Elizabeth Kenny
Elizabeth Kenny
Elizabeth Kennywas an unaccredited Australian nurse who promoted a controversial new approach to the treatment of poliomyelitis. Her findings ran counter to conventional medical wisdom; they demonstrated the need to exercise muscles affected by polio instead of immobilising them. Kenny's principles of muscle rehabilitation became the foundation of physical therapy, or physiotherapy...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth20 September 1886
CityWarialda, Australia
CountryAustralia
His response was remarkable for its irrelevance, if for nothing else.
The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.
I do not want medical men to discuss whether or not my work is valuable, because I know what it will do. I want them to tell me how best this new knowledge of rapidly restoring paralysed people to health and strength can be applied where it is needed.
In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.
'O sleep, O gentle sleep,' I thought gratefully, 'Nature's soft nurse!'
At first, I was called a quack, a charlatan, and worse, year after year, in Australia, England and the United States, by men who simply refused to believe that a nurse from 'the bush' could devise a treatment which succeeded where they had failed.
I play the Demon myself -- no puppets involved.
It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.
He who angers you conquers you.
Panic plays no part in the training of a nurse.
It is easier to recount grievances and slights than it is to set down a broad redress of such grievances and slights. The reason is that one fears to be thought of as an arrant braggart.
O sleep, O gentle sleep, I thought gratefully, Nature's gentle nurse.
memories do not always behave in an orderly way, but bloom, as it were, erratically ...
Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.