Mary Mallon, infamously known as Typhoid Mary was a poor cook of Irish origins who was found to have unknowingly given the fever, typhoid to many families she worked for. In the year 1906, she worked in some of the most affluent households in New York City and spread the virus to more than 50 people. A mysterious trail of the disease appeared in New York wherein the common link was found to be Mary Mallon. She was then taken forcibly to the hospital to know if she really was responsible for all the infections.
A case of asymptomatic strangeness
What is strange about the case of Typhoid Mary is that Mary herself never showed any signs of having typhoid. Before her, there was no seeming possibility of an asymptomatic carrier of the virus. Although studies were being done to know the virus better every day, the incident with Mary Mallon came about unexpectedly to help uncover more properties of the bacterial infection.
Typhoid is a kind of bacterial infection caused due to the presence of Salmonella Typhi bacteria. The infection was first discovered in the late 1800s at which time, it has a different name and form. In the years 1906 and 1907, the USA experienced an outbreak of this epidemic because of Mary Mallon as she unwittingly spread the disease to the residents of New York in the places that she worked.
Work, infect, repeat
During her time working as a cook in New York, Mary Mallon changed numerous jobs and left behind her a trail of ailing families. First, she cooked for a family in Mamaroneck, then Long Island and Oyster Bay. In all the places people experienced fever, diarrhoea and vomiting but everyone just fired her holding her hygiene practices in question. She kept working all over the city until her last employer – a banker named Charles Henry Barren had six out of eleven family members sick after Mary started working in their kitchen. The banker then hired a typhoid researcher named George Soper to figure out what exactly went about in the house and how more than 50 per cent of the residents had fallen sick.
Investigation and forceful quarantine
Once he had investigated the series of events a bit and tracked her work history all the way back to 1900, Soper came to the conclusion that Mary was indeed the one responsible for people falling sick with symptoms of typhoid. Wherever Mary worked, there were no traces of her being there which made it very difficult for George Soper to track her down and stop her from spreading the fever even more. With some difficulty, she was discovered working for a family in Park Avenue where Soper appeared one day at random asking Mary for the samples of her blood stool and urine, to which she answered with an instant and vehement “no”. When asked to give her urine or stool samples again later, she refused every single time. How she could pass on the disease without experiencing it herself was beyond her, so she did not cooperate with the officials to run tests at all.
After much effort and a little bit of help from the New York Department of Health along with the police, she was detained and kept in confinement at the isolation ward in Willard Parker Hospital. Here she was found to be positive for Typhoid. Having found that out she was moved to a quarantine facility in North Brother Island without her will where the 37-year old was kept till 1910.
When released, she had sworn to never step in a kitchen professionally as a condition for being let out of the quarantine facility. But just after five years, she was found working again in the kitchens and spreading typhoid due to the lack of her handwashing habits. This time, Mary was taken and held in quarantine for the rest of her life. She spent the rest of her years in quarantine, where she suffered a stroke, was paralysed and died at the age of 69 due to pneumonia.
Barking up the wrong tree
The story of her imprisonment in the year 1907 instantly caught everyone’s attention and spread like a wildfire in the country. Her persona was represented and drawn in the media as the grim reaper himself. To this day when you google typhoid Mary, you’ll see a picture of a woman dropping skulls into a pan as she cooks, all with a nonchalant demeanour.
But her case albeit unique was not the only one, yet she was subjected to a life that no other carrier was. Many reports will tell you that by the time she was caught for the second time, there must have been thousands of asymptomatic carriers of typhoid in the country. The fact that the survivors of typhoid can actually contract the disease long after they’ve recovered, was known by the experts even at the time. She was directly responsible for a total of 3 deaths which is not a huge number in a country that had over 20,000 deaths in just two years. Why then, was Mary Mallon made to be a story that became history and horrified many? This can have multiple reasons that might have to do with how we see immigrants, low wage workers even women.
Mary Mallon was a single woman, an immigrant from Ireland and worked as a house servant in the late 19th century. It is of no surprise that people relating to all these social tags were treated differently than an average white, well-to-do man in the USA. Her story is still up for debate amongst academicians due to the underlying issues that it brings out. To just read the story from the surface is not enough. It is important that one looks into the whys and how far can you go, depriving someone of their consent and freedom for the sake of the perceived greater good.
Even today, Typhoid Mary is seen as the archetype for a person who causes death and destruction. This can also be attributed to the fact that at her time microbial studies were just beginning to become known. That is why neither the media, Mary herself or the masses knew what actually happened.
From feeling like a “peep show for everyone” to being called a “kidnapped woman”, Mary never stopped feeling trapped her whole life. We often take the kind of media we have today for granted and never pause to think that these are the kind of things that can happen in its absence or if it fails to give an unbiased report. Typhoid Mary can be remembered in today’s world as a symbol of why you should wash your hands, how important a role media can play in pandemics and epidemics but also how everything, even disease and its spread can be much more than just microbes and biology.