How To Acknowledge Uncomfortable Facts When Writing Historical Fiction
Even the noblest moments in our history have disappointing truths. Here, author Lynn Cullen shares how to acknowledge uncomfortable facts when writing historical fiction.
It floats to the surface of months of research like a radioactive log in a pristine pond: an uncomfortable—no, distressing—fact about your subject or character. All novelists writing historical fiction confront them eventually.
One’s first response is to unknow this inconvenient fact. Tie a boulder around it and sink it. Just keep writing like it doesn’t exist. The second is to abandon the project altogether. Wipe your hands clean and run. I went through both responses when two appalling facts cropped up while I was writing The Woman with the Cure.
It seemed impossible for such a noble project to have a dark side. I was writing about real-life heroes, the women and men who battled the most heartbreaking outbreaks of disease since the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Poliomyelitis was a monster. It preyed on the young, from babies to adolescents to young adults, sparing many but paralyzing or killing others. Kids watched their buddies lose the use of their legs, siblings lost siblings, families were torn apart when a parent succumbed. Outbreaks occurred every summer for 39 years—39 years!—gaining momentum over time, until it claimed tens of thousands each year, leaving hundreds of thousands of children and adults disabled in total.
Scientists didn’t know how the polio virus worked in the body, nor how it spread. The only tool parents had to battle it with was isolation. Kids were kept inside, from their friends, from swimming pools and theaters, from life. In 1950 America, only nuclear war was more feared.
Much has been written about Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin vying to be the first with a polio vaccine. I wanted to tell the story about the race for the polio vaccine, but from a woman’s point of view. Although many women made crucial advances in the drive to beat polio—actually a woman, Isabel Morgan, created the first modern polio vaccine, Salk only modified it—I had to root them out. Women in science in midcentury America are truly hidden figures.
I found my narrator in Dorothy Horstmann. Born in 1911 to poor German immigrants, Dr. Horstmann should have never amounted to anything. She helped support her family by giving piano lessons as a teenager—at 16, she had her own listing in the U.S. Census as a music teacher. 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. He went “nearly apoplectic” when Dorothy Millicent Horstmann walked in the door.
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 a woman again. She asked him if he’d hold one man’s mistakes against every other man who came after him for the next 50 years. He begrudgingly hired her.
She taught at Yale for the rest of her life, serving for decades on the Yale Polio Study Unit, the flying epidemiology squad sent to outbreaks across the world. 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.
There’s a 1938 photo of FDR’s secretary being buried at her desk under a landslide of coins that children had mailed to the White House to support polio research. It speaks to the public’s hope that scientists could save them. And scientists were trying. They knew that polio was caused by a virus, but how did it work in the body?
They had no idea. Albert Sabin, the most respected (and loudest) polio expert blamed houseflies as the carriers. At his suggestion, a massive program was launched to blanket the U.S. with DDT sprayed from former military trucks and airplanes. 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. All proved wrong.
Private citizens had their own ideas, too, which they urged on scientists, like the woman who knew that poliovirus lurked in either beetles or groundhogs, and the man who was sure it could be cured with dog manure. Then there was the doctor in Berlin who found success with injecting patients with their own urine, never mind the infection, the joint pain, the mental depression, the sore throat, and fever that resulted.
Meanwhile, Dorothy Horstmann suspected that poliovirus was found in the blood. This 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.
It took 10 long years of persistence and meticulous research for her to confirm her hypothesis about poliovirus traveling through the bloodstream. 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 77 million people in the U.S.S.R. needed to be evaluated—single-handedly, mind you, because this was the height of the Cold War, and the U.S.S.R. 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.
So, what were the radioactive facts that nearly made me throw in the towel? Animals were used in the testing for the vaccine for polio. And when I looked closer, I found that lab-animal handlers were predominantly African American men, one of the few roles in which they were allowed to participate in polio research.
How could I save the story? It seemed wrong to shutter Dorothy Horstmann’s fight to change the world for the better, but these facts sickened me. Then I wondered … what if I leaned into them? What if I highlighted the work of the animal handlers and acknowledged the animals who sacrificed their lives for ours? Wouldn’t it be better to be grateful than to look away?
What if … Dorothy’s colleague handling animals loved them deeply, and used his compassion and knowledge to make their lives more bearable? The only avenue open to him to battle the disease that claimed his daughter is repugnant to him, yet he imbues his difficult role with dignity and honor. And what if Dorothy, at her greatest moment, acknowledges her work could not be done without him and the animals? It would be within Dorothy’s real-life character for her to be compassionate and grateful.
My hope is that by shining the light on things more comfortably kept in darkness, that the sacrifices of all those in the race for polio, not just the key players, will be illuminated, showing the breadth of this astounding moment in history. There’s power in gratitude and in telling the truth. Embrace it.
Lynn Cullen grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is the bestselling author of The Sisters of Summit Avenue, Twain’s End, and Mrs. Poe, which was named an NPR 2013 Great Read and an Indie Next List selection. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, their dog, and two unscrupulous cats.
