Kerry Highley, Dancing in My Dreams

Kerry Highley’s Dancing in My Dreams is a history of the polio epidemics from the Australian perspective. She focuses her study on the epidemic decades from the 1930s to the early 1960s, and she discusses both the experience of having polio and the work of Australian physicians and scientists who contributed to the effort to understand the disease and to develop a vaccine. Highley also takes a close look at the career of Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the Australian nurse noted for developing a new method of treating patients paralysed by polio. Highley frames her study in part as a struggle between the competing approaches to polio treatment advocated by Dame Jean Macnamara and Sister Elizabeth Kenny. Macnamara, a medical doctor, was a forceful advocate for the traditional method of treating polio paralysis through rest and immobilisation using casts and splints. Kenny, an unorthodox bush nurse with little formal training, developed an approach that employed hot packs to ease pain and contractures, assisted movement of limbs, and hostility to immobilisation and traditional treatments. Although Kenny attained both success and fame in the United States, Highley argues that the strong opposition of Macnamara and the Australian medical establishment meant that Australian polio patients were largely denied the benefits of Kenny’s innovative therapies

Poliomyelitis · Political science · Sister · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Medicine · Law · Virology