August 1906
In this luxurious vacation home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, a young girl, Margaret  Warren, is gravely
ill with Typhoid Fever.
She has the best care but without a cure. All anyone can do is try to bring down her fever.
This is the last thing Charles
Warren, Banker to the Vanderbilts,
expected when he rented a house for his
family this exclusive seaside resort.
This is a family that he brought servants with them and came to summer out on the
island and this individual family, no one
else in Oyster Bay, but this individual
family was struck by typhoid fever and
six members of the household came down
with the disease.
Typhoid Fever is extremely contagious.
First the youngest daughter became ill then two maids, the mother, another daughter.
Then finally the gardener. How could a disease of the slums strike this wealthy community?
It wasn't the sort of area that one would
expect to see Typhoid which is often
associated with crowded poor
neighborhoods.
At the turn of the 20th Century, most
crowded neighborhood in the world is New
York City's Lower East Side. It's even
more crowded than Calcutta.
With few connections to city water or sewer, the tenements lack even basic sanitation.
Infectious diseases like Smallpox, Diphtheria, Tuberculosis and Typhoid Fever
kill thousands each year.
Typhoid Fever was a fairly common visitor in New York
City and in other urban areas especially
in the 19th Century and in the early
part of the 20th Century.
In New York City alone there were about
four thousand new cases of typhoid fever every year.
The symptoms of Typhoid can be severe.
Weeks of fever, headache, diarrhea, delirium.
One out of ten dies of the disease.
When people had Typhoid Fever in the early
20th Century and there were no
antibiotics, doctors had to just treat
the symptoms.
But the cause of the disease is no longer a
mystery. Thirty years earlier
scientist Louie Pasteur electrified the
world by proving that bacteria, microbes
visible to the naked eye, cause disease.
Typhoid Fever comes from Salmonella Typhi, bacteria that grow in the intestinal
tract and are shed in the feces.
In 1892, New York City set up the
country's first bacteriology laboratory
devoted to public health.
The new science the new bacteriology was
tremendously exciting. This focused on what
can we see under the microscope, what can we do once we diagnose people with
specific diseases, what can we do to
prevent this from being spread to other people?
In Oyster Bay, where even President Teddy Roosevelt summers, the threat of a Typhoid epidemic is terrifying.
Everybody started looking
around for an explanation. They started
looking for the usual suspects, you know,
let's find that the dirty, the poor,
may be some bad dairy, the lady on the
beach who sells shellfish -- it's gotta be one of them.
Experts are called in to investigate. They know typhoid fever is caused by
contaminated food or drink. They suspect
the plumbing in the house and put dye in the toilet
to see if it contaminates the drinking water.
It doesn't.
They check the local shellfish to see if the bay is polluted with sewage.
It isn't.
They examine the milk supply in case it is contaminated.
It too, is free of bacteria.
The source of the outbreak remains a
mystery.
Though the Oyster Bay victims recover, a cloud of disease hangs on to the house.
The family who owned the house, The Thompson's,
were afraid if they didn't get to the bottom of this,
they would never be able to rent their house again.
That winter The Thompson's learn about a
freelance civil engineer known for its
ability to track down the source of disease.
Thirty seven-year-old George Soper is
confident and ambitious.
In 1907 I had a great deal of experience
with Typhoid Fever. As an undergraduate I had
the temerity to move typhoid patients
and their families out of a house that
had a long history of communicable
diseases and with the consent of the
owner, burn it to the ground.
George Soper was somebody who got his teeth into a problem and would not let go.
He wanted to find the cause he was not
going to give up until he did and so he was obsessed.
Soper begins by reviewing the results of the earlier investigation.
It's detective work and Soper was excited about the ability now
to trace diseases, to trace the disease
outbreaks and to really understand how
diseases like typhoid were being spread.
The first investigators have done their
work thoroughly but tried as I would,
I could not find anything wrong. So, I turn my attention to the people in the house
This gave the key to the situation.
Finally he asked the question of one of
them members of the household who else
was in this house that I didn't talk to
and one of them remember that they'd had
a cook that summer that was no longer with the family.
Knowing that it takes up to three weeks after exposure to become sick with the disease
Soper uncovers his first clue.
I found that the family had changed cooks on August 4th about three
weeks before the epidemic broke up. All
the patients were infected after the new
cook's arrival.
The way a cook who was infected with
the Typhoid bacillis would transmit the disease
is that it would probably be
some typhoid bacillus that they got onto their
hands while they were in the bathroom.
To prevent the transmission of Typhoid a
lot of brushing and scrubbing was
involved meaning under the nails, no
jewelry. I mean we're talking a
vigorous and abrasive scrubbing.
Soper also knows the bacteria can survive on uncooked food only.
On a certain Sunday there was a dessert which
she prepared and of which
everybody present was extremely fond of.
This was ice cream and fresh peaches cut-up in it.
I suppose no better way could be found for
a cook to clean her hands of microbes
and infect a family.
The cook is a 37 year old Irish
immigrant who works for wealthy families
in New York.
Before God and in the eyes of decent men
my name is Mary Mallon and I have a
decent and upright life.
Soper sets out to find the cook.
The employment agency that placed her with the Warren's does not
know where she is but directs them to some of her previous employers.
What he discovers astounds him.
In ten years, she's known to work for eight families and
in six of these, Typhoid had occurred.
How is this possible?
Has Mary been spreading Typhoid bacteria
for years without ever appearing to be sick?
Soper remembered reading a paper written four years earlier by German scientist Robert Koch.
Koch had found a baker was not ill but who
spread typhoid germs -- a so-called
"healthy carrier" of disease.
Could this be the case with Mary Mallon?
Soper had read that literature and thought he
was on the cutting edge of
medical science and history.
if Soper is right
the cook would be the first American
identified as a healthy carrier of
Typhoid Fever.
It would be a major discovery and make his
career.
I think Soper is very excited by this
this possibility. He sees it as a
scientific puzzle—that he is the
detective, for he's going to sleuth out and win the prize.
To prove his case, Soper needs specimens from the cook. In March, 1907, he learns Mary is
working for a family on Park Avenue. Typhoid too is already in residence.
A chambermaid has
just taken to the hospital and the
family's only child is in critical
condition.
Mary helps nurse the girl.
There you go, my darling. Oh, I know. Just hold on there. Just hold on.
It was at this house that I had my first interview with Mary. I supposed she would be glad
to know the truth. I thought I could count on her cooperation.
Soper's account of their
meeting is almost theatrical.
Miss Mary Mallon?
I'm Mary Mallon.
Miss Mallon, my name is Dr. George Soper.
I have been looking for you for quite awhile. I was hired to track you down.
To track me down?
Yes, Miss Mallon. It appears that you are the unwitting cause of the typhoid fever
outbreak at Oyster Bay last summer.
Are you mad?!
It is imperative that I get specimens from you of urine, feces and
blood to confirm my suspicions.
I've never been sick a day in my life. I've never had typhoid.
Miss Mallon, you contain, within your
body, typhoid fever germs. When you visit the toilet, these germs get on your
fingers. You then transmit these germs to the food.
Are you suggesting that I don't wash
my hands?
Soper claims that the meeting ended badly when Mary reached down and picked up a meat fork
and threatened to, well, stab him with it.
Miss Mallon, please.
Get out of my kitchen.
and don't come back again.
Miss Mallon, try and be reasonable.
Keep going. I don't want to see you back here again! Keep going!
I think that he makes her sound a lot more fearsome than she was simply to explain
the fact that, you know, he, well, she scared the hell out of him.
He unleashed
a violent temper in her, by what he thought was a mild request, reasonable request, a
scientific request. And she sees it as the exact opposite of that.
Soper did not mention the families where I have worked where there was no typhoid. He did not
see fit to mention the family I always lived with in the Bronx when I was
out of work and where I shared a room
with the children without giving them
typhoid.
Mary Mallon had no reason to think that she could have communicated typhoid fever to
anybody.
The concept that if you are sick with a particular disease, you can give it to
somebody else is fairly new.
Why would you believe, all of a sudden, a group of
scientists telling you
that invisible germs that you can't even see, that you've never heard of before,
are causing all these diseases that
you've seen for decades and decades.
Like most people of her time, Mary Mallon does not understand the cause of disease.
In the 19th century, you had this idea about disease, that somehow it came from
filth. And filth was somehow a moral statement about your community. So the
filthier your community, the more subject you were to having what were called "miasmas"
arise.
People thought that illness came from mysterious sewer, sewer gases, miasmas, you know.
We're not far away from evil spirits.
Miasmas and the filth that caused them were thought to be concentrated in the tenements
overflowing with immigrants.
With the population doubling every decade, city services were unable to cope.
It's a city that's being traversed by 150 to 200,000 horses. And, of course, you know, basic
public health fact Number 1 is that each horse gives off about 25 pounds of
manure a day, times 200,000 horses, times 365 days in which the manure may
or may not be picked up. So the city was really filthy.
Uncollected garbage, animal carcasses, back alley privies, clogged sewers and
household waste made conditions unbearable. Cleaning up the city became a
moral crusade. In 1895, a Department of Sanitation was created proclaiming,
"Cleanliness is next to Godliness."
It recruited an army of street cleaners, the White Wings.
There were parades of these guys. These guys would march down Fifth Avenue. It's almost
like a military exercise.
At the same time, public health is shifting its focus from brooms to
bacteriology. George Soper is part of that change.
George Soper is part of that change.
George Soper was on the cutting edge of the new science, but he's coming from an older field, any older field of
sanitation, that he's, in some sense, trying to leave behind.
Having Mary Mallon deemed a typhoid carrier would lead to a new kind of respect, a new credibility in
the science of bacteriology.
I discovered that Mary was spending the evenings at a
rooming house, on Third Avenue below 33rd Street, with a disreputable looking man named
Briehof, who had a room on the top floor, and to whom she was taking food. He kept
his headquarters during the day in a saloon on the corner. I got to be well
acquainted with him. He took me to see the room. I should not care to see
another like it.
Soper describes it as a horrifyingly squalid, fetid,
evil apartment with a, you know, menacing, mangy looking, probably dangerous dog. You know,
Briehof is this degenerate, you know, alcoholic. This is class war—with all its
prejudices—at its purest.
The new generation of public health people had a kind
of condescension to the poor. You have this kind of mix of a belief in bacteriology, a belief that
there are germs there, and embedded in that is a belief that the immigrant
is kind of a source of real infection and danger.
Soper made some arrangement with Briehof, the boyfriend. He somehow turned Briehof. He got Briehof
to tell him when Mary was going to be visiting the apartment next.
Good Evening, Miss Mallon.
What are you doing here?
Miss Mallon, this is my assistant, Dr. Hoobler.
We've come with the hope that you will cooperate and come with us.
I've already told you. I'm doing nothing for you.
Miss Mallon, I believe that you are making people sick. I believe that you are the cause of the typhoid outbreaks in several
families you've worked for. Now, nobody is claiming that you've done this intentionally, but we need to
have these specimens so that we can understand this illness and help you.
I've nursed those people that were sick in those households and I've never had typhoid,
so how could I give it to them?
Miss Mallon, please come with us and we can be certain.
I can't believe that you followed me. You followed me in the
street. You've come to my place of work, and now you've come to my home.
How did you fi -?
His interpersonal skills were not as good as his epidemiological skills.
He tracked her down, and maybe he should have left the interview portion of the case to someone else.
Go. Both of you. Get out of here now. Go. Get out. Go.
She threw him out again, swearing apparently the whole way, and also protesting her innocence,
still thinking, "Why is this man harassing me?"
I have never had typhoid fever in my life and have always been healthy. The contention that I am
a perpetual menace in the spread of typhoid germs is not true.
These Irish immigrant women were tough. I mean, they had lived a life of such deprivation in Ireland.
They came into a society that vilified them, that associated them with every negative
stereotype:
stupid, drunken, dirty, that they were unfit for participation in the American sort of mainstream.
They had to be tough.
Mary Mallon was born in 1869, in County Tyrone, one of the poorest regions of Ireland.
Life in County Tyrone in the years Mary was growing up was really harsh. Every year there
would have been times of famine.
She would have grown up eating primarily potatoes. There were no plates, no forks.
It was a very grim existence.
She came to this country in 1883, alone, as a teenager. She moved in with her aunt
and uncle in New York City. Her aunt and uncle then died, and she always described herself later as "alone in
America.
She probably put in her time on a laundry, seamstress work, cleaning, hauling coal
all the usual lower echelon tasks. So it was quite a climb. She at some point had to
had to learn how to cook well, how to run a kitchen well,
and apparently was good at what she did. She was hired again and again by very good families.
Cook was the highest rung of the pecking order among servants. And she
And she was often not just cook, but she was really the kind of manager of the entire
enterprise and would have been the most
trusted member of the staff.
Mary's employers are unaware that their cook may have brought typhoid fever into
their home.
I felt a good deal of responsibility for the case. Under suitable conditions,
Mary might start a great epidemic.
But Soper alone does not have the authority to force Mary to cooperate.
Typhoid fever, smallpox, influenza, diphtheria, tuberculosis, the man leading
the charge against these scourges is Hermann Biggs, the New York City Health
Commissioner. Biggs is committed to wiping out disease using science and the
tools of public health. In this crusade, workers have the right to march into
tenements to vaccinate people, confine the infected to their houses, and use force
to quarantine those who will not comply on islands in New York Harbor.
This is the power needed to confront Mary Mallon.
I laid the facts concerning Mary's history before Dr. Hermann Biggs, with the suggestion that the woman be taken into
custody and her specimens examined.
Dr. Soper asked to have an inspector sent to get specimens from Mary.
I was the inspector assigned this seemingly simple task.
Trained as a physician, Dr. S. Josephine Baker is one of the Department of
Health's roving inspectors.
You know, of all the things that people did in the story of Mary Mallon, picking a woman seemed like
a really smart and civil
human move.
Baker came from a fairly well off family.
She was very committed to the poor and to
improving the health of the poor. However, she had nothing kind to say about the people that
she worked among. And yet, there she was committing her life to them.
The heat, the smells, the squalor, made Hell's Kitchen something not to be believed.
Its residents were largely Irish, incredibly shiftless, wholly lacking in
any ambition, and dirty to an unbelievable degree. I climbed stair after stair
knocked on door after door, met drunk after drunk, filthy mother after filthy mother, and dying
baby after dying baby.
In the home where Mary Mallon works, the daughter dies of typhoid fever.
Mary must be taken in for testing.
I station one policeman in the front of the house.
I stationed one policeman in the front of the house, another on the nearest side street, had an ambulance waiting around the corner,
and with a third policeman at my elbow, I knocked at the servants' entrance.
Miss Mallon, the Health Department has sent me to take you with us.
I'm going nowhere!
Officer....
Mary sees her, brandishes a fork again supposedly.
Mary goes on the lam, tries to get away, with police searching everywhere.
Has Mary Mallon come through here?
The rest of the servants denied knowing anything about her or where she was.
Even in my distress, I like that loyalty.
We went through every nook and cranny. It was utter defeat. Then one of the
policemen with me caught sight of a tiny scrap of blue calico caught in a door in a back hallway.
Several ash cans were heaped up in front of it.
Mary, I am...
No!
... under instructions to bring you in to take samples from you.
I am going nowhere with you!
Now, Mary, you have typhoid germs in your body.
We will not hurt you.
They pull Mary Mallon out, scratching and screaming and yelling.
No! Let me go! I'm not...
And it takes the five police
officers to get her into the ambulance
And Josephine Baker sits on her in the ambulance the whole way to Willard
Parker Hospital, where they're going to take her.
It was like being in a cage with an angry lion.
Mary is taken to Willard Parker Hospital, an infectious disease facility for the poor.
There is a photograph of Mary Mallon in bed at Willard Parker Hospital, and she is in a room with a lot
of other people. Who knows if they have typhoid fever or something else,
or why she is in bed, since she's not sick.
Being brought to Willard Parker was, in some sense, a
statement about Mary's worth that she would have understood very clearly. She would have said, "Oh, my God,"
you know? "How dare they?" I mean, this is, this was a real, kind of, insult to her.
I have committed no crime, and I am treated like an outcast, a criminal. It is unjust,
outrageous, uncivilized. And it is incredible that in a Christian community
a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.
At New York City's pioneering Bacteriology Laboratory, scientists test
Mary's specimens using the most advanced tools and techniques.
Samples are placed in an incubator to see if bacteria grow.
The results are unambiguous.
The hospital's laboratory speedily proved that Mary was as dangerous as Dr. Soper had suspected. Her
stools were living culture of typhoid
bacilli.
George Soper knew all along, from his work, that she could carry typhoid fever. This was
proof that she did carry typhoid fever.
Soper has made a major breakthrough in the battle against
disease, proving that Mary harbors the bacteria even though she insists she has
never had typhoid fever marry Milind did
have typhoid fever but she had a very
Mary Mallon did have typhoid fever. But she had a very,
very mild case of the disease. And she never knew she had typhoid fever or was
that sick at all. In fact, she probably just thought she had a cold or the flu.
In most cases of typhoid fever, the body is host to a microbial battle where there is a clear
winner. If the bacteria win, the patient dies; if the immune system wins,
the typhoid bacteria die.
But in the case of a healthy carrier, there is no clear winner. The immune
system protects the body from infection, but the bacteria continue to live. Mary, with
no symptoms at all as contagious is as
someone sick with the disease.
The press gets a hold of the story immediately, in 1907, but they don't get very much of it. The health department is clearly trying to
keep a lid on the fact that they are holding, against her will,
a healthy 37-year-old woman.
Still, the story makes front page news. To protect Mary's
identity the Department of Health gives the newspaper a false name. But Mary cannot escape a
visit from George Soper. He is anxious to learn when she was exposed to typhoid
and how often she has passed it on.
She, of course, immediately sees him and sees red. She doesn't
want him there and she's not talking to
him but he's talking to her and he has
learned a little bit presumably from
their first encounters and trying to be
reasonable.
"Mary," I said, "I've come to talk with you and see if, between us, we cannot get you out
out of here. You would not be where you are now if you had not been so obstinate. So
throw off your wrong-headed idea and be reasonable. Answer my questions and I
I will do everything I can to get you out. I will write a book about your case; I
will guarantee that you will get all the profits."
This is fairly forward thinking. I mean, these days, you walk out of a burning building and there's somebody offering you
a book deal right away, and a film deal. You know, maybe he was ahead of his time
here. And he even offered her 100 percent, which is quite reasonable. I...on
the other hand, I can certainly understand why she turned down the deal.
She gets up,
marches into the toilet, slams the door, and doesn't come out until he's gone.
The door slammed. There was no need of my waiting.
What should health officials do?
They can't let Mary return to cooking,
but how can they stop her?
Typically, poor people with infectious diseases are sent to a quarantine island,
and that's what they do with Mary.
Without trial, without representation, without any kind of due process, the law
allowed you to be plucked off the street and deposited on a plague island for as long
as they felt like keeping you there.
Civil liberties have to sometimes be bent for the public good. And I think that, while it
may be perceived as a conflict, most serious people in public health and, I think, in
the country would understand that
depriving an individual of her freedom for, hopefully, a brief period of time, that's a legitimate
step to take.
North Brother Island sits in the East River, a few hundred yards offshore from
the South Bronx. This is the site of the City's largest quarantine facility,
Riverside Hospital. Most of the patients are sick with tuberculosis. They must stay
here until they recover
or die.
North Brother Island was a scary place to go to.
Here are hundreds of patients, very sick with infectious diseases,
and then Mary Mallon, who everybody admits is perfectly healthy, is sent out there.
Mary is confined to a small cottage on the island.
She was being cut off from everyone and everything she was familiar with, so it was
really imprisonment. I don't think she would have seen it as anything other than a form of imprisonment.
When I came here I was so
nervous I was almost prostrate with
grief and trouble. My eyes began to twitch, my left eye became paralyzed, would
not move. It remained in this condition for six months.
Not everyone in public health believes Mary's quarantine is justified. Dr. Milton
Rosenau, Director of the national Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, and
and other prominent scientists object to her incarceration.
They understood her dangers—they accepted that she was a healthy carrier—and yet they said, "All
you have to do is retrain her for another job where she's not cooking, and
then she won't be a danger to anybody."
But the Department of Health is determined
not to let Mary go. Instead, doctors try to cure her with experimental drugs and
procedures.
I took Urotropin for about three months, all told. If I
should have continued it, it would have killed me, for it was very severe.
At first, I would not take it, for I am a little afraid of these people, and I have good right.
She never listened to reason. When they suggested removing her gallbladder,
the probable focus of infection, she was convinced afresh that this was a
a pretext for killing her.
Mary's doctors have a hunch, incorrect as it turns out,
that removing the gallbladder will cure her.
They said they'd have the best surgeon in town to do the cutting. But I said, "No,
no knife will be put on me. I've nothing the matter with my gallbladder."
I think Mary Mallon may have made a very good choice there. If she had had surgery, she probably
would have survived, but the rates of infections and other problems were higher,
and there is a chance she might have died from routine gallbladder surgery.
North Brother Island but wages a steady
battle she writes letter after letter to
Biggs, Soper and Baker pleading for her freedom.
Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement.
A few years of this life and I will be insane.
Two years go by. Mary is even more desperate to regain her freedom.
Will I submit quietly to staying here a prisoner all my life?
No!
As there is a God in Heaven I will get justice, somehow, sometime.
In June, 1909, Mary and a young Irish lawyer, George O'Neill, file suit in the New York
Supreme Court demanding her release.
Her argument was very simple: I've never been sick therefore I can transmit sickness to anybody else
and I've never gotten my day in court. There has been no due
process.
A few days later, publisher William Randolph Hearst tells Mary's story in
his New York American. He may even be financing her legal case to sell
newspapers.
This time her identity is revealed but
Typhoid Mary is the name that sticks. The story includes an article by William Park, head
of the city's bacteriological lab. He writes that new screening procedures
have uncovered at least 50 healthy carriers of typhoid fever; only Mary is in quarantine.
The health department knows, and the reason they haven't isolated the other 49 is because
walking around the city streets, mingling with people in New York, was not at all
dangerous.
Mary Mallon only transmitted typhoid fever when she cooked for people.
July, 1909: Mary Mallon leaves North Brother Island, for the first time in two years, to
lead her case before the New York Supreme Court.
The Department of Health defends its position.
The health department argued very strongly that there was proof in the laboratory
that she was a carrier and therefore dangerous to the public
health, a menace to the public health. And they argued that point alone.
Mary goes into court with some ammunition of her own. Using her boyfriend Briehof as a courier, she
has been sending specimens for months to the Ferguson Laboratory in Manhattan.
The results contradict the Health Department's.
The Health Department report always comes back stating that typhus bacilli have been found. But my
specialist, who is the head of his profession, reports that he has found none.
Occasionally the specimens of a healthy carrier do not contain bacteria,
which may explain Mary's results. In any event, the court rules against her.
Historically, courts have almost always sided with public health departments—
be it typhoid fever, be it tuberculosis, be it other infectious diseases—because the
fear of the spread of infectious diseases is so dramatic.
I absolutely think that the public health authorities were justified in quarantining her.
The public has the right to be protected from people who can destroy their lives
and end up killing them.
We see it today, certainly, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, with
HIV/AIDS, now with SARS. Uh, you see where individuals are being quarantined,
isolated, whose liberty is taken away in the name of protecting the public health.
Well, Mary Mallon gives us an example of that at an extreme level, because she was healthy. She wasn't
even sick.
There are two kinds of justice in America, and all the water in the ocean wouldn't
clear me of this charge in the eyes of the health department. They
want to get credit for protecting the rich, and I am
the victim.
Several leading public health officials are outraged at Mary's
continued incarceration. Charles Chapin in Rhode Island declares it "a
discredit on public health work." In New York, the Department of Health is feeling the pressure.
There were numerous attempts to find a way to let all involved weasel out.
here were a number of approaches to Mary. "Well, don't you want to go stay with
your sister in Connecticut?" And she would say, "But I don't have a sister in Connecticut."
I think the idea there was, you know, "If we can just unload her on another state..."
What I have been told that all I have to do is to leave the state and
live under another name and I can have my freedom, but I will not do this.
I will either be cleared or I would die
where I am now.
In 1910, Mary's fortune changes.
New York City hires a new Health Commissioner, Ernst Lederle.
Lederle strikes me as a sympathetic character. I think he was uncomfortable
with the civil liberties implications, the political implications, the humanitarian
implications, the medical implications. He was uncomfortable with the situation.
Lederle releases Mary.
She must report in regularly and can never again work as a cook.
He even find a job at the bottom of the
domestic ladder.
Laundresses were just about the worst paid members of the female working class. It
It was a horrendous work and paid close to nothing.
Mary's boyfriend, Briehof, dies soon after her release; she is on her own,
barely able to make a living.
The Health Department has her on file and knows where she's living and knows when she
moves in 1910, in 1911, in 1912, in 1913. In 1914, they admit they've lost track of her.
By that time, health officials have a bigger problem on their hands. They have come to realize
that at least 3 percent of people who get typhoid fever become carriers after they recover.
That was an enormous number of people. It would range in the
thousands and thousands in a city like New York. You basically have to go to
everyone who had typhoid fever and check their stools after they got better.
That's impossible, so the Department of Health focuses on those who pose the
greatest risk, food handlers.
The health department passed a resolution, and it became the law
of the land, that anybody who handled food in New York City had to be tested, and had to
be tested regularly.
They were given cards, so they were known to the health
department, and then they were given instructions about what they should and
shouldn't do. And they were supposed to report back periodically to the health
department to get checked on.
They caught very few healthy carriers that way, and
it was a very expensive program, as you can imagine all the food handlers there are in New York City.
Most healthy carriers escape detection unless they cause an outbreak. In March, 1915, typhoid
fever strikes the city's prestigious Sloane Maternity Hospital. Twenty-five doctors,
nurses and staff come down with the disease; two die.
The hospital calls in George Soper.
Dr. Cragin telephoned me asking that I come
at once to Sloane Hospital. When I arrived he told me he had a typhoid epidemic
on his hands. The other servants had jokingly nicknamed the cook "Typhoid Mary."
She called herself Mrs. Brown. She was out at the moment, but would I recognize
her handwriting? He handed me a letter, from which I saw at once that it was indeed Mary Mallon.
I went up there and went into the kitchen. Sure enough, there was Mary, earning her living in the
hospital kitchen, spreading typhoid germs among mothers and babies and doctors and
nurses, like a destroying angel.
My sympathy begins to erode a bit for her. And I think, "What is going through
her mind? How can she go back and start cooking? Is she either so dense that she didn't get it,
or is she so spiteful that she's going to show the Americans, or she's going to show
the employer class that they can't keep her down?"
I don't think she was ever an evil
person she didn't intentionally go out
to people she just was incapable of
understanding that her carrier state was the cause of deaths of people and the illness of people.
Department of Health officers trace Mary to a house in Queens.
She doesn't answer the doorbell so they use a step ladder to get up to the second
floor. There are dogs barking. They bring up meat to give to the dogs and quiet them
down. And they break into the house.
This time, she goes without a struggle. I think
she understood "the jig's up," you know? "This was basically my last shot. I'm not getting out of this."
There is no sympathy now for the woman whose name is synonymous with disease..
he second time that Mary Mallon was quarantined, the arguments for doing so have become
much more compelling. She's sort of failed the test of working with the public health
officials, and she's sent back to the island, this time with more justification.
By the time she hit North Brother the second time, there was no fight
left in her. Everything that she had was gone.
One of the women here, the second from the left, is thought to be Mary Mallon. Adjusting to
life on North Brother Island, Mary even makes friends with some of the doctors
and nurses.
My father was the Medical Director of the Riverside Hospital there, and he knew
Mary Mallon very well. He was one of the few people that Mary got along with. He
was a first-generation Irish person. I think he could identify, maybe more than
Hermann Biggs or George Soper, with what makes an Irish immigrant tick.
Three years after her return, the Department of Health occasionally allows Mary to take
the ferry into New York.
They would let her leave, take day trips to visit friends, and she would always
return on time. I don't think there was anything else for her out there.
While Mary is in quarantine, the Department of Health develops a more flexible approach to
healthy carriers. Food handlers are sometimes retrained or paid to stop
working. Even uncooperative carriers are not punished the way Mary Mallon is.
Mary Mallon got singled out, I think. The Public Health Department, in the face of her
resisting this new authority of science, I think, got vengeful in their
desire to show, to teach her a lesson.
On the island, Mary is tested regularly for
typhoid. She is still a carrier.
Eventually she is given a job as a lab technician at Riverside Hospital. In 1932,
her supervisor poses here with Mary at age 62.
The photograph that we have of Mary Mallon from
from late in her life
shows a woman who's gained weight, who has suffered some minor strokes. You can
see one of her hand is in a fist. She does not look very attractive in that picture.
She doesn't look very happy.
After 26 years on North Brother Island, Mary Mallon died in 1938. She
was 69 years old. She had given 47 people typhoid fever; three of them died. Mary never accepted
she was the cause.
By that time, typhoid fever was on the wane, the result of better sanitation
It would be another 10 years before antibiotics would be used to treat the
disease and cure healthy carriers like Mary.
But new and even more deadly diseases continue to arise, confronting us with
the issues that Mary Mallon first raised a century ago.
Today it might be Ebola virus, HIV, and
most recently SARS. But we always have to, as a society, be very careful about
how we will use public health powers and not trample on the rights of the
individuals who are sick.
Though Mary Mallon is long forgotten, "Typhoid Mary" is not
She remains a potent symbol of our fear of disease and of the dilemma over how far we
should go to protect ourselves.
We now assume that Typhoid Mary is actually a perpetrator of evil,
and I think that's probably a pretty sad legacy for her.
I lived a decent and upright life until I was seized, locked up and rechristened
Typhoid Mary. Before God, and in the eyes of decent men, my name is Mary Mallon.
Quarantine is as important now as it was in Mary Mallon's day. On NOVA's Web site, trace
the history of quarantine from ancient
to modern times including the powers
states have today to isolate you. Find it
on pbs.org
stay tuned for dual biographies of two
very different men the two men who would
lead the nation for the next four years
frontline explorers the choice 2004 next
program on VHS or DVD the book Typhoid
Mary captive to the public's help please
call one eight hundred 2559 44
