Odd this day
‘Typhoid Mary’ is arrested in New York — not without some difficulty.
Mary Mallon was born in Ireland — possibly with typhoid, because her mother had it while pregnant — and moved to America at the age of 15. In 1900, when she would have been in her early 30s, she began working as a cook, and was employed by eight families in the next seven years, all but one of which contracted typhoid. As soon as they did, she left for another job — which may look suspicious, but given how vigorously she asserted her innocence (we’ll come to that later), she may just have been fearful of contracting a very nasty disease, and legged it.
In August 1906, leaving a dozen documented cases of typhoid and at least one death in her wake, she started cooking for the family of a wealthy banker who lived on Long Island. In fact, most of the families she infected were well off, which was what made her cases stand out. Typhoid was usually associated with unsanitary living conditions — i.e. poor people — and these were not typical victims.
George Soper was brought in to investigate. He had a doctorate in sanitation engineering from Columbia — and some experience.
As an undergraduate student … in the Adirondacks, I had the temerity to move two typhoid patients and their families out of a house which had a long history of communicable disease and, with the consent of the owner, burn it to the ground.
By painstakingly excluding all other possible causes, he arrived at the common denominator: Mary, and finally tracked her down to Park Avenue, where “the only child of the family, a lovely daughter, was dying”. Of typhoid, obviously.
Soper said “I was as diplomatic as possible”, but there was no getting away from the fact “that I wanted specimens of her urine, feces and blood”. It has to be said that one of the pleasures of reading his account is his calmly scientific presentation of not very calm events:
It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. I passed rapidly down the long narrow hall, through the tall iron gate, out through the area and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape.
All Soper’s quotes can be found in ‘The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary’ in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 1939, incidentally:
George didn’t entirely need the samples, having established with epidemiological evidence that Mary was the cause. He writes, though, that her hands “became soiled when she visited the toilet”, and she either didn’t wash them, or didn’t wash them enough.
He went to see her again, and rapidly left again, “followed by a volley of imprecations”. So, Dr Josephine Baker of the New York Health Department, with a number of police officers, had a go. Mary lunged at Baker with a kitchen fork, fled, and was found after a five-hour search. In Dr Baker’s words (reproduced in Judith Walzer Leavitt’s Typhoid Mary, 1996):
She came out fighting and swearing, both of which she could do with appalling efficiency and vigor … I literally sat on her all the way to the hospital; it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.
Mary was placed in isolation in a cottage on North Brother Island in New York’s East River, and released three years later, having signed an affidavit in which she promised to find employment which did not involve touching other people’s food, and to take hygiene more seriously.
So, naturally, she changed her name and started cooking again, and in 1914 caused an outbreak at the Sloane Maternity Hospital — 25 staff infected; two dead. Other staff jokingly nicknamed the cook ‘Typhoid Mary’, and an obstetrician contacted George Soper to ask if he’d recognise Mallon’s handwriting. He would and he did. Mary was sent back to her cottage and remained there until her death from natural causes in 1938.
