biography by Naomi Rogers, a Yale University medical historian, readers can learn why [Sister Kenny] gained such fame. As Dr. Rogers shows, Ms. Kenny irked the American Medical Association and the rest of the medical establishment for reasons beyond her medical theories. But it was Ms. Kenny's fierce adherence to what she observed at the bedside that holds the most
relevance today." -- Barron H. Lerner, New York Times' Science Times
"A new look at this bold woman's work as well as a fascinating exploration of the culture of medicine and the nature of healing." -- The Washington Post
"Polio Wars provides an excellent account of the politics of gender, philanthropy, and American medicine during the mid-twentieth century, and will benefit junior and more senior scholars alike." -- Journal of the History of Medicine
Featured on - H-Net