Mary Mallon

• 1. Introduction

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  Mary Mallon was an Irish-born cook who never showed a single sign of typhoid fever. Even so, she is believed to have infected up to fifty-seven people with the bacteria that cause it. Three of those infections are confirmed to have ended in death.

  She was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella Typhi. That means her body held the bacteria while she herself stayed well, so the danger traveled with her from kitchen to kitchen.

  This documentary asks how a woman who felt healthy came to be pursued by health officials. It asks why one carrier among many lost her freedom for most of her remaining life. And it asks how a nickname attached to her became a phrase that people still use for anyone who spreads disease.

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• 2. A Cook's Trail

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  Mary Mallon was born on the 23rd of September 1869 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in the north of Ireland. Her parents were John Mallon and Catherine Igo. How much schooling she had is not known, though she did attend some.

  In 1883, at about fifteen, she crossed to the United States aboard the steamship Ethiopia. In New York City she first lived with an aunt. Soon she found work as a private cook for a series of wealthy families, earning good wages and a favorable reputation.

  Some of her posts were live-in. For others she stayed with friends, including a Mr. A. Briehof. Her biographer, Judith Walzer Leavitt, saw in this pattern the narrow range of jobs open to unmarried women of her ethnic background and class.

  Between 1897 and 1906, members of four of the households she cooked for contracted typhoid. For three years from 1897 she worked for a family in Mamaroneck, New York, and nobody there fell ill. In September 1900 a guest did, ten days after arriving. He had earlier been in East Hampton, where an outbreak had occurred.

  From 1901 to 1902 she spent eleven months with another New York family. Their laundress checked into a hospital with typhoid on the 9th of December 1901.

  In 1902 the lawyer and socialite J. Coleman Drayton hired her while his family spent the summer in Dark Harbor, Maine. Four family members and five staff members became ill. Only Drayton and Mallon were spared. She stayed to nurse the sick, and Drayton paid her a bonus of $50. Two doctors, Edwin Daniels of Boston and Louis Starr of Philadelphia, blamed the footman, the servant who served meals.

  In mid-1904 she cooked for Henry Gilsey and his family at their summer house in Sands Point. Four staff members, who lived apart from the family, caught typhoid. None of the family did. Robert Wilson, superintendent of hospitals for communicable diseases for the New York City Department of Health, suspected the laundress but could not prove it.

  In 1906 the New York banker Charles Henry Warren hired her. His family spent that summer at Oyster Bay on the North Shore of Long Island, in a house rented from George Thompson. On the 27th of August one of Warren's daughters was struck down with typhoid, and five other family members out of eleven also fell ill. All recovered. Thompson feared he would never be able to rent the house out again.

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• 3. The Epidemic Fighter

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  George Soper was a sanitation engineer and epidemiologist for the New York Department of Health, and Thompson hired him to find the cause at Oyster Bay. Microbiologist Richard Adler and epidemiologist Elise Mara note that Soper was known as an "epidemic fighter".

  Soper first ruled out the usual causes of typhoid. These were contact with infected people and contamination of the food, water, and milk supplies. Questioning the household, he learned that Mallon had joined the staff on the 4th of August and left three weeks after the outbreak.

  He doubted at first that a cook could be the source, since cooking kills bacteria. His doubt eased when he heard she had prepared an ice cream dessert with fresh peaches. According to Leavitt, this dish "would have been an excellent medium for typhoid infection".

  Mrs. Warren told Soper that Mallon had come from Mrs. Stricker's employment agency. The agency described her as "an Irish woman about 40 years of age, tall, heavy, single. She seemed to be in perfect health."

  The agency gave Soper her work history, and he mapped it against known typhoid cases. Seven of the eight families she had worked for had suffered outbreaks. He tied twenty-six cases to her. Leavitt argues that this is a small number, and that many of the people Mallon cooked for may already have been immune.

  Soper had read much of the European literature on asymptomatic carriers. He proposed that Mallon was a healthy carrier and wanted samples from her to test the idea.

  Meanwhile Mallon kept working. In September and October 1906 she cooked for George Kessler's family at their home in Tuxedo Park. Two weeks after she arrived, the laundress contracted typhoid. There had been no cases in Tuxedo Park at the time, and the other staff had long served the family.

  In November or December 1906 she began cooking at Walter Bowen's residence on Park Avenue. On the 23rd of January 1907 a chambermaid contracted typhoid. Bowen's daughter also fell ill and died. She was the first death linked to Mallon, and it gave Soper a reason to seek the cook herself.

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• 4. The Carving Fork

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  In March 1907 Soper found Mallon at the Kessler house and explained that he needed samples of her blood, urine, and feces. He later described what happened next.

  "It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. I passed rapidly down the long narrow hall, through the tall iron gate, out through the area and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape."

  Soper returned with his colleague B. Raymond Hoobler to the rooming house on Third Avenue that she shared with Briehof. He recalled that "Mary was angry at the unexpected sight of me". As the two men left, they were "followed by a volley of imprecations from the head of the stairs". Her refusal rested on a firm belief that she was not infected.

  Soper then reported to his superiors and recommended her arrest so that her stool could be tested. The department sent Sara Josephine Baker, a female doctor and health department inspector, to persuade her. That also failed.

  Baker came back on the 20th of March 1907 with police. Mallon answered the door holding a long serving fork and lunged at the visitors. Then she ran out the back and hid in a garden shed. Baker wrote, "Mary was on the lookout and peered out, a long kitchen fork in her hand like a rapier."

  Officers found her in the shed, and she resisted again. Baker reported, "She came out fighting and swearing, both of which she could do with appalling efficiency and vigor." Mallon was placed in an ambulance for the trip to Willard Parker Hospital. To stop her struggles, Baker had to sit on her chest for the whole journey.

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• 5. Court and Release

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  At Willard Parker Hospital, Mallon's stools were tested three times a week, and they showed the presence of Bacillus typhosus. The condition resisted different drug treatments. She also refused to consider having her gallbladder removed, the primary organ where the typhoid bacillus is held in the body.

  That was enough proof for the Health Department. It moved her to Riverside Hospital, an institution for quarantinable diseases on North Brother Island in New York City's East River. She lived there for three years in a small cottage beside the hospital. She could walk around the island and use many of its facilities, including the chapel.

  In 1909 Mallon challenged her confinement in court. Leavitt believes that William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the New York American, paid for her lawyer, George Francis O'Neill. He filed a writ of habeas corpus to try to free her.

  The paper ran a story about her on the 20th of June 1909. The nickname Typhoid Mary had been given to her by health department officials, and journalists now spread it. On the 30th of June the paper called for "pity for the lone woman who has not a relative or friend to whom she can turn".

  Her case was heard in late June and early July 1909 before judges Mitchell Erlanger and Leonard Giegerich. In mid-July they ruled that she must stay confined. They relied on Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the power of states to enforce compulsory vaccination to protect the public.

  In 1910 Ernst J. Lederle became the new commissioner for health for New York. On the 19th of February he released her from North Brother Island. She signed an agreement to report to the health department every quarter and not to return to cooking as a career.

  Lederle explained his reasoning: "She has been released because she has been shut up long enough to learn the precautions that she ought to take." He found her a job in a laundry once she left.

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• 6. Return to the Island

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  Leavitt writes that Mallon stayed away from cooking until at least December 1911, and possibly until September 1912. By November 1914 the Department of Health had lost track of where she was.

  The department thought she had cooked at an inn in New Jersey in 1913 and 1914. Soper claimed she had cooked for families in the same years, including one in Newfoundland, New Jersey, and that six more typhoid cases followed. He offered no evidence. Historian Alan M. Kraut writes that she was definitely linked to an outbreak in New Jersey, and possibly to more cases in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

  The earliest confirmed job as a cook after her release came in October 1914, according to Leavitt. Sloane Maternity Hospital hired her under the name Mary Brown. In January and February 1915 the hospital became the center of a typhoid outbreak with twenty-five cases and two deaths.

  Soper was called in and compared the handwriting of Mary Brown with that of Mallon. The match showed who was responsible. She had already left the hospital's employment, and she was not apprehended until March 1915. She was sent back to North Brother Island.

  On her return she baked cakes and made jewelry from beads, selling both to patients and staff. In 1918 she got a job in the hospital. By 1925 she was helping in the hospital laboratory.

  That year the physician Alexandra Plavska came to the island for an internship and hired Mallon as her assistant. Mallon cleaned, washed bottles, recorded results, and helped with analysis. According to Plavska's daughter, the two became friends. Once Mallon was allowed day passes, she visited the Plavska home.

  Plavska left in 1927, and Emma Rose Goldberg replaced her in 1929. Goldberg set up a laboratory on an upper story of an unused chapel, and Mallon carried on there. Goldberg described her as a dependable worker who was always on time.

  In later life Mallon had several small strokes. On the 4th of December 1932 she suffered a major one and was moved to a hospital ward, paralyzed and bedridden. Plavska and her daughter were among her visitors.

  Mallon died on the 11th of November 1938. Her funeral was held at St. Luke's Church, and she was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery on the 13th of November.

  Medical historians Filio Marineli and colleagues report that an autopsy found Salmonella typhi bacteria in her gallstones. They also note that other writers deny any autopsy took place, calling it "another urban legend, whispered by the Health Center of Oyster Bay, in order to calm ethical reactions".

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• 7. Unequal Treatment

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  Frederick Moersch, a German immigrant who worked as a confectioner, was sent to North Brother Island in 1915, the same year Mallon returned. He was allowed to leave in 1944 and was given a job at a Brooklyn hospital. He lived in Brooklyn, and the state paid his rent.

  Alphonse Cotils, a Belgian immigrant who owned a New York bakery, was banned from working in it because of his typhoid. In 1924 he received a suspended sentence for breaking the ban. The judge said Cotils could not legally be imprisoned "on account of his health".

  Tony Labella was responsible for eighty-seven cases of typhoid and two deaths. After he evaded the Department of Health's restrictions, he caused thirty-five more cases and three more deaths. Officials responded by helping him find work outside the food industry.

  By the time of Mallon's death, more than four hundred asymptomatic carriers had been recorded. Many in the food trades were given jobs and had their rents paid by the state. None was held for as long as she was.

  Mallon, by contrast, was called a "menace to public health". Her gender, class, and Irish background all counted against her. Soper wrote that she lacked femininity, and the press repeated the idea. He claimed that people who knew her best said "Mary walked more like a man than a woman".

  Leavitt observes that Mallon's standing as a working-class immigrant seems to have shaped how both the public and scientists saw her. Her confinement came during a campaign against tuberculosis that targeted low-wage immigrants. Journalism historian Katherine A. Foss suggests that had Mallon been born twenty years earlier or later, she would not have been imprisoned.

  In 1908 William Park, a bacteriologist with the New York City Department of Health, described her case in a paper in JAMA. He wrote, "The case of this woman brings up many interesting problems." Then he asked, "Has the city a right to deprive her of her liberty for perhaps her whole life?"

  Foss says the case raises legal questions about habeas corpus, civil liberties, and due process. Marineli and colleagues call Mallon "a victim of the health laws, of the press and above all of the cynical physicians". Those physicians, they write, "had plenty of time to test but never had time to talk with the patient".

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• 8. A Name That Stuck

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  Early uses of the nickname, Leavitt notes, wrote "typhoid Mary" with a lowercase t, using the disease as a descriptor. Soon it became "Typhoid Mary", which presented Mallon as a diseased social outcast rather than a person. Wald calls the name a "dehumanizing epithet".

  Early press coverage described her as a bacterial agent rather than a human being. Phrases included "a walking typhoid factory", "a human typhoid germ", and "a living human culture tube".

  According to Foss, The Washington Times applied the name to a milk dealer as early as 1909. By mid-1910 it was commonly used for seemingly healthy people who passed disease to others. Today it can also mean a person or thing that is the source of undesirable opinions or emotions.

  Mallon has appeared in fiction. Steve Beeferman wrote Typhoid Mary, Poz McBeefy, which Foss describes as a story about HIV-positive heroes in the midst of a pandemic. Carolyn Gage wrote a one-woman play about her life, Cookin' with Typhoid Mary, and Geoff Page wrote Typhoid Mary: The Musical.

  In May 1988, issue 254 of a Marvel comic introduced a supervillain named Typhoid Mary as an enemy of Daredevil. Foss argues that films and television series using the name as a passing reference reduce Mallon to a malicious spreader of disease.

  The way her story is told has also shifted. From 1938 until the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, Leavitt says, tales about her took a human interest angle and showed how medical science had improved modern life. After AIDS, writers took a more practical view, weighing the risks one person can pose against the rights of that person.

  Communications professor Marouf A. Hasian Jr. observed that "the advent of HIV and the return of tuberculosis outbreaks has heralded a newfound respect for the trials and tribulations of Mary Mallon". When COVID-19 began spreading in 2019, several academics revisited her case in light of social distancing laws.

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