Typhoid Mary

By: Stephanie Hardyway

Typhoid Mary, Captive to the Public's Health” by Judith Walzer Leavitt is about a woman by the name of Mary Mallon. It is centered on a certain type of disease called “Typhoid Fever,” that broke out during the 1900s. Mallon was a cook who worked for different families and even though she was not the only person to be a carrier of Typhoid Fever she was the first to be in the public eye. She went through many trials and tribulations due to the discovery of her having this disease, and that is why her story is so important. Typhoid Fever is a common illness that can be transmitted through food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain Salmonella (Wikipedia). Mary Mallon was a carrier that showed no symptoms of this disease and so she was unique to the public eye. She was known as a healthy carrier (someone who had the disease, but showed no signs). As a healthy carrier of this disease she seemed normal (uninfected) but in reality she could have been passing it on to others.

Mallon immigrated to New York when she was young and she got a job as a cook in Long Island, New York. Everyone she worked for loved her food, so it was easy for her to get more jobs as a cook in other families. However, even though she was a great cook, there were suspicious patterns of illnesses in the families she worked for. Of course no one ever suspected the illnesses were caused by her because she seemed very healthy and normal. The first incident happened in 1900 with the first family Mallon worked for. Mallon cooked for them for over three years and when a young man came to visit the family he was found to be infected with the disease. However, in this case it was said that the young man had gotten infected before he even entered the family’s home. Then in 1907 Mallon had only worked for two weeks in a different family when the laundress got sick, but in this case it was unknown why she was sick, but it was still another person that had gotten sick while she was working. So of course in the end looking back onto her past, these stories only helped the public have a suspicion over Mallon being the transmitter, since so many people mysteriously got sick during her employment in these homes. So then when the daughter of a family Mallon worked for died, things started to look even more suspicious.

An investigator by the name of George Soper was hired to find out if there was a carrier that caused the epidemic to breakout. Soper reviewed the Warren case as well as how the disease can be spread not excluding the fact that there could be a healthy carrier in the bunch. Since the disease can be spread through “food” and water, he knew to look further into Mallon and find out if she could be infected as well. Soper wanted to have some tests done by Mallon, but she refused to participate since she didn’t believe that she carried the disease in her symptom. This was understandable since she looked very healthy and all of the people who were eventually diagnosed with the disease, in the homes where she worked, all showed feverish symptoms. So then he went to the court and was able to get the court to have tests done on Mallon, but she still refused to have them done, so they had to force her to take the tests. Finally when the results came back, there was a trace of typhoid found in her system so she was arrested. Mallon was isolated for over two years, and in those years the media went crazy with her story. The media was very malicious towards her making it seem as if she were a killer and that she knew what she was doing. There was even a picture that was drawn about her. The picture was of a buxom woman who had her sleeves rolled up as if she were a man, her face and arms were shaded to look as if she were hairy like a man, and she was cracking eggs that resembled skulls into a frying pan. The picture reported her as a horrible person and it was very effective in getting people to agree that she was a horrible person who should be isolated from the rest of the world. Sometimes the media would have some sort of sympathy for her, but for the most part the reports about her were exaggerated to get a good story.

Later she was released from isolation on the condition that she would never cook for families ever again, so she agreed. However, when all of the jobs that she found didn’t pay as much as what she got from cooking, she broke the terms of her release and started to cook again. So she was arrested and taken into isolation again. Eventually Mallon died while in isolation, but her story went on. In the end Mallon’s story was very important for the world to understand and get a glimpse of one of the many diseases that were breaking out in the 1900s. Of course typhoid fever was not the only disease that broke out, but it helped to start the sanitary laws that were soon implemented around the world. Mallon’s story was one of the many people to have had this disease and not even know it, again she was not the only healthy carrier, but it amazes me that even when people knew this they still treated her so badly. However, in the end even though she died in such a cruel way, she helped pave the way life is today and that is what is important.