1 Irish Cook Gets Her Own Island, Infamous Nickname
Irish immigrant Mary Mallon was originally just another cook and caretaker in the New York City area in the early 1900s. Then, families developed a habit of suddenly becoming stricken with typhoid even though Mallon herself appeared to be perfectly healthy.
In 1915 doctors ordered that Mallon be quarantined for life after determining that she had infected more than 30 people, three of them fatally. Although her status as a healthy carrier of the disease earned her the nickname “Typhoid Mary,” she didn’t die of typhoid. Instead, she passed away in 1938 following a stroke after spending over two decades quarantined on North Brother Island in New York’s East River.
2 It Takes a Village to Raise a Quarantine
When the English village of Eyam received a bolt of flea-ridden cloth in 1665, residents knew they had a potential plague problem on their hands. Villagers soon began falling victim to the plague, so the town took the drastic step of quarantining itself to slow the disease’s spread. The quarantine lasted for over a year, during which time over half of the village’s population succumbed to the Black Death.
3 You Can’t Quarantine Racism
In 1900, the Chinese owner of a lumberyard in San Francisco died of the bubonic plague. In a classic case of overreaction, authorities immediately roped off 15 blocks surrounding the area, which included 25,000 people of Chinese descent and their businesses. Shops owned by Caucasian people were not subject to the seclusion, and after three months a court ruled the quarantine was unfair and racist. The court declared health officials used an “evil eye and an unequal hand.”
4 You Guys Are Heroes! See You in a Few Weeks …
The crew of the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon received a booming welcome when they returned home in 1969. Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins then went into quarantine for three weeks to ensure that they hadn’t brought any space bugs back from the lunar surface with them. The astronauts of Apollo 12 and Apollo 14 got the same treatment before scientists determined that the moon was devoid of all life, including germs.
In 2000 the New York Times reported that Queen Elizabeth II had a Big Mouth Billy Bass on her grand piano at Balmoral Castle.