10
INTO THIN AIR
“It would be well if cooks could be selected only after careful assurance concerning their histories and personal habits.” —George Soper
Mary Mallon waited two weeks to learn her fate.
On July 16, 1909, Justice Mitchell Erlanger announced his decision: “ORDERED that the said writ of Habeas Corpus be . . . dismissed and that the said petitioner, Mary Mallen [sic], . . . hereby is remanded to the custody of the Board of Health of the City of New York.”
They weren’t going to let her go.
Justice Erlanger explained that he understood Mallon’s desire to be freed, but he had to side with the health department: “While the court deeply sympathizes with this unfortunate woman, it must protect the community against a recurrence of spreading the disease.”
He added that if, at a future time, Mallon could prove that she had been cured, she could apply for her freedom again.
The health department had convinced Erlanger that Mallon already infected innocent people and was capable of infecting more. The evidence was her feces, which were still full of typhoid bacteria. Erlanger trusted the health department lab tests rather than those arranged by Mallon at Ferguson Laboratories.
George Ferguson ran a reputable and competent company. The discrepancy between the two sets of lab results could have had several explanations. The specimens that Mallon’s friend Briehof delivered might have been mishandled before reaching Ferguson’s lab. Maybe they were too old to show the bacteria. Possibly she had collected and sent feces and urine samples during the occasional times when her body wasn’t giving off the bacteria.
Mary Mallon had no doubt about which results were correct. She had never given typhoid fever to anyone!
MARRIAGE PROPOSAL
Most New Yorkers approved of Justice Erlanger’s decision, though they felt sorry for Mallon. After all, it wasn’t her fault that a “curious freak of nature . . . has made of her a repository for typhoid germs.” An editorial in the New-York Daily Tribune summed up the opinion of many: “It is unfortunate that, in order to secure the majority in their rights, hardship must sometimes be inflicted on the minority or on an individual.” Mallon deserved to get “the best medical treatment in order that she may be cured of her strange affliction.”
One man didn’t seem to mind that she was “a living culture of typhoid fever bacilli.” The day after the court decision, a twenty-eight-year-old farmer from Michigan named Reuben Gray wrote to Health Commissioner Thomas Darlington. He’d read about Mary Mallon’s case, and he wanted to help her by offering her a home.
His farm was large and away from town, he wrote, so she wouldn’t be a danger to others. Mary sounded like a good cook, the most important quality in a wife, he believed. “One thing she must know before she comes,” Reuben added, “and that is that I have been insane, but it was over three years ago.”
When the residents of the man’s town heard about his offer, they protested that they didn’t want Typhoid Mary anywhere near them. They had no reason to worry. Commissioner Darlington did not grant Reuben his wish. Mary Mallon would stay on North Brother Island.
LASHING OUT
Justice Erlanger’s refusal to release Mallon increased her anger toward the Board of Health and the people who had captured and imprisoned her. Mallon lashed out at them in an interview with the World newspaper. “I’m persecuted!” she cried. “All the water in the ocean wouldn’t clear me from this charge in the eyes of the Health Department.” Mallon insisted that she had “been flung into prison without a fair trial,” and even murderers were entitled to that.
She claimed that on North Brother Island she took care of the doctors’ children and helped to nurse sick patients. Children loved her and always had. Doctors and nurses visited her and ate meals that she cooked. “Does that look as if I carried death with me everywhere I went?” she asked.
Yet just a few weeks before, Mallon had declared that she was ostracized on the Island and treated like a leper. Some World readers found her new claims hard to believe. It didn’t make sense that medically trained people would take the risk of eating food she’d prepared after they regularly found her feces teeming with typhoid bacteria.
Mallon vowed to get justice. “Will I submit quietly to staying here a prisoner all my life? No!” she told the reporter. “I will be either cleared or die where I now am.”
She sent hostile letters to those she blamed for her imprisonment. One recipient was Josephine Baker, who was now director of the health department’s Division of Child Hygiene. Baker was unnerved by Mary Mallon’s letter and later said, “She had threatened to kill me if she could get out.”
Hermann Biggs, who authorized Mallon’s capture, received numerous “violently threatening letters” that distressed his family and friends. Once, during a visit to North Brother Island on health department business, Biggs happened to walk past her cottage. Mallon stood in the doorway with a whip, scowling at him. His friends were worried enough to surround him protectively, until they realized she was using the whip to train her dog.
THOUSANDS OF CARRIERS
Even though Mary Mallon had lost her bid for freedom, her case forced officials throughout the country to consider how they should handle other typhoid carriers. In 1909, at least 400,000 people in the United States suffered from typhoid fever. Thousands who recovered became carriers. It was impossible to identify them all.
Charles Chapin, health superintendent in Providence, Rhode Island, believed the country contained “a very respectable army of unrecognized sources of typhoid infection.” Isolating the few carriers that officials could find, like Mary Mallon, was “practically useless, and therefore unjust.” Instead, he recommended that carriers should not be allowed to serve food.
Milton Rosenau of the Public Health Service agreed. He said that it wasn’t “necessary to imprison the bacillus carrier; it is sufficient to restrict the activities of such an individual.”
Meanwhile, some doctors in the New York City Department of Health doubted they would ever be able to cure Mary Mallon. Nothing they’d tried had worked. Stronger drugs that might kill the bacteria would kill her, too. She repeatedly refused to have her gallbladder removed, and there was no guarantee that the surgery would work, anyway.
A CHANGE OF HEART
In January 1910, a new health commissioner was appointed. Dr. Ernst Lederle accepted the fact that there were likely “other persons quite as dangerous” as Mary Mallon in the city. It didn’t seem fair to single her out. Lederle was willing to give Mallon a chance at freedom. “She has, in my opinion, been hounded long enough for something that is no fault of her own,” he said. “I am going to do all I can to help her.”
In February, the Board of Health offered Mallon a deal. It would release her if she promised not to work as a cook or handle food intended for other people. She also had to report to the health department regularly to update her whereabouts and be tested for typhoid bacteria.
Lederle announced to the New York press that Mary Mallon “has been shut up long enough to learn the precautions that she ought to take. . . . I have little fear that she will be a danger to her neighbors.” The doctors and nurses at North Brother Island had emphasized to her that she must wash her hands after using the toilet so that her fingers didn’t spread her typhoid-laden excrement.
After being a prisoner for nearly three years, Mallon agreed to the conditions. She didn’t believe that she was infected with typhoid bacteria, but she wasn’t going to turn down her freedom.
Mary Mallon quietly slipped back into the city. Lederle and the health department never announced exactly when she left the Island or where she went.
SEEKING REVENGE
She was off the Island, but Mallon’s life wasn’t easy. Cooking had been her profession, and now she was forbidden to do it. The health department found her work as a laundress, though the wages were much less than she had made as a cook. For someone with her talents and experience, such low-skilled work was hard to accept.
The publicity during her court hearing had made her name and face infamous. Who would want to hire “Typhoid Mary” now? The city had ruined her chances of making a decent living, and Mallon wanted officials to pay for the difficulties she was having.
Her attorney, George O’Neill, came to her aid again. In December 1911, he sued the City of New York and the Department of Health on Mallon’s behalf for illegally confining her. He demanded that she be paid $50,000 in damages. Mallon claimed in the legal papers that she was not now and never had been a typhoid-germ carrier.
The lawsuit held responsible several people from the health department: Darlington (the commissioner when she was captured), Lederle (the commissioner who let her go), Park (the head of laboratories), and Dr. Fred Westmoreland (the resident physician of Riverside Hospital). It also named George Soper, whom Mallon blamed for the beginning of her troubles.
O’Neill told the press, “If the Board of Health is going to send every cook to jail who happens to come under their designation of ‘germ carrier,’ it won’t be long before we have no cooks left.”
The lawsuit went nowhere, and a year later, O’Neill advised his client to drop the case. Perhaps he realized the courts would once again support the Board of Health instead of Mallon.
A SHOT IN THE ARM
While the health department kept tabs on Mary Mallon, the national efforts to control typhoid fever continued. Surgeon General Rupert Blue told the U.S. Congress, “There is probably no single disease whose study is of as great importance at the present time.”
Many cities were still using rivers as sewers. Buffalo, New York, dumped its raw sewage into the Niagara River, and it flowed over the famous Niagara Falls. The rate of typhoid fever was alarmingly high in the city of Niagara Falls, New York, which took its drinking water from the river.
New York City fought its own typhoid epidemic during the summer of 1911 when 700 people became ill. Typhoid-infected sewage from a town north of the city polluted the water flowing into one of New York City’s reservoirs. Later that year, the city built a filtration plant to protect the reservoir.
In 1908, Jersey City, New Jersey, became the first American city to treat its water with bacteria-killing chlorine. Others soon followed. Whenever a community introduced chlorinated water, its typhoid rates plummeted.
The U.S. Public Health Service encouraged the nation’s cities and towns to abandon outhouses and to build well-designed sewer systems. It also recommended that all milk be pasteurized to kill typhoid bacteria.
In 1910, the Service advised local officials to investigate outbreaks, trace them back to their source, and test possible carriers. The Service warned that carriers should be banned from handling food consumed by others. It advocated giving local health departments the legal power to “hold in quarantine any typhoid bacillus carrier who will not take . . . necessary precautions.”
Because these restrictions might make it hard for some carriers to earn a living, the Service suggested a “reasonable compensation” to help them. At the time, New York City did not pay Mary Mallon or any other carriers they found.
Researchers in Europe and the United States had been working since 1896 on another way to control typhoid—a vaccine. The U.S. Army was eager to try it.
In 1909, the army tested the vaccine on volunteers, showing that it caused no harm. The vaccine didn’t give total protection to everyone. But those who later were exposed to typhoid and became sick usually had milder cases. In 1911, all soldiers were vaccinated, and the number of cases in the ranks plunged.
Doctors began giving the vaccine to civilians who might be exposed because of an epidemic, travel, or a profession such as nursing.
OUTBREAK!
For a while after her February 1910 release, Mary Mallon upheld her end of the agreement with the Board of Health. She checked in as she was required and submitted feces for lab tests. The bacteria hadn’t gone away, and she was reminded not to cook for others.
Then sometime in 1913 or 1914, Mallon stopped showing up. No one knew where she was or what had happened to her. The mystery worried health officials.
In January 1915, the Department of Health received a report of a typhoid fever outbreak at Sloane Hospital for Women, a maternity hospital. Of the 281 patients and employees, 25 became ill, including doctors, nurses, other workers, and a patient. A nurse and a chambermaid died.
The Department knew that this hospital was meticulous about hygiene, so investigators focused on food as the outbreak’s source. They uncovered an important clue when they learned that one of the sickened doctors had eaten only a single meal at the hospital. Everyone who developed typhoid had eaten that meal, too. Investigators traced the source of the bacteria to a pudding.
Coincidentally, the health department had given typhoid vaccines to some of the doctors and nurses during the previous three years. Almost as many of them became sick as those who hadn’t been vaccinated. The vaccine apparently didn’t protect against a large dose of food-borne bacteria.
THE MISSING COOK
Investigators zeroed in on the kitchen, sampling the staff’s blood. The Widal blood test of the cook who had prepared the pudding was slightly positive. But because the test wasn’t always reliable, they couldn’t be certain that she was the source of the outbreak.
Something else made the health inspectors suspicious. After they took the cook’s blood sample, she suddenly quit her job.
Hospital officials described her as an Irish woman named Mrs. Brown, who had been working there since October 1914. Her co-workers said that when the outbreak started, they had nicknamed her “Typhoid Mary.” It was all in fun. None of them had reason to suspect the cook of causing the epidemic.
The health department made it a priority to find Mrs. Brown. Over the next few weeks, investigators interviewed her acquaintances, trying to learn more about her and where she might be.
What they discovered was disturbing. The woman they sought was none other than forty-five-year-old Mary Mallon.
Someone tipped them off that she might be living in a house in another part of New York City, the Corona section of Queens. The health department put a man on lookout at the house.
On Friday, March 26, 1915, the temperature in New York hovered around the upper 30s. An occasional light rain made it a dreary day to be outside. But the officer watching the Queens house stayed alert, and it paid off.
He spotted a woman walking down the sidewalk toward the house, her face concealed by a veil. She opened the front door and went inside.
The officer immediately called in the sighting and kept an eye on the house to make sure she didn’t leave. Soon several members of the health department, including sanitary inspectors and a doctor, were rushing by car to the scene.
After they all arrived, one of them rang the doorbell. No one answered. Knowing that the woman was still inside, an officer extended a ladder to a second-floor window and climbed up. When he raised the window, a bulldog and a fox terrier greeted him with threatening barks.
He tossed meat to the dogs, and they let the health inspectors crawl inside.
As the men searched for the woman, they heard doors shutting. Someone was definitely in the house. Finally, they came to a closed bathroom door. One of the inspectors pushed it open. A middle-aged woman was huddled in a corner.
It was Mary Mallon. They had her again.