In the spring of 1907, a woman named Mary Mallon was working as a cook in a fine New York townhouse when a stranger arrived uninvited at her door. He was George Soper, an epidemiological investigator, and he was carrying a file of evidence he had spent months assembling. He told Mary that she was making people ill through her cooking, that she was carrying typhoid fever and had been spreading it for years through the homes of Manhattan’s wealthy families. He asked for samples of her blood and urine so that he could confirm what he already believed to be true.
Mary refused, and she chased him out of the house. At the time, the idea that a person could carry a disease without suffering from it themselves was almost unknown. Mary Mallon would become the first major case of this phenomenon, and her story would leave her name forever associated with the sickness she carried. Born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in 1869, Mallon had emigrated to New York City at the age of fourteen during the great wave of Irish migration to America.
She found work first as a domestic servant and then as a cook, a trade at which she was skilled enough to build a steady career in the homes of the city’s wealthy. By the turn of the century, she was a regular presence in the kitchens of Manhattan’s upper crust. Sometime around 1900, Mallon contracted typhoid fever. The illness is caused by Salmonella Typhi bacteria, and in turn-of-the-century New York it was a serious public health threat, often spread through contaminated water.
Around ten percent of those who caught it died. But Mallon appears to have been one of the asymptomatic carriers, people who caught the disease but showed little or no signs of it. As a result, she never accepted that she was carrying or spreading a serious illness, and she continued to work as a cook in household after household. The trail of sickness followed her wherever she went.
In 1901, while employed by a Manhattan lawyer, seven of the eight residents of the household became ill with typhoid. In 1904, she began work for another lawyer, and within weeks the laundress and four other servants had come down with the disease. Health inspectors investigated but wrongly concluded the laundress had brought the infection into the home. Mary moved on, unaware or unwilling to accept what was happening around her.
In the autumn of 1906, while she was working at the summer residence of a New York banker on Long Island, six members of the household fell ill with typhoid within a week of each other. That outbreak eventually brought George Soper into the case. He was familiar with the latest medical literature, which hypothesized that such outbreaks could be caused by a silent carrier, someone who spread disease without showing symptoms themselves. Soper began tracking down Mallon’s previous employers and found a pattern.
In at least seven houses where she had worked since 1900, there had been outbreaks of typhoid, resulting in at least twenty-two infections and one death. After she chased Soper from her door, the matter did not rest. He took his findings to city health officials and then to the police. Mary refused offers of voluntary testing, and in March 1907 she was apprehended and taken to a hospital, where laboratory tests confirmed what Soper had suspected.
She was a silent carrier of the typhoid bacterium and had been transmitting it through unwashed hands during food preparation for years. She was removed to a quarantine facility on an island in the East River, where she was treated with remedies now known to be completely ineffective. She lived alone in a one-room cottage on the grounds and would spend more than a year there petitioning for her release. Her case might have remained obscure had it not been for events after her first arrest.
In the summer of 1909, a New York newspaper ran a story about her detention and the possibility that she would be re-arrested. The fact that she had returned to work in the kitchens of wealthy households even after her release fed the public alarm. Soon the newspapers were full of stories about the woman they had begun calling Typhoid Mary. In February 1910, Mallon was released from quarantine for a second time after agreeing to change her occupation and avoid any work connected with food preparation.
But she was forced to take a job at a laundry, work that was more physically demanding and worse paid than her old profession, and by late 1912 she had abandoned her agreement and was once again working as a cook. In March 1915, city authorities discovered she was working in the kitchen of a maternity hospital under a false name. There had recently been an outbreak of typhoid linked to the hospital kitchen, causing at least twenty-five infections and two deaths. When the source was determined, Typhoid Mary was once again at the center of intense public attention.
Her punishment this time was far harsher. She was returned to the quarantine facility and would never be released. She spent the remaining twenty-three years of her life living alone on the property, with contact only with other inmates and some staff. From 1918 she was allowed to work in the laboratory there and could take supervised day trips, as long as she had no interaction with the public.
In 1932, she suffered a stroke and was left bedridden until her death in November 1938, at the age of sixty-nine. Mary Mallon was only one of many thousands who carried typhoid at the time, and only one of the many carriers who resisted the authorities’ restrictions. It is likely that she was treated so harshly because she had spread the disease to some of New York’s richest families, and because anti-Irish sentiment was still widespread in America in the early twentieth century. She never accepted the science behind her condition, and she never accepted responsibility for the illness that had followed her through the kitchens of the rich.
Her refusal led to her isolation, and it was in that isolation, on a small island in the East River, that she died, remembered only as Typhoid Mary.