Aussie Hero’s 1: Sister Elizabeth Kenny
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Elizabeth Kenny was born, the great grand-daughter of an Irish convict, in the tiny hamlet of Kelly’s Gully western NSW 1880. As a child her parents moved around until finally settling in Nobby, Queensland where she was home-schooled by her mother. At the age of fourteen she fell from a horse breaking her wrist, during her convalescence she passed the time as a patient in a clinic by studying various anatomy books written by Dr Aeneas McDonnell in Toowoomba. Dr McDonnell became her mentor as Eliza developed a strong interest in not only anatomy but how the muscles worked.
Elizabeth trained and worked as a nurse during a time when polio - infantile paralysis - was common amongst children. The treatment up till then had been to bind the frozen limbs and place them in splints. It was rare for a child to walk again once having had polio. Eliza noted that when hot compresses were placed on the painfully stiffening muscles they began to relax after a period of time. She continued with this method, as a result most of her young charges recovered to be able to walk again.
Naturally, the male dominated medical establishment of the time were her greatest critics and she fought great opposition to her treatment, ‘The Kenny Method’. But in nearly all cases, when her treatment was applied in the acute stage, paralysis was halted. Eliza worked on opening clinics and defying her critics, in her work she was the pioneer of todays physiotherapy with her idea that keeping the limbs mobile and supple stopped deterioration.
One of her patients was the actor Alan Alda who credited her and her determination with his being able to walk after suffering polio as a child.
Today parents have the wonderful vaccine to protect their children from polio so cases are rarely seen, but there was a time when it was all too common to see children in leg splints and crippled. Sister Kenny, with her treatment made life bearable for those unlucky at that time to encounter this disease.
She died in 1952.
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I thought I would start this little section because when I went to school we had a book for the General Studies class. In the back was a section about individual Australians who were commemorated for the remarkable things they had done during their lives. Yes, we had our own hero’s in Australia and I’m going to remind everyone about them. Some of them you may never have heard about, but through here you will.
