Sister Elizabeth Kenny (20 September 1880 – 30 November 1952) was a self-trained Australian bush nurse who developed an approach to treating polio that was controversial at the time.

Her method, promoted internationally while working in Australia, Europe and the United States, differed from the conventional one of placing affected limbs in plaster casts.

[2] Her life story was told in a 1946 film, Sister Kenny, where she was portrayed by Rosalind Russell, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.

[3] Called "Lisa" by her family, Kenny was home schooled by her mother, and only received a few years of formal education when living at Headington Hill, near Nobby.

[10] Kenny earned the title Sister while nursing on transport ships that carried soldiers to and from Australia and England during the First World War.

[13] Upon her return to Nobby, Kenny advertised her services as a Medical and Surgical Nurse,[14] reaching her patients on foot or by horseback or buggy.

[18] Recent scholarship has placed doubts on the veracity of Kenny's reporting of her first encounter with polio whilst working as a Nurse in Nobby or Clifton.

[19][20] Press reports from Australia in the 1930s quote Kenny as saying she developed her method while caring for meningitis patients on troopships during the First World War.

She carried a letter of recommendation from Dr McDonnell,[30] which Victor Cohn believed assisted her in being assigned as a Nurse on the crew of the HMAT Suevic.

[36] Kenny's service records confirm that she was assigned temporarily on two occasions to the Australian Auxiliary Hospitals at Harefield Park and Southall while awaiting reassignment to her next voyage.

In June 1919, she volunteered to assist for two months at a temporary isolation hospital in Clifton, set up to care for victims of the 1918 flu pandemic.

[52] At that time Kenny, while travelling to sell the Stretcher, adopted eight-year-old Mary Stewart to be a companion for her elderly mother.

[54] As sales of the Sylvia Stretcher declined in the early 1930s, Kenny resumed her involvement with the CWA and campaigning for improved rural first-aid services.

[61] The following year, local people helped Kenny set up a rudimentary paralysis-treatment facility under canopies behind the Queens Hotel in Townsville.

She instituted a careful regimen of passive "exercises" designed to recall function in unaffected neural pathways, much as she had done with Maude Rollinson.

[72] The broadest appraisal of her methods, The Kenny Concept of Infantile Paralysis And Its Treatment, appeared in collaboration with Dr John Pohl in 1943 and was known as The Red Book.

[75] In 1934, Kenny made public claims about the success of her therapy [citation needed] that angered Raphael Cilento, who by now was the Director-General of Health in Queensland.

Its most critical comment, on Kenny opposing the use of splints and plaster casts was: "The abandonment of immobilization is a grievous error and fraught with grave danger, especially in very young patients who cannot co-operate in re-education.

The Commissioners' strongest words were against the Queensland government, then funding Kenny's work, as her clinics were unsupervised by medical practitioners.

In a 1943 letter to the British Medical Journal, Kenny noted, "There have been upwards of 300 doctors attending the classes at the University of Minnesota.

During her first year in Minneapolis, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) paid her personal expenses and financed trials of her work.

Kenny was a determined and outspoken woman, which harmed her relations with the medical profession, but her method continued to be used and helped hundreds of people suffering from polio.

In recognition of her work, in February 1950 President Harry Truman signed a Congressional bill giving Kenny the right to enter and leave the US as she wished without a visa.

This honour had only been granted once before, to the French Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a leader in the American War of Independence.

[89] Kenny filled her final years with extensive journeys in America, Europe and Australia in an effort to increase acceptance of her method.

Suffering from Parkinson's disease, she stopped on her way home in Melbourne to meet privately with internationally respected virologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet.

[90]In an attempt to save her life from cerebral thrombosis, Irving Innerfield of New York sent his experimental drug based on the enzyme trypsin by air mail to Brisbane.

It was rushed by car to Toowoomba[91] and administered on 29 November 1952, but her doctor found Kenny too close to death to benefit and she died the following day.

[92] Kenny's funeral on 1 December 1952 at Neil Street Methodist Church in Toowoomba was recorded for transmission in other parts of Australia and in the United States.

In Toowoomba, the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Memorial Fund provides scholarships to students attending the University of Southern Queensland who dedicate themselves to work in rural and remote areas of Australia.