Picturing polio pioneer Dorothy Horstmann

 For years, she stood in the shadow of great men like Salk and Sabin. Now she’s ready for her close-up.

by Geoffrey Johnson

2 Oct 2026

“For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear.” —Virginia Woolf

In the spring of 1944, even as a world war raged in Europe and Asia, a silent and unseen assailant crept into North Carolina’s Catawba County. Its first reported victim was a 17-month-old blond girl from Hickory named Linda Kiser. After falling ill in early June, the girl had been rushed to the hospital in nearby Charlotte by the county’s public health nurse.

Scenes from the polio hospital that miraculously sprang up overnight in Hickory. Image credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On 7 June, a front-page headline in the Hickory Daily Record announced the dire diagnosis: POSSIBLE POLIO CASE TREATED.

It was in fact polio, and little Linda would not be the last case. In the weeks that followed, the illness spread from Catawba into neighboring counties, and children showing symptoms of polio inundated Charlotte Memorial Hospital and the North Carolina Orthopedic Hospital in Gastonia.

A coalition comprising medical caregivers, skilled craftsmen, community members, and even prison work gangs sprang into action. On 21 June, a children’s summer health camp on Lake Hickory was evacuated, and its sole stone building was augmented by tents and hastily constructed buildings. A U.S. Army hospital donated dozens of cots and mattresses, and over three days, the Catawba County Health Camp was transformed into the Hickory Eergency Infantile Paralysis Hospital, accepting its first patients on 24 June.

Ralph McDonald, state chairman of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later known as the March of Dimes) marveled at what had been accomplished in so short a time. “It is just about a miracle the way the camp is being developed,” he said. “How it has been achieved, I don’t know,” added Stone Crane, an assistant disaster relief director for the American Red Cross. “But the hospital is there to speak for itself, well-staffed and functioning satisfactorily.”

Wanting to see this miracle for itself, Life magazine dispatched its star photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, to Hickory. In late July, 14 of Eisenstaedt’s dramatic black-and-white photos appeared in the large-format weekly magazine under the heading “Infantile Paralysis,” and it’s here we first catch sight of Dr. Dorothy Horstmann.

In the world of polio research, where the field is dominated by the names of two men — Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin — Horstmann’s name is little known outside the discipline’s coterie of cognoscenti. But without Horstmann’s breakthrough discovery about the manner in which the polio virus moves through the body to attack the central nervous system, there might never have been a polio vaccine. Read More by Clicking Here