Typhoid Mary

Would you like some Typhoid with your omelette? The illustration of “Typhoid” Mary Mallon, throwing skulls like eggs into a frying pan, conveys the sentiments about her that many Americans felt in the early 20th century. She looked matronly and healthy, but was responsible for spreading the deadly disease to about 50 people, resulting in at least three deaths.

It was easy for many people to vilify Mary Mallon. She had changed jobs frequently when Typhoid cases developed around her, resisted getting tested after an investigator charged her with carrying the disease, and, only five years after being forcibly imprisoned/quarantined on North Brother Island in New York for having been an asymptomatic carrier of the deadly infectious disease (with a mortality rate of up to 30% without treatment), Mary had resumed her profession as a cook and proceeded to infect more people.

But it’s important to keep the wider context of Mary Mallon’s situation in mind. In the first part of the 20th century, germ theory wasn’t well understood by the public. Mary’s special dessert of ice cream with sliced raw peaches was laden with the Salmonella Typhi bacteria, because she didn’t wash her hands before preparing the dish. Also new was the idea that someone could be stricken with Typhoid but not show symptoms (up to 6% of folks with Typhoid are asymptomatic).

Mary had two other strikes against her — she was Irish, at a time when white Americans had a lot of prejudice against this ethnic group. Also, she worked for families in a wealthy neighborhood called Oyster Bay — the people she infected were wealthy, and news of their illness made headlines. After promising to forgo her profession as a chef, Mary was only able to get work as a laundress, which paid her far less. When she resumed cooking before she was caught for a second and final time, her poverty had played a large role.

Mary Mallon spent the last 23 years of her life quarantined, dying from complications of a stroke at age 69 in 1938.