MARY QUITE CONTRARY - Two

I am of two minds about "Typhoid Mary". The officials could not prove in court that Mary Mallon was spreading typhoid fever. The science of biology had not progressed that far. And that  made her arrest and detention unconstitutional. Thank God they locked her up, anyway - at least for awhile.

After Mary chased George Soper out of the Bowen family kitchen, it would appear that he was no longer welcomed in the house by either Mary or her employer, Mr, Bowen - which makes me wonder if George was as “diplomatic” as he claimed to be.  We know that the next time he tried to talk to Mary, George Soper approached her at the rooming house where she lived. This time he even brought along an actual medical doctor, Doctor Raymond Hobbler. But this did not strengthen his argument. Again Mary refused to hand over her urine, blood or feces. 

Defeated yet again, the Health Department decided to dispatch the assistant commissioner of health, who also managed the smallpox vaccination programs and sanitation issues for the city,  Doctor Sara Josephine Baker.  She brought with her an assistant, an ambulance with a driver and an attendant,  and five police officers.

By  the way; Mary Mallon was not a complete fool. She had consulted a chemist – what we would call a pharmacist.  He had examined her and assured Mary she was clear of the disease. Thus she felt it was the health officials who were crazy. 

So when Mary answered the knock on her rooming house door, and was confronted by Dr Baker and several police officers, she panicked. According to Dr. Baker, “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.”

They turned the tiny house upside down, and five hours later found Mary hiding in the supply closet of a neighboring house. Wrote Dr. Baker, “(Mary) came out fighting and swearing, both of which she could do with appalling efficiency and vigor…she was maniacal in her integrity…"

"The policemen lifted her into the ambulance and I literally sat on her all the way to the (Willard Parker Hospital (above))…it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.”

At last the health officials could obtain the precious samples. The blood and urine were negative. But the stool was described as “teeming” with "Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi". 

Under the city code 1169, requiring Health officials to avoid causes of disease, and code 1170 giving them the right to place any ill person in isolation, they now restricted Mary Mallon (above, foreground) to the hospital on North Brother Island, in the middle of the East River. She would remain there for almost three years. During which time she was not ill.  

But throughout that time Mary continued to fight back, writing letters and contacting lawyers. The hospital's tests showed 120 out of 163 of her stool samples tested positive for typhoid. So Mary sent her own samples to a private lab and consulted her own physicians. They reported her as free of typhoid. 

As she wrote to the courts, “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 to me incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.” Clearly this was not an ignorant woman. 

A photo of patients taken from the hospital on North Brother Island is dominated by a glaring Mary Mallon (above, foreground). No wonder she is glaring because it is a staged photo. Except for her first few days there, Mary was not confined to a bed.  And in the photo she is fully dressed.

Because she was not ill, the hospital provided her a small cottage . But she was still not a woman to be ignored.

The civil engineer George Soper (above) fought back. “The state has the power to compel the ignorant, the selfish, the careless and the vicious to so regulate their lives and property so that they shall not be the source of danger to others. The welfare of the many is the supreme law…” It was an arrogant argument,  which in 1909 swayed Justice Mitchell Erlanger. “While the court deeply sympathizes with this unfortunate woman, it must protect the community.” But the public was now aware of Mary’s predicament, and public pressure began to build for her release.

In 1910 a new commissioner of the NYC Board of Health agreed to release Mary if she promised to no longer work as a cook, and checked in every three months with the board. Mary immediately agreed, and on 20 February, 1909 , she stepped off the ferry from Brothers Island and blended back into the city of New York. She reported to the Health Department a few times and then simply disappeared. She was not heard again for five years. 

In January 1915 there was another outbreak of typhoid fever at the Sloan Maternity Hospital (above). Twenty-five nurses and workers fell sick, two of whom died. In fact, that year some 300,000 cases of Typhoid Fever were identified in the entire city. Eventually the investigation narrowed to a new cook, at the Maternity Hospital named Mrs. Brown. And upon being arrested by the police Mrs. Brown confessed. She was actually Mary Mallon.  And the entire 1915 out break could be traced back to her.

Mr. Soper observed, “Here she was, dispensing germs daily with the food…” The press wanted her tried for murder and the public, which had supported her plea for freedom five years before, were now universal in their condemnation. But Mary herself was unrepentant, telling a reporter, “As there is a God in heaven, I will get justice, somehow, sometime.” She still refused to believe she was the source of infection. She told Life magazine, “I am doomed to be a prisoner for life!” 

And so she was. She was returned to her cottage on North Brother Island (above), and eventually was given a job helping out in the laboratory. 

Years later, there is Mary (above, right) wearing glasses now, standing next to bacteriologist Emma Sherman. Seeing her you can understand how the police and Doctor Baker had such trouble taking her into custody that first time.  

Mary must have been lonely. She had few visitors, usually only staff members. She never admitted she might be responsible for any illness or deaths, but for twenty-three years she was identified to all as “Typhoid Mary”.  

Then, in December of 1932 she suffered a massive stroke. Now, she was a patient again, and bed ridden. And in 1938 she died. She claimed to have never suffered from typhoid fever.  

But her  autopsy revealed her liver was heavily infected with the Typhoid bacteria, which it had been  periodically releasing her entire adult life. 

"Typhoid" Mary Mallon is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.

Her nemesis,  George Soper (above), was the director of the American Cancer Society from 1923 to 1928. He died on relative obscurity 17 June, 1948, in at the age of 78. 

He must have known that his subject, Mary Mallon (above, left), would be better remembered than he was; which was odd. She just wanted a normal life, while he hungered for fame.

Doctor Sara Josephine Baker (above) was appointed the director of New York City's Bureau of Child Hygiene in 1908. 

And when she (above, foreground, washing a baby), retired in 1923, New York City had the lowest childhood mortality rate of any major city in the United States. 

During the remainder of her life, Dr. Baker (above) resided in New Jersey with her life partner, novelist Ida Wylie. Between the 50 articles she wrote for profession journals, her 200 magazine articles on children's health and her five books, it is probable Dr. Baker saved hundred's of thousands of children's lives by the time she died in 1945. 

A vaccine, available since 1921, can prevent most Typhoid infections, but it has side effects. Since 1946 the standard treatment has been a course of the antibiotic streptomycin, invented by graduate student, Albert Israel Schatz, and stolen by his advisor at Rutgers, Professor Selman Waksman (above), This can cure an infected patient. Still prevention of infections through public health programs remains the most cost effective method to prevent its spread. And nothing developed over the past century would have made life any easier for  "Typhoid" Mary Mallon,   

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