Sister Elizabeth Kenny came to the United States in 1940 to seek medical approval for her new methods of polio treatment. (“Sister” was a designation for senior nurse, not a religious title.) She gained the support of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes), America’s largest disease philanthropy directed by Franklin Roosevelt’s former law partner, Basil O’Connor. Kenny became one of the most prominent women of her era: an expert witness at Congressional hearings on science research; the director of her own Foundation which attracted as a spokesman Hollywood superstar Bing Crosby; and the subject of a Hollywood movie “Sister Kenny” (RKO 1946) starring Rosalind Russell. As a nurse claiming the authority of discoverer and healer, she crafted a public persona as a mixture of Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie. Polio left families and their doctors at a terrifying loss: epidemics could not be predicted or controlled; paralyzed patients frequently remained disabled in a world unfriendly to the disabled; and until the mid-1950s there was no vaccine to prevent the disease. Kenny rejected conventional polio therapies, especially splinting and surgery. Her hot packs and muscle exercises embodied a different style of clinical practice - optimistic, energetic, patient-centered care – that gave hope to desperate patients and families. Kenny’s cause also provided a forum for the public to express long-standing frustration with unresponsive physicians, autocratic public officials, and medical orthodoxy. Most elite physicians and scientists were not convinced by her theory of polio as a non-neurological disease yet American health professionals quickly adopted her methods.