A riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a pandemic, from the bestselling author of Mrs. Poe.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lynn Cullen’s The Woman With the Cure, which is out now!
In 1940s and ’50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease that kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. Outbreaks of the virus across the country regularly put American cities in lockdown. Some of the world’s best minds are engaged in the race to find a vaccine. The man who succeeds will be a god.
But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. Applying the same determination that lifted her from a humble background as the daughter of immigrants, to becoming a doctor –often the only woman in the room–she hunts down the monster where it lurks: in the blood.
This discovery of hers, and an error by a competitor, catapults her closest colleague to a lead in the race. When his chance to win comes on a worldwide scale, she is asked to sink or validate his vaccine—and to decide what is forgivable, and how much should be sacrificed, in pursuit of the cure.
CHAPTER 2
Dorothy peered through the window of the gallery. It was going to be a most peculiar autopsy. Not only was it to be performed in a surgical operating theater instead of in the morgue, but Dr. Sabin had brought his own instruments—medical bags full of them. Now masked, gowned, and gloved as if his subject were still alive, he reviewed his paraphernalia. Dozens each of scalpels, saws, scissors, and forceps were arrayed before him like the keys of a pipe organ that he was about to play. At his side, Robbie, the maestro’s assistant, prepared stacks of slides and rows of vials. The body had not yet been brought in.
Down the row from Dorothy, the chief of medicine, Dr. Morgan (still recovering from allowing a woman on his staff), narrowed eyes deep within bony sockets. “This is ridiculous.”
The nine other doctors in attendance agreed.
He leaned forward to speak into the microphone, the light of an overhead bulb reflecting off his rocky slab of brow. “Why the elaborate production, Dr. Sabin?”
Dr. Sabin glared up through the bright lights of the operating theater, visibly irritated at being held up by the arrival of the body. “Since we are experiencing a delay, allow me to provide some background. As you know, our esteemed colleague Simon Flexner tells us that the poliovirus enters the body through the olfactory neuronal pathway and spreads directly from there to the central nervous system.”
“Yes, we know,” said Dr. Morgan. “You can lower your mask so that we can hear you—you can’t infect the body once it comes.”
A few of the doctors chuckled.
Down on the operating floor, Dr. Sabin either didn’t hear or pretended not to. “And since Dr. Flexner says this, what does the scientific community do? Chases ways to stop it from entering the nose. Installing nasal plugs, putting powdered zinc or picric acid up the noses of children—none of this works, or worse. Some of the children permanently lost their sense of smell. Our colleagues seem to have forgotten Hippocrates: ‘First, do no harm.’”
“It’s not forgetting Hippocrates,” a doctor declared, “when you’re trying to save a child!”
Dr. Sabin waited for the gallery to settle down. “Meanwhile, more children perish from polio. Yet no one asks, is it possible that Flexner’s conclusions were based on flawed work?”
“But why should we think that?” Dr. Morgan exclaimed into the microphone. “Simon Flexner is the leading authority on polio.”
Dr. Sabin cocked his head with a little smile. “If something is not working, shouldn’t you ask yourself why?”
Behind the glass, the doctors grumbled. Next to Dorothy, Barry said, “Who does he think he is?”
Dr. Sabin scowled at the operating room door before continuing. “First of all, Flexner’s conclusion that poliovirus enters through the nose was based on research using rhesus monkeys. What if they process poliovirus differently than other kinds of monkeys, or, more importantly, humans? I’m already finding this to be so—what is true for the rhesus is not necessarily true for us. “Second, I realized that the autopsists in his studies were using dirty scalpels, with no care to sterility. The patients were already deceased, I suppose they figured, so what did it matter? But you see, it does matter. If poliovirus on a scalpel contaminated otherwise unaffected tissue samples, the wrong inference could be made.” He surveyed the row of doctors. “Same goes for contamination by an autopsist not wearing a mask.”
“Do you think you might have polio?” Dr. Morgan scoffed. “Have we proven that is impossible? Gentlemen, when it comes
to polio, we have proven essentially nothing.” He paced now, his irritation growing. “Flexner’s work was sloppy, but we didn’t question it, because Flexner was the top man. All those years, wasted, because of an early wrong turn.”
The chief leaned into the microphone. “How do you know that they were wasted?”
“Where is the body?” Dr. Sabin burst out. “Robbie! Go find it!” Robbie trotted off.
Begrudgingly, Dr. Sabin returned his attention to the gallery above him and, scowling, took down his mask. “So far, in all of the sterile retrieval procedures that Dr. Ward and I have conducted, we’ve found that poliovirus in the nasal olfactory bulb is nonexistent. It’s just not there.”
“So you are saying that Simon Flexner was wrong,” said Dr. Morgan.
“In a nutshell—yes.”
“But how does the virus get to the nervous system to cause paralysis? What’s the path?”
“Here’s the interesting thing.” Dr. Sabin paused as if reluctant to share this information. “The poliovirus may not be readily found in the digestive tissue of rhesus monkeys, but it is found in humans.” Dorothy sat back. It didn’t make sense. Polio was a disease of the nervous system, paralyzing its victims, sometimes to the point that they couldn’t breathe, like the poor child who they would be autopsying. Already other scientists were reporting finding the poliovirus in human stools. Was he saying the virus didn’t just pass through the digestive system but grew in it? How’d it get there? How did it paralyze kids from there?
Robbie pushed into the operating room. “There’s been a holdup on the release of the body.”
Dr. Sabin flung up his hands. “That can’t be. I have all the paperwork.”
“The mother is refusing.”
“Does she not know that this is for the benefit of science?” he exclaimed, as if that were everyone’s main motivation in life.
“There are some nurses talking to her, but they can’t bring her around.”
“Do something!” he cried.
His ideas burned through Dorothy like a gulp of whiskey. To pull herself away now was painful, but someone had to help.
She made her way past trousered legs. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” Dr. Morgan stepped aside, frowning, as she adjusted the chrome head of the microphone upward. Her voice twanged across the air: “Dr. Sabin.”
He shaded his eyes. “Dr. Horstmann?”
“I know her. I know the mother. I can try to talk to her.” “Yes,” said Dorothy’s attending physician. “Yes, let Dorothy go.”
Dr. Morgan waved her off. “Go. This is no place for a woman.”
*******
Dorothy sat in the waiting room next to the patient’s mother, a young woman whose delicate arms and wrists seemed to belong to a different species next to Dorothy’s hardy Viking bones.
“Mrs. Brooks, I’m very sorry about your son Richard.”
The woman lifted her face. Tender purple bags had swollen the woman’s eyes into slits. “I remember you. You were the one who came out and told me he was gone.” The words floated between them: You were the one who lost him.
“Is Mr. Brooks here?”
The woman plucked at the wilted flounces at her throat. “There is no Mr. Brooks. He died of a bleeding ulcer last year.”
Dorothy had only meant that she didn’t want the woman to be alone, and now she was making it worse. “Is there anyone who can be with you?”
“My sister Carolyn. But I sent her to find a lawyer.” The woman swung her head back and forth on the thin stalk of her neck, her soft brown ringlets rolling along with it. “I know I signed papers, but I changed my mind. I can’t do this to Richie.” She swallowed audibly. “I’m his mother. Doesn’t that count?”
“Yes. It does. Completely.”
The mother stared at the snapshot in her hands. “I know you want him for research.”
“Yes. To help others.”
Mrs. Brooks’s face crumpled upon itself. “Can’t you just use a monkey?”
“They say that the study of man is best studied in man.” Dorothy sighed. “I fear that is true.”
Mrs. Brooks lowered the photo to her lap. “He had a temperature over 101 and was throwing up. He said he just wanted to go to bed. His legs and arms felt funny—he couldn’t make them work right—but he just wanted to go to bed.” She balled her fists, pinching the photo under her thumbs. “I wanted to take him to the hospital, but he begged me not to. He was scared of the hospital. That’s where his dad died.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I told Richie, okay, get some sleep. We’ll see how you feel in the morning.” She raised her face. “I killed him by waiting.”
“You were doing your best.” “But it wasn’t good enough!”
Nor was Dorothy’s treatment of her son. Between her and this poor mother, the room was so thick with guilt that you could cut it into blocks.
“Do you have a child?” asked Mrs. Brooks. Their eyes met.
“No. I wish I did.” Dorothy had never told a soul that. She rarely admitted it to herself.
Mrs. Brooks touched the serrated edge of the photo. “Whenever there’s been something difficult for me to do, I tell myself, you birthed a baby, Milly. If you survived the agony of giving birth, you can do anything.”
Dorothy had delivered enough babies in her obstetric rotation to nod solemnly.
Mrs. Brooks saw that Dorothy knew what she meant. “But childbirth only lasts for hours. This— This is never going to end. What do I tell myself now? How am I going to keep living?”
Dorothy wouldn’t look away. This woman deserved the truth. “I don’t know. But you will.”
They sat, the woman’s suffering filling the empty waiting room.
Mrs. Brooks looked up from the snapshot. “Letting the doctors have him will help others?”
Dorothy nodded. “Yes.”
“Then take my baby. Somebody’s got to do something about this terrible disease.” The woman lowered her gaze back to the photo.
Dr. Sabin wasn’t the only hero.
Excerpted from THE WOMAN WITH THE CURE by Lynn Cullen, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023
