On This Day in History: March 19

Typhoid Mary

AUDIO VERSION HERE

When one of my kids would come home from school all sneezy and snot-nosed from licking playground equipment, then that sickness would rip through the entire family, I’d refer to them as “Typhoid [kid’s name].” The real Typhoid Mary, however, was the epitome of “Sucks to be you,” because she was forced to spend her life in quarantine even though she felt fine.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 19, 1907--

Born in Ireland in 1869, Mary Mallon is believed to have come into the world with typhoid because her mother was infected with it during pregnancy. When she was 15, she immigrated to New York and worked as a maid, but by the time she was in her 30s she was working as a cook for a series of wealthy families.

When an outbreak of the bacterial infection typhoid fever hit Long Island in 1906, the source became a mystery in need of solving. An investigator, George Soper, focused on the family’s new cook, Mary. What he learned was that for the past seven years she’d worked for eight different families, and seven of them had contracted the disease. Mary was the first person in the U.S. shown to be an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid.

Mary was arrested for being a threat to public health on March 19, 1907 and sentenced to quarantine on a small island on the East River. Soper wrote an article about her in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the news of her story spread, leading to the “Typhoid Mary” nickname, which she despised.

After almost three years of incarceration, she was released on the condition that she no longer work as a cook, as well as take special hygienic care to prevent spreading the disease, unlike those anti-mask assholes who just had to go to church during a worldwide fucking pandemic.

Mary worked as a laundress, but the pay was shit compared to cooking, so she violated the conditions of her release and began cooking again under a fake name for a variety of restaurants and hotels and a hospital. And guess what? More people got sick and more people died. In all, Mary Mallon was shown to have infected 53 people. Three of them died, but some believe Mary’s death toll to be far higher.

Soper was called in again in 1915 to trace the outbreak and was all Jesus fuck Mary not you again. She fled, but the police tracked her down and she was sentenced back to the wee island to quarantine for the rest of her life, another 23 years. They didn’t treat her like total shit though. She got a private cottage, was allowed day trips to Manhattan, and was given work in a laboratory.

The ethics of her incarceration remain a subject of debate.

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