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.
The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science - that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.
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.
I spent more time on dark ships in danger zones than any other woman in the world.
I came to America to teach my method - not to enter a research experiment.
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 have a message to give to the world, and I shall not be thwarted.
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.