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When Dorothy Horstmann applied to Yale for a fellowship during World War II, her interview did not go well. Francis Gilman Blake, the acting dean, told her “how the last woman he had on the house staff did something awful,” she recalled. “If a woman on the house staff did not live up to expectations it was remembered for the next 50 years,” she told him, “but if the person was a man, it was forgotten by the next year.” Blake left the hiring decision up to John Paul, a young pathologist who had co-founded the Yale Poliomyelitis Study Unit in 1931. Horstmann was hired and she paved the way for a polio vaccine with her discovery that the virus enters the nervous system through the bloodstream. Horstmann, shown here in her lab in the 1970s, was the first woman to be appointed a full professor at the medical school.