The Virgin Cure KINDLE MOBI by Ami McKay H.A.

Canadian author Ami McKay's 2011 novel The Virgin Cure has a real-life inspiration — McKay's great-great grandmother was a woman doctor who ministered to the poor in the 1870s in New York's Lower East Side. Dr. Sarah Fonda Mackintosh was in the first graduating class of the medical school founded by Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first women ever to practise medicine in the U.S. Her graduating thesis was on syphilis in young girls, and she practiced at an infirmary that treated immigrants and destitute people of all backgrounds, with one of the most common ailments being syphilis.
The protagonist of The Virgin Cure is "Moth", whose mother illegally and unknown to Moth, outright sells her 12 year old daughter as housemaid to an abusive woman and her lecherous husband. Thinking she is only hired help and working to support her mother, Moth finds herself a virtual prisoner and slave. She endures it in the belief that she is helping her mother, finally escaping only to find her mother nowhere to be found; from neighbours she discovers her mother took the money received for Moth and disappeared. Homeless in New York during the winter, she manages to survive long enough to be "enrolled" into a home for young girls, a training ground for prostitutes, whose "innocence" is sold to the highest bidder. The title, "Virgin Cure" comes from a common 19th century belief that men afflicted with syphilis could be cured by having sex with a virgin; a belief still held as a cure for HIV/AIDS in parts of Africa today.
Moth's life is difficult to say the least, and while she eventually escapes the life of a child prostitute, it is a hard road for her to find independence and financial stability in a society where the sex of a girl of her class is generally referred to as her "commodity".
The Virgin Cure is at times heartbreakingly real due to McKay's incredibly detailed historical research, but her character "Moth" is a spunky survivor, and the story of how she gains control of her life--while perhaps not at all the norm for any girl at that time in Moth's circumstances--McKay's reddering of Moth's tragedy to triumph tale (though it is a triumph tempered with moral compromise) is engaging and believable.