This film has a singular importance. You may recall I spoke glowingly of women who ably supported determined, dedicated, striving men in their various endeavors. I spoke of a writer, a doctor, and an old time scientist in Ancient Greece. The personalities I described all benefited from divine intervention in the person of a woman. Now the cases I related enjoyed the support of loving wives.
What man has not sworn by having the 'love of a good woman' behind him from time to time? It is something of a clique' and asks women to assume a subordinate role to the man's purposes and goals. For some women this is not an imposition. They find fulfillment in helping and serving and creating a family. But there are many women who would find such a role conforming to a stereotype. One that blunts the edges of their personality and precludes growth and development towards embracing other callings.
Elizabeth Kenny is a natural healer. Played sensitively by Rosalind Russell, we see in the very first opening scenes that she derives her sense of identity from this more than anything else. That even includes being a nurse or a teacher. Like countless women before her, she meets an exigency with care and common sense and without necessarily meaning to, develops revolutionary ideas that advance the cause of healing throughout the world.
Elizabeth Kenny demonstrates with humility and compassion the virtues of a true revolutionary. The kind who changes the world with the force of ideas rather than the force of arms. She unexpectedly finds herself at loggerheads with the Medical Establishment. The truth is Sister Kenny tends to her patients with a mixture of personal empathy, communication between muscles as living things, and I believe, an advanced tactile sense which is part and parcel of a kinesiological genius that not everyone is privy to or permitted to enjoy. It marks one who is endowed to be a true healer.
She brings reports of half a dozen cases stricken with infantile paralysis to the attention of Dr. McDonnell as played by Alexander Knox. He is shocked to discover that she has achieved complete recovery in all these cases, when the 'standard' expectation is a more or less alleviation of the symptoms. He becomes a champion for her methods, but because of his formal medical training which at that time emphasized mechanics and structure and his psychological disposition, he does not attain the degree of success that is routine for Sister Kenny. There is a tinge of authoritarianism in his approach that seems to prevent the patient from placing the needed hope and faith in the practitioner to accomplish complete success, but this is mere speculation on my part from viewing that one scene in the film.
Throughout the decades, Sister Kenny, according to the film, finds herself in direct opposition with medical authority as mainly represented by a Dr. Brack. Phillip Merivale plays this role with distinction. She finds herself spearheading a cause and a crusade that puts healer and patient rapport before illness as a study in mechanics and the function of communication to re-educate muscles in spasm to flow before studies of structure. She thereafter finds herself married to her calling as a healer and her relationship with her fiancee, Kevin Connors, unfortunately recedes to the background.
This is a well written and well directed film by Dudley Nichols. Despite that, it nonetheless lost money here in the states and abroad elsewhere. Even in Australia where the titular character hailed from and claimed as her stomping grounds. Rosalind Russell did win a Golden Globe for her efforts. But what could have been done to make the satisfactions of genius more palatable for the commercial public, is a problem in aesthetics for another day.
What man has not sworn by having the 'love of a good woman' behind him from time to time? It is something of a clique' and asks women to assume a subordinate role to the man's purposes and goals. For some women this is not an imposition. They find fulfillment in helping and serving and creating a family. But there are many women who would find such a role conforming to a stereotype. One that blunts the edges of their personality and precludes growth and development towards embracing other callings.
Elizabeth Kenny is a natural healer. Played sensitively by Rosalind Russell, we see in the very first opening scenes that she derives her sense of identity from this more than anything else. That even includes being a nurse or a teacher. Like countless women before her, she meets an exigency with care and common sense and without necessarily meaning to, develops revolutionary ideas that advance the cause of healing throughout the world.
Elizabeth Kenny demonstrates with humility and compassion the virtues of a true revolutionary. The kind who changes the world with the force of ideas rather than the force of arms. She unexpectedly finds herself at loggerheads with the Medical Establishment. The truth is Sister Kenny tends to her patients with a mixture of personal empathy, communication between muscles as living things, and I believe, an advanced tactile sense which is part and parcel of a kinesiological genius that not everyone is privy to or permitted to enjoy. It marks one who is endowed to be a true healer.
She brings reports of half a dozen cases stricken with infantile paralysis to the attention of Dr. McDonnell as played by Alexander Knox. He is shocked to discover that she has achieved complete recovery in all these cases, when the 'standard' expectation is a more or less alleviation of the symptoms. He becomes a champion for her methods, but because of his formal medical training which at that time emphasized mechanics and structure and his psychological disposition, he does not attain the degree of success that is routine for Sister Kenny. There is a tinge of authoritarianism in his approach that seems to prevent the patient from placing the needed hope and faith in the practitioner to accomplish complete success, but this is mere speculation on my part from viewing that one scene in the film.
Throughout the decades, Sister Kenny, according to the film, finds herself in direct opposition with medical authority as mainly represented by a Dr. Brack. Phillip Merivale plays this role with distinction. She finds herself spearheading a cause and a crusade that puts healer and patient rapport before illness as a study in mechanics and the function of communication to re-educate muscles in spasm to flow before studies of structure. She thereafter finds herself married to her calling as a healer and her relationship with her fiancee, Kevin Connors, unfortunately recedes to the background.
This is a well written and well directed film by Dudley Nichols. Despite that, it nonetheless lost money here in the states and abroad elsewhere. Even in Australia where the titular character hailed from and claimed as her stomping grounds. Rosalind Russell did win a Golden Globe for her efforts. But what could have been done to make the satisfactions of genius more palatable for the commercial public, is a problem in aesthetics for another day.