Once upon a time, there lived a cook in the city of New York. Famous for her extraordinary talent of cooking, she worked for the wealthiest households of the town. Her most popular dessert dish was: ice cream with raw peaches. However, she put the most unusual ingredient in her dessert, a deadly disease virus, typhoid! Leaving behind seven sick families, three dead, the cook became famous as ‘Typhoid Mary’. Her name has become a namesake for disease carriers.
But who was this Typhoid Mary and why did she spend more than a decade spreading the deadly disease?
The story of Typhoid Mary or Mary Mallon
Mary Mallon, infamously known as typhoid Mary, was born in 1869 in a small village near Ireland. She travelled by herself to start her new life in the United States in 1883. Mary was one of the first “healthy carriers” of typhoid fever, an often-fatal communicable illness. Although she harboured the extremely infectious bacteria, Mary never demonstrated any of its symptoms.
Over the last century, Mary’s story has brought up many issues whose impact can still be seen today, especially those regarding civil liberties, public health, and how the government reconciles both. Mary was presumed to have infected 51 people, and three of those illnesses resulted in death. Since she used several fake names, it is totally possible that the number of people who died is possibly higher.
How fatal is typhoid fever
Typhoid fever is carried by the bacteria Salmonella typhi, and is propagated through contaminated food or drinks. Since Salmonella typhi is shed from the body through faeces, an infested person can then easily spread the disease if cooking food without being well disinfected. Early typhoid fever indications are like the primary flu, where disease-ridden individuals experience stomach pains, headaches and often a loss of appetite.
The ignorant murderer
Even after being the most active carries of the deadly bacteria, Mary never demonstrated any of its symptom which includes fever, headaches and diarrhoea. Immune to the disease herself, Mary was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen. Judith Walzer Leavitt wrote in her book “Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health, “She denied ever having been sick with the disease, and it is likely she never knew she had it, suffering only a mild flu-like episode.”
The engineer who traced down Typhoid Mary
When six members of the well-off cashier Charles Warren’s family suffered typhoid fever, New York’s rich and famous, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Summer White House, was taken aback. The family meanwhile was vacationing in Long Island’s Oyster Bay in the summer of 1906.
Typhoid fever was regarded as a disease of the congested slums, associated with poverty and the lack of basic sanitation. Warren’s landlord was concerned that the outbreak would prevent him from leasing out his summer house again. That’s when he employed George Soper, a self-employed sanitary engineer who had examined other sources of typhoid fever outbursts, to regulate the cause.
Even though everything including the house’s plumbing to sanitation to the fish supply came up negative, and the determined Soper found the cause: Mallon, the cook who had worked for the Warrens weeks before the epidemic.
Soper investigated Mallon’s occupation history and found that seven families for whom she had cooked since 1900 had reported cases of typhoid fever. The case had led to the contamination of around twenty-two people and the demise of one girl.
Peach Ice Cream and the secret ingredient
After brainstorming and probing into the matter of deadly outbreak, doctors came up with a theory that Mallon most likely passed along typhoid germs by failing just to wash and scrub her hands before cooking and preparing food.
However, since the high temperatures essential to cook food would have killed the bacteria, Soper wondered just how Mallon could have transported the germs. He found the answer in one of Mallon’s most famous dessert dishes: ice cream with raw peaches cut up and frozen in it. Soper wrote in his report “I suppose no better way could be found for a cook to cleanse her hands of microbes and infect a family.”
Based on Soper’s investigations, the New York City Health Department took Mary into custody in 1907 and she was placed into forced consignment inside a bungalow. Mary denied having the disease and filed a petition. She was armed with test results from a private lab, that were negative and in 1909, she sued the health department which was later declined by the New York Supreme Court. However, in 1910, she was released by the newly appointed health commissioner, on just one condition: if she promised never to work as a cook again.
Crime of breaking promises
In 1915, an outbreak of typhoid fever hit Manhattan’s Maternity Hospital which struck 25 workers and killed two. The epidemic was traced to the hospital’s cook, whom the staff nicknamed “Typhoid Mary”.
The pattern was now very obvious and later it was revealed that it actually was Mallon, who was working there faking her name to be “Mary Brown”. During these five years, the health department had lost track of Mary after her release. Meanwhile, she cooked in hotels, restaurants and institutions. After her capture, she was again confined to North Brother Island.
26 Years of forced isolation
After her second capture, Mary spent the last 23 years of her life as a virtual prisoner in forced isolation, adding to the three years from her first isolation on North Brother Island.If not thousands, then at least hundreds of asymptomatic transporters who were recognized, were walking freely on the sidewalks of New York, Typhoid Mary alone lived in exile. In large parts, the only reason behind why only she was the public opinion that turned firmly against her after her failure to stay out of the kitchen. She was cursed to cook only for herself until her death on November 11, 1938.