Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip is taken from a silent colour home movie and shows children afflicted with polio undergoing rehabilitative hydrotherapy at a place named as Franston Home in an intertitle (not seen in the clip), but believed to be Frankston House, in Frankston, Victoria. Two boys are levered in and out of the pool while braced on a stretcher that is operated by a woman turning a wheel. A woman in the pool assists the children and stretches out their wasted leg muscles in the water. The film was produced in about 1940 by Reverend R W Dobbinson, OBE.

Educational value points

• This film is an example of an early promotional film used in fundraising activities. It was made for St Giles Home in Launceston, Tasmania, which was set up to provide support for children affected by poliomyelitis (polio) following an outbreak in 1937. Reverend R W Dobbinson, the filmmaker, was instrumental in establishing St Giles. The film depicts treatment facilities in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria with the aim of raising funds for a similar Tasmanian service.

• The excerpt reveals the crippling effects of polio on children in about 1940. During the epidemics in Australia in the 1930s–50s up to 70,000 people, mostly children, were afflicted. Polio, also known as infantile paralysis, is a potentially fatal infectious viral disease that affects the central nervous system. The development of a vaccine by Dr Jonas Salk in 1953 led to a mass vaccination program in Australia in 1956 that finally halted the spread of the disease.

• The use of hydrotherapy seen here was one of the tenets of Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1880–1952), who challenged the traditional treatment of polio. The self-trained nurse did not agree with the common practice of splinting limbs to immobilise them, advocating instead the use of heat packs, hydrotherapy, massage and manipulation of affected arms and legs to treat muscle spasms and improve muscle flexibility.

• Clinical massage and physiotherapy played important roles in providing relief and treatment for polio sufferers, and in aiding their recovery and rehabilitation. The disease led to paralysis, muscle wasting and in extreme cases inhibited respiration. The standard treatments for polio were rest, splinting limbs, warming muscles and re-educating muscles, which involved testing the muscles for strength then devising an individual treatment plan.

• In 1937–38, the worst-ever epidemic of polio in Australia stretched medical resources, particularly massage therapists, to the limit and required additional facilities to be established to care for victims. Children with polio were treated in convalescent homes and treatment centres such as the one shown here at Frankston, Victoria. The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne set up the world’s first mobile home treatment service for children with polio.

• Polio carried a social stigma because it was wrongly thought to be associated with poverty. The stigma was compounded by the forced quarantining of the entire family for three weeks once polio was diagnosed in any member of the family. Today there are various post-polio networks that assist adults who have recurring symptoms from polio. Many of them were never told by their parents that they had contracted the disease.