key in development of polio vaccine
Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, 89, the first woman appointed as a professor at the School of Medicine and a researcher who made significant contributions to science, education and public health, particularly regarding polio and rubella, died Jan. 11 in New Haven.
Her major scientific achievement was showing that the polio virus reached the brain by way of the blood, a finding that helped make polio vaccines possible. At the time, scientists believed that the polio virus directly attacked the nervous system because efforts to isolate the virus from the blood of paralyzed patients had failed.
Dr. Horstmann's team detected the polio virus in the blood of infected monkeys and chimpanzees before signs of paralysis appeared. They found that by the time paralysis developed, antibodies had eliminated the polio virus from the blood.
Her work contributed to the licensing of an oral polio vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin from live, weakened virus. Later, Horstmann evaluated the oral polio vaccine program in Russia and studied the effectiveness of a rubella vaccine.
"She was a very elegant woman in addition to being a perfectly disciplined scientist," says Dr. James Niederman, a clinical professor of epidemiology and public health who had known Horstmann since 1955.
Nancy Ruddle, professor of epidemiology and public health and immunobiology, said Horstmann was a "remarkable woman ... very inspiring, very dedicated to her work ... a trailblazing person."
Dorothy Horstmann was born in Spokane, Washington, on July 2, 1911. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her medical degree in 1940 from the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Horstmann spent an additional year training at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
In 1942, she came to Yale to perform research under Dr. John Paul before becoming a specialist in internal medicine. The following year, she joined the Yale polio-myelitis unit and helped battle a polio epidemic in New Haven.
At midcareer, Dr. Horstmann became a pediatrician. And, in 1961, she became the first woman to receive an endowed chair at Yale in epidemiology and pediatrics: the John Rodman Paul Professorship.
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Dr. Horstmann is survived by a nephew, Paul Rooney of Ashland, Oregon.
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