Social History of Medicine Advance Access published online on March 5, 2008
Social History of Medicine, doi:10.1093/shm/hkn001
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‘Silence has its own Stories’: Elizabeth Kenny, Polio and the Culture of Medicine
* Section of the History of Medicine and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Yale University, PO Box 208324, New Haven CT 06520–8324, USA. E-mail: Naomi.rogers{at}yale.edu
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Abstract |
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Summary This essay examines four topics in medical history, drawing examples both from recent historical works and also from the author's own research on medicine in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The topics are the visibility and management of symptoms in clinical practice, particularly pain in polio; the changes in deception and truth-telling in clinical diagnosis and prognosis, such as the silence chosen by both physicians and families around terminal illnesses like ovarian cancer; debates around the etiquette of publicity within the medical profession and the historical creation of a lay ‘public’ considered irrational and easily swayed; and the making of medical films as sources of scientific evidence. A focus on Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse based in Minneapolis in the 1940s and early 1950s, who developed controversial methods of treating patients paralysed by polio, is used to link these themes together around the boundaries of medical authority: the struggle to define who can make symptoms visible and significant, give or withhold the truth of a terminal diagnosis, set standards of professional respectability, and assess the authenticity of evidence presented as ‘scientific’.
Keywords: medical authority; medical ethics; history of diagnosis; scientific evidence; history of polio; history of cancer; history of pain management