Dorothy Millicent Horstmann (July 2, 1911 – January 11, 2001) was an American epidemiologist, virologist, and pediatrician whose research on the spread of poliovirus in the human bloodstream helped set the stage for the development of the polio vaccine.
[1] Horstmann had initially been rejected from the residency program at Vanderbilt as the school's chief of medicine Hugh Morgan only chose men to participate.
At each site, the team analyzed sanitary conditions in the water supply, collected insects that might be possible vectors, and took blood samples from patients with symptoms and those without, all as part of an effort to identify how the poliovirus was transmitted between people.
A former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Horstmann was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
[1] The Woman with the Cure, a historical fiction based on Horstmann's involvement in the search for polio's cause, was written by Lynn Cullen and released by Berkley in 2023.