When I first started researching for my book, The Woman with the Cure, back in 2015, I was captivated by the race between Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to find the polio vaccine. I wanted to tell the story from a woman’s point of view, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the remarkable story of Dr. Dorothy Horstmann that I found my heroine.
Born in 1911 to poor German immigrants who worked in a bar, Dorothy should have never amounted to anything. But she earned a degree in English Literature then went to medical school at a time when few women did, especially not poor ones. Vanderbilt University Hospital only accepted her as a resident when the chief thought that the D.M. Horstmann on a stellar resume was a man. She had to talk her way into her fellowship at Yale, when her interviewer reported that he’d had a bad experience with the one female he’d hired and he was never employing one again. She asked him if he’d hold one man’s mistakes against every other man who came after him for the next fifty years. He begrudgingly hired her.
Dr. Horstmann served for many years on the Yale Polio Study Unit, the flying epidemiology squad sent to outbreaks across the world. Several decades into her employment there, she became the first women with a full professorship in the medical school—although that elevation only came after she was nominated for a Nobel Prize.
Dr. Horstmann suspected that poliovirus was found in the blood; that was how it traveled from the gut to the nerve cells it destroyed. But her hunch went against the theory then embraced by the great [male] minds in the field, so she got neither encouragement nor the funding to pursue it. Meanwhile, Sabin blamed houseflies as the carriers and a massive program was launched to blanket the US with DDT sprayed from former military trucks and airplanes. (His theory was wrong.) In Sweden, doctors thought the virus was found in fruit that had fallen to the ground and sponsored a national rake-up. Another group of researchers figured it had to be in chickens’ spinal cords. Private citizens had their own ideas, too, which they were happy to share with scientists, like the woman who dreamed that poliovirus lurked in beetles or groundhogs, she wasn’t sure which, and the man who was sure it could be cured with dog manure.
It took ten long years of unencouraged persistence and meticulous research for Dr. Horstmann to confirm her hypothesis about poliovirus traveling through the bloodstream. But when she did, vaccine development surged forward. The end to Polio Summers was in sight. Her impact on beating the disease didn’t stop there. When the results of the oral polio vaccine trial involving 11 million people in the USSR needed to be evaluated—single-handedly, mind you, because this was the height of the Cold War and the USSR would only allow in one Western scientist—who did the WHO turn to? Dorothy. The trial’s approval opened the door to the oral vaccine being used throughout the world. That polio vaccine that you got in a sugar-cube in the early 1960s? Essentially, you got it on Dorothy Horstmann’s say-so.
Living through a pandemic while writing about one certainly deepened my empathy for those earlier survivors of polio. We have photos now of children receiving their Salk polio shots with their happy mothers looking on, and of lines of children and parents patiently waiting for their dose of the Sabin oral vaccine. No wonder children sent their dimes to President Roosevelt when he called for them to support polio research through the March of Dimes.
The Woman with the Cure is an inspiring story about one woman’s determination and resilience in the face of adversity, and how her work helped save millions from suffering from polio. It is a reminder of how far we have come in science and medicine and how much we owe to those who have gone before us. It is also a reminder that with courage and perseverance, we can overcome any challenge that comes our way.
