SISTER KENNY

Sister Elizabeth Kenny,

Sailor,

You earned your title on the Dark Ships of World War One.

Later to prove your seaworthiness,

You walked upon the waters of Lake Complacency,

Townsville.

Around you ran the children you had saved,

Singing:

‘Little children should be free,

Free to run

and to play in the sun.

God knows these things

Were meant to be.’

“Charlatan!’

Cried the doctors.

‘Shame!’

Cried the nurses.

The butcher’s block doesn’t

wield the chopper.

The apprentice doesn’t teach the master

and the nurse doesn’t lecture the doctor!’

GO back to the bush,

Upstart Kenny.

Next day the papers carried the headline:

“Sister Kenny can’t swim.”

But you persisted,

Speaking to deaf ears,

Battering on the shutters of closed minds.

In England,

curing a doctor’s child

of the polio torture before his eyes.

But he wouldn’t bear witness

To your skill.

Finally in the land of stars and stripes

One doctor listened.

Perhaps it was true,

Polio could be stopped without surgeon’s knife

or splint and steel

to shackle little bodies.

Perhaps, just perhaps.

The cure was taught,

Tried on one,

Then ten,

A hundred.

Soon thousands sang,

‘Little children should be free,

Free to run

and to play in the sun.

We always knew these things

are meant to be.’

Footnote:

 In WW1 sister Kenny was a nurse on the hospital ships which sailed without lights, because of enemy subs.

She was able to travel the world trying to have her treatment accepted because she’d invented a stretcher called the Silvia Stretcher.

Money from the patent on this allowed her to persist in her quest to have her treatment recognized.