DETERMINATION and STUPIDITY: Suicide

 

I gotta admire the spunky, determined spirit of one manic depressive fifty year old inmate of Japan's Fuchu Prison, who committed suicide on 19 February, 2008, He stabbed himself in the head with the broken end of one of his chopsticks. It didn't work, but you could say this was final proof that you should never play with your food. And I thank God the sad gentleman in question was not restrained in a Swedish prison where he might have had access to a deadly spork.

Another winner of the “determined to do something stupid” award would to be the 46 year old Welsh coal miner Alan Urwin , who over three months in 1994 survived three separate self administered drug overdoses. Not one to be discouraged easily, Alan then decided to electrocute himself by wrapping a bare electric cord around his naked body and climbing into a full bathtub. He then plugged himself into the wall. He blew a fuse and suffered a damn good shock. But he survived.

However, showing a real “never-say-die” spirit, Alan then bent the wire to form a noose, which he suspended from an  overhead beam.  He stood on a chair, slipped his head into the noose and jumped into eternity, or would have except the wire was too thin to support his weight. It snapped under the tension, and Alan landed on his butt.  Still not deterred Alan then broke the gas pipe in his room, laid down next to the open end and breathed deeply for several minutes. But even though the tiny house was now filled with toxic fumes, much to Alan’s dismay he was still alive. He grew impatient, and struck a match. 

The resulting explosion blew the roof off his room, and blew out one of the walls. However Alan suffered nothing worse than flash burns.  Whereupon his career as a dead man was cut short because he was convicted of arson and given two years probation, with the requirement that he undergo psychological counseling. Having finally gotten the message that the universe had been so persistently trying to deliver, Alan went into therapy and a year later was described as “cheerful".  

Suicide can best be described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And death is rarely - very, very, very, very rarely - a solution to anything.  It is even an ineffective way of punishing the survivors, from those who loved you to those strangers who have to clean up after you. But the one thing abundantly clear, is that no such rational explanation has ever deterred a suicide. It is an irrational act, the product of defective thinking, usually committed under the influence of a drug, usually alcohol,  Amazingly it can often be prevented by the simple and prompt suggestion of,  "Please don't do that." Social engagement, such as asking a person standing on the edge of bridge, "What are you doing?" can often be enough to delay the attempt for a few minutes. And such a delay is called life. 

According to the Taiwan Fortean Times, a pair of lovers in Taiwan took the old adage “…till death do you part…” a little too literally.  

In-laws and out-laws from both families opposed the match of soldier Huang pin-jen and his girlfriend, Chang Shu-mei.  Denied the right to marry but determined to prove their undying love for each other, the couple proved instead that attempted suicide can always reduce love to the level of farce.  They jammed their heads into a single large plastic bag and tied it off at their necks. But the the drugs  (or maybe his/her partner’s breath), induced one of them to nausea, and he/she threw up in the bag,  reducing the level of romance substantially and forcing the other to choose life over humiliation.  The partner clawed their way out of the vile bag, inadvertently rescuing their companion at the same time. How disappointing.

The devoted lunatics then tried to drive off a gorge along the Central Cross-Island Highway,  If they survived the crash, they would surely drown in the river far below.  But they missed the river and landed instead in a cushion of trees and bushes which left them unfortunately uninjured.

In desperation they checked into the honeymoon suite at the two-star Samantha Hotel in Taipei. (It has since closed). After a romantic last supper they tied bed sheets together to form a pair of nooses, which they then attached to ceiling rods. But they had misjudged the length and weight of their suicide pact. When they jumped from their chairs, instead of dangling by the neck,  they landed on their feet and broke through the ceiling of the room below.

Luckily for them, the crackerjack staff of the Samantha Hotel failed to promptly notice the wrecked ceiling. So the lovebirds had time to rethink their meathedology. They decided to use the gas powered fireplace to put a coda on their love pact. They fed several coins into the unit, turned the flames up to full and then blew them out. They quickly passed out from the toxic fumes, However, their cost consciousness proved the undoing of their undoing, and the timer on the gas jets ran out before the lovebird's numbers came up. They awoke several hours later with splitting headaches.

Finally, in mounting desperation, the lovebirds jumped hand in hand, out the window of their 12th story hotel room.  What could possibly be more romantic than that? It was a beautiful gesture – except it seemed the fates as well as their in-laws were opposed to this union till death do them part.  They somehow missed the street, and landed instead on the tin roof of a five story restaurant. They thundered through the roof and crushed a large lobster tank, temporarily freeing dozens of doomed crustaceans, at least those that were not crushed instantly (a bunch of damned unlucky lobsters, if you ask me), and finishing their adventures in insanity by landing on a banquet table.

The lovers suffered numerous fractures and contusions and bruising but were finally stabilized in a stable condition at a local hospital. And when their families heard how dedicated Pin-jen and Shu-mei were to killing each other rather than parting,  both families agreed to accept the match. Which would have been the logical and compassionate solution from the beginning. 

The lesson I take from all of this is that no matter how crappy your life may feel, you can always make it worse by trying to kill yourself. Don't be an idiot. Stick around and be miserable, like the rest of us. It's only fair.

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"The Book of Bunny Suicides" (2003) originated in the twisted mind of Andy Riley

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.

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 he 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 attendant,  and five police officers.

By  the way; Mary 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. So 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 (Willard Parker Hospital)…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. 

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 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. Eventually the investigation narrowed to a new cook, named Mrs. Brown. And upon being arrested by the police Mrs. Brown confessed. She was actually Mary Mallon. 

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, and eventually 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.  

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. Although she claimed to have never suffered from typhoid fever, her  autopsy revealed her liver was heavily infected with the Typhoid bacteria, which it had been  periodically releasing her entire adult life.  

An autopsy revealed her liver heavily infected with Typhoid bacteria. 

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

Her nemesis,  George Soper (above), was named 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 New York City's Bureau of Child Hygiene in 1908. 

And when she (above, 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. 

The bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine, available since 1921, can prevent most TB infections, but 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, This can cure an infected patient. Still prevention of infections through public health programs remains the most cost effective method to stop its spread. And nothing developed over the past century would have made life easier for  "Typhoid" Mary Mallon,   

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MARY QUITE CONTRARY - ONE

I doubt that you have ever heard of George Soper, but he is the perfect example of the ways that new technology and new ways of thinking provide an opportunity for an individual to achieve wealth and fame. George was born in 1870 in New York City, just as the population was exploding, and people were noticing that it was not a very healthy place to live. Each year one out of every 36 people in New York City died of disease or accident. In Boston and Philadelphia the rate was one out of every 44. The rate for London and Paris was one out of every 40. The natural question was why the death rate varied at all. No one had ever asked that before.  So George did.

George A. Soper (above) graduated from Columbia University in 1899 with a doctorate in the new field of “civil” engineering. He was described as a man of “average build, high wide forehead and hooded eyes that seem foreboding,” which I suppose came from staring down disaster day after day.

On 8 September, 1900 , when a category 4 Hurricane leveled Galveston Island, Texas and killed one third of the human population, one of the unsung heroes was 30 year old Dr. George Soper. He saved thousands of lives in Galveston by quickly redesigning and installing a new municipal water system and preventing the predicted typhoid epidemic which normally followed natural disasters. 

In 1903 he helped stop a typhoid epidemic in Ithaca that had killed 82 in just two months, and then stopped another typhoid outbreak in Watertown, New York. In 1904 he turned his attention to New York City.

George was hired by the Department of Health, and tasked with answering a basic question; what happens to all that human waste dumped into the Hudson and East Rivers? Conventional wisdom was that it all floated out the bay to the ocean. But by releasing floats into the rivers and tracking their journeys over three years, George came to the stunning realization that because of their width and the tides, neither river actually flows very much out to sea.  

The floats meandered back and forth for weeks before eventually escaping into the bay.  Since the river did not flush itself, it was not a very good toilet. As George explained to the New York Times, “…immense quantities of poisonous sewage floats for days in the river and bays close to public baths, bathing beaches and the oyster beds of Jamaica Bay, from which 1 million bushels are brought to New York markets every year.” (p. 20, NYT March 14, 1911 Sports) George was obviously preparing the public for the expense of building a new sewage system.

George knew there would be resistance.  “No new taxes!” is not a new battle cry. And he knew opponents to the expense would be nit-picking every word he said. And if you listened carefully you could hear Dr. Soper soften his absolutes, even in that same interview with the Times. 

He continued, “Only recently there was an outbreak of typhoid at the Rockaway Peninsula…In one case we traced the oysters to a dealer who was to have put them into fresh water before selling them. We could not assertion whether or not he kept his promise…”  In other words, George knew the sewage was killing people but he did not yet have the individual case histories or the laboratory work that would establish it to a scientific certainty. 

And that was why, when landlord George Thompson asked Dr. Soper to investigate a single outbreak of typhoid in a  house he was renting in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Dr. Soper jumped at the chance.  

Banker Charles Warren and his family had rented the Thompson guest house (above)  for the summer. On Sunday, 27 August, 1911, one of the Warren daughters had suddenly developed a fever of 105 degrees F, a headache, diarrhea, nausea and a heavy cough.  When she also developed a skin rash a local doctor diagnosed her with typhoid fever.  Quickly Mrs. Warren, a second daughter, two maids and the gardener also came down with the fever.  A Board of Health investigator quickly ascribed the source to a contaminated water supply, but the Thompson family drank from the same supply and they were all fine. Mr. Thompson was convinced the cause could not be the water, in part because, if it was, he would have a very hard time renting that house again.

Dr. Soper agreed with Mr. Thompson, and began his own investigation, but this time in New York City where he interviewed the Warren family in their own home,  intensively. George had noted that there were eleven people in the Warren household that summer, but only six had developed typhoid. What was different about those six people? What had they done that the five other occupants had not done? Eventually, after hours of interviews, the family remembered a special treat they had eaten for desert one night; peaches. George realized now he had to locate the cook who had washed those peaches, who everyone was certain, had not developed typhoid fever.

All the family knew of her was that she was Irish, was middle aged, had dark hair, and was named Mary. She had been provided by an employment agency, which had checked her letters of reference but had not kept them. So George found himself tracking “Mary” the cook through other servants used by the same agency. 

He ran into suspicion and secrecy, and had to travel to Boston and back, but eventually he discovered that her name was Mary Mallon, and she had cooked for seven families over the last seven years. In those families 22 people had developed typhoid fever, and one young girl had died. Soper was now certain he had found a carrier for typhoid, something that been only a theory up to now; Which explains why Dr. Soper was so excited when he found Mary, working as a cook for Mr. Walter Bowen and his family, on Park Avenue.

Soper appeared before Mary (above) in the Bowen kitchen and, “I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and I wanted specimens of her urine, feces and blood.”  Sounds very diplomatic to me.  Mary would later claim that Soper also told her he was going to write a book about her and offered to split the royalties with her. But whether such a deal was offered or not, Mary’s reaction was swift and definitive. According to Soper, “She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction.” Soper says he ran from the house, feeling lucky to have escaped.

And to be honest, I do not blame Mary Malone. A strange man has approached her and asked for a sample of her bodily fluids. And worse, he had then accused her of being a typhoid Mary; in fact, the original Typhoid Mary.

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