I can still put myself in her absolutely charming waiting room, full of lovely original art and really fascinating antiques, and in her office, with its glass jars, rubber mallet, and vials of Silver Nitrate and alcohol and that shiny sterilizer full of instruments of pain. A tiny end house of a row of historic buildings with box hedges hiding the typically prim entry, it still still looks the same as ever, on State Street with the trolley tracks running by.
Huffy was what our family called her out of affection -- a play on her name that I hope she didn't mind. At a time when it took immense courage and maybe a bit of hubris for a woman to aspire to medical practice, she opted to study Osteopathy. She was particularly interested in the research of a woman in Australia who was working with people suffering with Infantile Paralysis, a woman known as Sister Elizabeth Kenny.
Huffy was a gifted diagnostician. She stayed conscientiously within her parameters as a D.O, prescribing appropriate treatments and medications, and she faithfully referred cases outside her scientific field to specialist M.D.'s. And she picked her specialists from the best. She was an astute observer: it was she who, puzzling out my father's worrisome symptoms, noted a characteristic odor that led her to refer him directly to a Diabetes specialist. Right on the money!
I was so proud, and somehow relieved, when my mother told me that Huffy had been presented with an award of excellence and distinguished human service by the Lion's Club. There were people at school who sniffed at Osteopathy, grouping it with Chiropractic practice and calling it all quackery. All I know is that Huffy was a true healer and scientist, never a quack, and the Lion's Club agreed with me.
I personally owe my active life to her. It was Huffy who had diagnosed my Polio and got me immediately to a specialist when I was a baby of 18 months or so.
"Mommy, I can't come down the stairs."
"Yes, you can. You come down right now."
"But I can't. Come carry me."
(Before she could, I fell down the stairs, and my mother felt terrible about it, of course.)
What it must have been like for a child just walking to be immobilized, as they did then, in what they called a Bradford Frame, so that only her head could move about, I really cannot imagine.
My parents later described to me the trauma, the heartbreaking anxiety of that time.To this day I have a real phobia about tight places which I suspect comes from those months of endless weeks of immobilization and quarantine.
Nothing improved and Huffy met with the M.D.'s and proposed a plan. She cited the work, still controversial in Europe and America, of Sister Kenny who was using gentle massage and gradual working of the muscles to successfully bring polio victims' limbs back into a functioning state.
With my parents' consent, the group decided to allow Huffy to work with my legs, and she began, I was later told by my mother, by very lightly stroking my feet. She taught a day-nurse who came to our house (this is another story-- that of the Polish nurse I called Mia) how to do the stroking, and then, later how to bend the toes and gradually to move the ankles around, and then the knees and then the hips, teaching the muscles to resist pressure, to push against her hand.
Over a long period of time Huffy brought a little two-year old child with useless legs to her feet, and then onto a tricycle and then onto skates, and then into a swimming pool. This little girl became a very successful competitive swimmer (and also reluctantly relinquished her imagined stardom as a ballet dancer.) The powerful legs still work remarkably well, to this day-- better than most seventy-ish people's do, I have noticed. Certainly better than most of the survivors of Infantile Paralysis who spent their lives in wheel chairs and braces with withered limbs.
This was Huffy's work.
The last I saw Huffy was at my mother's memorial service. She was in her 90's. Her remark about my Mom was "She was a very courageous woman." I wonder what tapes played through Huffy's memory when she said that?
I thought, "It takes one to know one."
HOUGH, Mary I., 101; Media, Pa; Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, 1927; died January 6, 1998.
Source: JAMA Vol. 281 No. 21, June 2, 1999
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