The Compelling Case of Mary Mallon

Many people will have no idea who Mary Mallon is because she lived long before any of us were born but that does not keep us from knowing a bit about this woman by way of folklore.  

You see Mary Mallon was a truly strong willed and infectious person and all who knew her would testify to that if they were alive today.  

Mary Mallon was born on September 23, 1869, in Cookstown, Ireland; her parents were John and Catherine Igo Mallon, but other than that, little is known of her life.  

According to what she told friends, Mallon emigrated to America in 1883, around the age of 15, living with an aunt and uncle. 

As was common for most Irish immigrant women, Mallon found work as a domestic servant or maid.
Later on she discovered she had a talent for cooking, and thus became a cook for affluent families, which paid better wages than many other domestic service positions.  

Summer Cooking

In the summer of 1906, Charles Henry Warren a New York banker, wanted to take his family on vacation. He arranged to rent a vacation home in Oyster Bay, Long Island from George Thompson and his wife. 

The Warrens hired Mary Mallon to be their cook for the summer.    

Unfortunately, one of the Warrens’ daughters became ill with typhoid fever On August 27. Soon after Mrs. Warren and two maids also became ill. This was followed by another Warren daughter and the gardener. 

In total, six of the 11 people in the house came down with typhoid.    

The common way typhoid is spread is through food or water sources therefore, the owners, George and his wife, feared it would be impossible to rent the property again if they did not discover the source of the outbreak. 

The Thompsons initially hired investigators to search for the cause, but they could not come to any conclusion.  

After that the Thompsons then hired a civil engineer with experience in typhoid fever outbreaks named George Soper. 

Soper believed Mary Mallon, the recently hired cook, could be the cause. At that time Mallon had already left the Warren house about three weeks after the outbreak. 

Soper decided to research her previous employment history to sleuth more information. 

Searching for the Source

Soper successfully traced Mallon’s employment history back to 1900.

To his surprise Soper found that there were typhoid outbreaks occurring after each job Mallon held. 

Soper found that from 1900 to 1907, Mallon worked at seven jobs of which 22 people become ill, including one young girl who died from typhoid fever shortly after Mallon began working for them. 

This was much more than a coincidence thought Soper, however, this could not be verified without stool and blood samples from Mallon which would be the scientific proof that she was the carrier.  

Soper found Mallon working as a cook in the home of Walter Bowen and his family In March of 1907. Soper decided to have a talk with Mary at her place of work and request a sample from her. 

He described the encounter from his memoirs below:  

“I had my first talk with Mary in the kitchen of this house. … I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and that I wanted specimens of her urine, feces and blood. 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, … and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape.“

Mallon’s violent reaction did not dissuade Soper and he decided to track Mallon to her home. To assist with the effort Soper brought an assistant (Dr. Bert Raymond Hoobler). When Soper approached Mallon at her home she became enraged, expressed that they were not welcome shouting expletives at them as they made a quick departure.

Soper gave it some consideration and concluded that he would need more persuasion such as from an authority figure. Soper provided his research and hypothesis to Hermann Biggs at the New York City Health Department.  After review Biggs agreed with the hypothesis and sent it to Dr. S. Josephine Baker whom he suggested to have a talk with Mallon.

Mallon was consequently very suspicious of these health officials and refused to listen to Baker, who left and engaged five police officers and an ambulance to return to Mallon’s home. This time Mallon was prepared and according to Baker’s report this was the scene:  

“Mary was on the lookout and peered out, a long kitchen fork in her hand like a rapier. As she lunged at me with the fork, I stepped back, recoiled on the policeman and so confused matters that, by the time we got through the door, Mary had disappeared. ‘Disappear’ is too matter-of-fact a word; she had completely vanished.”

The police and Baker searched the house eventually finding footprints leading from the house to a chair placed next to a fence which led to the neighbor’s property.  

After five hours searching both properties, they finally found “a tiny scrap of blue calico caught in the door of the area way closet under the high outside stairway leading to the front door.”  

Baker described the emergence of Mallon from the closet as follows:  

“She came out fighting and swearing, both of which she could do with appalling efficiency and vigor. I made another effort to talk to her sensibly and asked her again to let me have the specimens, but it was of no use. By that time she was convinced that the law was wantonly persecuting her, when she had done nothing wrong. She knew she had never had typhoid fever; she was maniacal in her integrity. There was nothing I could do but take her with us. The policemen lifted her into the ambulance, and I literally sat on her all the way to the hospital; it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.”  

Mallon was taken to the Willard Parker Hospital in New York where samples were taken and examined.

As suspected, typhoid bacilli was found in her stool. The health department then transferred Mallon to an isolated cottage (part of the Riverside Hospital) on North Brother Island (in the East River near the Bronx).

Is it Legal for Government to do this?

Mary Mallon was taken by force and against her will and was held without a trial. She had broken no laws so, how could the government lock her up in isolation indefinitely?  

That’s not easy to answer. The health officials were basing their authority on sections 1169 and 1170 of the Greater New York Charter:  

“The board of health shall use all reasonable means for ascertaining the existence and cause of disease or peril to life or health, and for averting the same, throughout the city.” [Section 1169]

“Said board may remove or cause to be removed to [a] proper place to be by it designated, any person sick with any contagious, pestilential or infectious disease; shall have exclusive charge and control of the hospitals for the treatment of such cases.” [Section 1170]

This charter was written before anyone knew of “healthy carriers” – people who seemed healthy but carried a contagious form of a disease that could infect others. Health officials believed healthy carriers to be more dangerous than those sick with the disease because there is no way to visually identify a healthy carrier in order to avoid them.

But for many, locking up a healthy person is just wrong and unethical.

Isolated and Angry

Mary Mallon herself believed she was being unfairly persecuted. She could not understand how she could have spread disease and caused a death when she, herself, seemed perfectly healthy.

“I never had typhoid in my life and have always been healthy. Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only a dog for a companion?”

In 1909, after having been isolated for two years on North Brother Island, Mallon sued the health department.

During Mallon’s confinement, health officials had taken and analyzed stool samples from Mallon approximately once a week. The samples came back intermittently positive for typhoid, but mostly positive (120 of 163 samples tested positive). 

For nearly a year preceding the trial, Mallon also sent samples of her stool to a private lab where all her samples tested negative for typhoid. Feeling healthy and with her own lab results, Mallon believed she was being held unfairly. 

“This contention that I am a perpetual menace in the spread of typhoid germs is not true. My own doctors say I have no typhoid germs. I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast—a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.”

Mallon did not understand a lot about typhoid fever and, unfortunately, no one tried to explain it to her. Not all people have a strong bout of typhoid fever; some people can have such a weak case that they only experience flu-like symptoms. Thus, Mallon could have had typhoid fever but never known it.

Though commonly known at the time that typhoid could be spread by water or food products, people who are infected by the typhoid bacillus could also pass the disease from their infected stool onto food via unwashed hands. For this reason, infected persons who were cooks (like Mallon) or food handlers had the most likelihood of spreading the disease.

The Trial and the Verdict 

The judge ruled in favor of the health officials and Mallon was remanded to the custody of the Board of Health of the City of New York. Mallon went back to the isolated cottage on North Brother Island with little hope of being released.

In February of 1910, a new health commissioner decided that Mallon could go free so long as she agreed never to work as a cook again. Anxious to regain her freedom, Mallon accepted the conditions.

On February 19, 1910, Mary Mallon agreed that she was “…prepared to change her occupation (that of the cook), and will give assurance by affidavit that she will upon her release take such hygienic precautions as will protect those with whom she comes in contact, from infection.” 

She was then released. 

Recapture

Some people believe that Mallon never had any intention of following the health officials’ rules; thus they believe Mallon had malicious intent with her cooking. But not working as a cook pushed Mallon into service in other domestic positions which did not pay as well.

Feeling healthy, Mallon still did not really believe that she could spread typhoid. Though in the beginning, Mallon tried to be a laundress as well as worked at other jobs, for a reason that has not been left in any documents, Mallon eventually went back to working as a cook.

In January of 1915 (nearly five years after Mallon’s release), the Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan suffered a typhoid fever outbreak. Twenty-five people became ill and two of them died. Soon, evidence pointed to a recently hired cook, Mrs. Brown.

Mrs. Brown, however, was actually Mary Mallon, using a pseudonym.

If the public had shown Mary Mallon some sympathy during her first period of confinement because she was an unwitting typhoid carrier, all of the sympathies disappeared after her recapture. This time, Mary knew of her healthy carrier status, even if she didn’t believe it, therefor she willingly and knowingly caused pain and death to her victims. Using a pseudonym convinced even more people that Mallon knew she was guilty.

Isolation and Death

Mallon was again sent to North Brother Island to live in the same isolated cottage that she had inhabited during her last confinement. 

For 23 more years, Mary Mallon remained imprisoned on the island.

The exact life she led on the island is unclear, but it is known that she helped around the tuberculosis hospital, gaining the title “nurse” in 1922 and then “hospital helper” sometime later. In 1925, Mallon began to help in the hospital’s lab.

In December 1932, Mary Mallon suffered a large stroke that left her paralyzed. She was then transferred from her cottage to a bed in the children’s ward of the hospital on the island, where she stayed until her death six years later, on November 11, 1938.

Other Healthy Carriers

Though Mallon was the first carrier found, she was not the only healthy carrier of typhoid during that time. An estimated 3,000 to 4,500 new cases of typhoid fever were reported in New York City alone and it was estimated that about three percent of those who had typhoid fever become carriers, creating 90–135 new carriers a year. 

By the time Mallon died over 400 other healthy carriers had been identified in New York.

Mallon was also not the deadliest. Forty-seven illnesses and three deaths were attributed to Mallon while Tony Labella (another healthy carrier) caused 122 people to become ill and five deaths. Labella was isolated for two weeks and then released.  

Mallon was not the only healthy carrier who broke the health officials’ rules after being told of their contagious status. Alphonse Cotils, a restaurant and bakery owner, was told not to prepare food for other people. When health officials found him back at work, they agreed to let him go free when he promised to conduct his business over the phone.

Legacy

Mary Mallon is now infamously remembered as “Typhoid Mary.” 

Why was she the only healthy carrier isolated for life? These questions are hard to answer. Judith Leavitt, the author of ‘Typhoid Mary’, believes that her personal identity contributed to the extreme treatment she received from health officials.

Leavitt claims that there was prejudice against Mallon not only for being Irish and a woman, but also for being a domestic servant, not having a family, not being considered a “bread earner,” having a temper, and not believing in her carrier status.

During her life, Mary Mallon experienced extreme punishment for something in which she had no control and, for whatever reason, has gone down in history as the evasive and malicious “Typhoid Mary.”

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Just for a thought experiment watch this video & read this information then think about all those Covid-19 Vaccinated people out there who do NOT believe they are “carriers” infecting others.

Isn’t it time to start calling the Covid-19 Vaccinated what they truly are?

Covid Spreaders …

Covidians

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