We know the events of Mary Mallon’s initial encounters with health officials mainly because of the writings of George Soper and S. Josephine Baker. As recounted in chapter 2, Mary Mallon rebuffed George Soper when he first called at her place of employment and when he followed her to her home by lunging at him with a fork and screaming epithets to his fleeing back. The day S. Josephine Baker apprehended her, she came out “fighting and swearing,” and would not be talked to “sensibly.” She was “maniacal,” and finally, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, like “an angry lion.”10 These descriptions give us a hint about how these two individuals, the two most responsible for Mallon initially and upon whose accounts most subsequent ones rested, approached Mary Mallon.
Fig. 4.1. George Soper, 1915.
George Soper provided by far the most cited and most comprehensive accounts of Mary Mallon’s story.11 Unfortunately for historians, he left no private papers to help us flesh out his public writings and learn more about his personality and motives.12 Writer Warren Boroson found in Soper’s public persona a man he described as “intelligent, decisive, authoritarian, cold, ambitious, and vain.” Boroson thought Soper showed no interest in Mary Mallon as a human being who had thoughts and feelings of her own.13 (See fig. 4.1.)
Soper’s ambition and vanity are evident in two letters he wrote (around the time of Mallon’s death) defending his reputation against what he believed had been inadequate recognition in the press.14 Soper felt that popular accounts of Mary Mallon’s discovery, while naming him, “rob me of whatever credit belongs to the discovery of the first typhoid carrier to be found in America. . . . Suffice it to say,” he continued, “I did not stumble upon her in the course of routine duties . . . or as a blind disciple of Robert Koch. I was at the time a thoroughly trained and experienced epidemic fighter who had seen service in the laboratory and the field. . . . It was a difficult investigation.”15 In the second letter, Soper, referring to himself in the third person, insisted that the discovery of Mary Mallon “was the outcome of a scientific field investigation by Dr. Soper, who was a highly trained consulting expert.” He claimed that the American Association for the Advancement of Science had recommended him to carry out the investigation, “as the most capable person obtainable to clear up the mystery surrounding an outbreak of typhoid.” He felt his discovery “changed the entire outlook of the medical profession upon the management of infectious diseases,” and he seemed bitter that his role did not garner him more public acclaim.16
Vanity and ambition may partly explain George Soper’s approach to Mary Mallon, but other attributes are even more important in interpreting his behavior and writings. What Warren Boroson called “cold” and “authoritarian” may reflect instead a combination of social and cultural attitudes very common to the early twentieth century. Soper belonged to an educated and privileged class of urbanites, mostly Protestant, whose dedication to the truth-telling ability of science put him among an elite group of progressive civic leaders. Urban social activists among whom Soper counted himself attempted in this period to stem social disorder, which they saw everywhere around them in the rapidly expanding cities, with a series of reform proposals for alleviating the worst of urban ills. In the process, they espoused both democratic and elitist goals.17
Soper believed that science could be used in the public service. Much of his work on urban sanitation, subway ventilation, and sewer systems reflected his belief that urban problems could be conquered through the application of rational and scientific principles.18 Mary Mallon’s situation, however, provided an example of how what he regarded as nonrational forces might interfere when officials tried to apply scientific advances in the public sphere. At the same time as Soper believed in the rightness of his actions, he acknowledged that they did not produce the desired result. Perhaps the impatience he showed with Mary Mallon was rooted in frustration that the scientific task which should have been straightforward was not.
Soper’s ideas about women’s roles were similarly in keeping with his time and with his own encounters with working women. Few middle-class married women worked outside the home. A married woman who worked outside her own home usually did so because she was poor or her husband had become sick or lost his job. If a woman was single, the extra income she could earn outside the home could help support her family. Such jobs as were available to women did not often involve positions of public leadership and usually were based in other people’s homes or “involved tasks that were an extension of housework—in laundries, canneries, textile and clothing factories.”19 Thus, with the exception of a small number of professional women like S. Josephine Baker, Soper would have encountered women working outside their homes mainly in domestic employment, and the women he would have come into contact with likely would have been immigrant working-class women. Most American-born women of his age and class would not have labored outside their homes. It is fairly safe to predict that, as a result of this experience, Soper would have assumed basic class and ethnic differences with women like Mary Mallon. Viewed through the lens of his own gender and class expectations, Mary Mallon would have seemed a social inferior. His own social orientation, as well as his strong commitment to science, help explain the ways Soper tried to solve the public health dilemma Mary Mallon posed.
Soper and Mallon were about the same age, in their late thirties, at the time that they first met in 1907.20 For reasons it may be impossible to know with certainty, they did not get along from the very first minutes of their meeting in the Bowen family’s Park Avenue kitchen in March, 1907. Soper insisted he was “as diplomatic as possible,” but we cannot know the precise words he used to try to explain to Mary Mallon that she was a healthy carrier—a concept not yet known in the lay world and still barely understood in the medical community—and why he wanted her to come downtown for laboratory tests. We can analyze the words Soper used to describe that meeting and two other direct encounters he had with Mary Mallon.21 In all his descriptions we see the gulf that separated George Soper and Mary Mallon.
Soper used some straightforward words to describe Mary Mallon’s appearance: she was an “Irish woman,” about forty years old, “tall,” “heavy,” “single.” She was, he admitted, in “perfect health.”22 When he met her, he wrote, she was “at the height of her physical and mental faculties. She was five feet six inches tall, a blond with clear blue eyes, a healthy color and a somewhat determined mouth and jaw. Mary had a good figure and might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy.”23 He described Mary Mallon ambivalently. She was blond and blue-eyed, but these conventionally attractive features were offset by her “determined mouth and jaw,” a phrase that seems to connote that Soper did not think her pretty or feminine. He similarly negated her healthy athletic appearance in his comment about her weight.
Soper also equivocated in his description of her educational level. “She could write an excellent letter,” he wrote, “so far as composition and spelling were concerned.” He complimented the form but not the content of what she said. “She wrote in a large, clear, bold hand,” Soper observed, and with “remarkable uniformity.” The bold hand seems positive, although it might compare in Soper’s mind to how a man might write and seem to him inappropriate in a woman. The notion “remarkable” seems to indicate Soper’s incredulity that she, an Irish working-class woman, could perform so well.24 He praised her (possibly to showcase his own humanity and compassion); but there were limits to the positive qualities he would attribute to Mary Mallon.25
Fig. 4.2. Mary Mallon in bed in Willard Parker Hospital, 1909.
Soper’s ambivalence completely fell away with his further description: “Nothing was so distinctive about her as her walk, unless it was her mind. The two had a peculiarity in common,” he thought. “Mary walked more like a man than a woman and . . . her mind had a distinctly masculine character, also.”26 These comments leap off the page as we read them today. In Soper’s eyes and, he tells us, in the minds of others who kn
ew her, she was no ordinary woman. Her very appearance, her mind, and the way she walked showed her deviance from acceptable female norms.
Fig. 4.3. Close-up of Mary Mallon in bed in Willard Parker Hospital, 1909.
Soper never claimed that Mallon’s walk or the character of her mind influenced the bacilli lodged in her gallbladder. Yet he could not refrain from calling attention to her ways of walking and thinking, medically irrelevant though he surely knew these traits to be. The Medical Record, with similar disregard for relevance, described Mallon as “a perfect Amazon, weighing over 200 pounds.” She was set aside in these descriptions as different, deviant, unfeminine. Of course, these characteristics were not relevant to Mallon’s public health status; her weight and her femininity were extraneous to the health dangers she potentially posed. Even more startling, the one early photograph I have been able to find of Mary Mallon indicates that the physical description of her was not only immaterial, it was false. In this photograph (and in the following close-up), taken in 1909, Mary Mallon lies in a bed in Willard Parker Hospital. She is the woman in the bed closest to the photographer, a neat, conventionally pretty, distinctly “feminine” woman.27 (See figs. 4.2 and 4.3.)
The physically imposing masculinized woman seems to have existed only in the eyes of the anxious beholders, in the vision of those like Soper who needed to see in her an aberrant “other” in order to justify their actions against her. His description may also reflect what different worlds the two moved in and the fact that Mary Mallon did not meet George Soper’s ideal of womanhood. Whatever it signified to Soper, his description reveals to us that factors other than science entered into his evaluation of his target. Consider his description of her lifestyle:
I found that Mary was in the habit of going, when her work for the day was finished, to a rooming house on Third Avenue below Thirty-third Street, where she was spending the evenings with a disreputable looking man who had a room on the top floor and to whom she was taking food. His headquarters during the day was in a saloon on the corner. I got to be well acquainted with him. He took me to see the room. I should not care to see another like it. It was a place of dirt and disorder. It was not improved by the presence of a large dog of which Mary was said to be very fond.28
Soper went beyond anything that might be considered necessary to a scientific investigation in this description. He could conceivably want to know the hygiene of Mallon’s living quarters in his consideration of the public health dangers she might pose. But his characterization of her friend, A. Briehof, as “a disreputable looking man” was not necessary to build a sanitary indictment against Mary Mallon. No doubt it contributed to creating social disapproval. Here was a single woman seeming to cohabit with a man who spent his days in a saloon. Soper did not test Briehof (or Breshof) for typhoid, but he and Mary Mallon failed the test of moral and social rectitude Soper did apply.29
Soper described Mallon and Briehof’s home as “disordered.” For people committed to bringing order and rationality to city life, as Soper was, this was strong language. Soper did not want to see another apartment like theirs; he did not think such living spaces should exist. In a statement preceding the quoted paragraph, Soper wrote, “Mary had no home.” He said she was “in the habit of going” to this apartment after work, and yet he would not call it her home. Mary Mallon lived under conditions George Soper abhorred, on which he could not refrain from passing judgment. Her out-of-wedlock cohabitation, her perceived disordered life, and even her dog were all relevant to George Soper in his justification for keeping close watch over this particular healthy carrier. He believed Mallon could not care properly for herself in part because she did not meet his social standards.
Soper’s investigation of Mary Mallon’s activities included looking into her personal hygiene on the job, since she transmitted the typhoid bacilli in large part because she did not keep her hands clean. But the engineer epidemiologist did not limit himself to cleanliness when he observed, “She was careless in her personal habits, but so are most cooks.”30 His class bias came into play when he placed Mary as part of a group which he, and by implication, his social class, denigrated. The stigma attached to healthy carriers could be linked to the inferior status of domestic workers to further justify Mallon’s incarceration.31
The distance Soper felt between himself and Mary Mallon is evident in his drawing a line between “we” and “them.” He wrote, for example, that Mary Mallon’s situation “shows how carefully we should select our cooks,” continuing, “we ordinarily know very little about them. [The case] confirms the truth of the adage that the more we pay the less we know about our servants” (emphasis added).32 Soper saw himself a class apart, and above, the one occupied by Mary Mallon, a hierarchy which helped define some of his suspicions about Mary Mallon. His observations that she was not “particularly clean,” which he repeated, fit his characterization of the class. Since Soper had only second-hand knowledge of Mallon’s cleanliness on the job, learned from housekeepers and employers whom he interviewed, we cannot be sure how accurately he described her personal habits.33 Other commentators picked up on Soper’s observations, and one, exaggerating Soper’s descriptions, said that in one “place where she had been employed she left the kitchen in such a filthy condition that it required the services of a scavenger to cleanse it.”34
As important as were physical appearance, home, hygiene, and occupation to Soper’s analysis of Mary Mallon’s problems, he saved his strongest language to describe her behavior and beliefs. When Soper met Mallon at her home to try to bring her into the hospital for laboratory tests, he noted, “Although I recited some well considered speeches committed to memory in advance to make sure she understood what I meant . . . I could do nothing with her.”35 Soper’s conversations with Mallon did not go as Soper had anticipated they should, because in his view, Mary Mallon did not behave rationally. “It was impossible,” Soper complained, “to deal with her in a reasonable and peaceful way.” From the beginning, when he turned over his records to the health department, Soper advised that the officials “be prepared to use force and plenty of it” when dealing with this woman.36
Soper’s impatience with Mallon spilled out onto the pages of his published accounts. He related that when he visited her in the hospital, a few days after the health department apprehended her, he found a “fearfully angry-looking person [with] a startling appearance.” He told her, “You would not be where you are now if you had not been so obstinate. So throw off your wrong-headed idea and be reasonable.”37 These were not words to gain her trust or ease her mind as she lay there alone in the Willard Parker Hospital, following her dramatic arrest.
Mary Mallon responded by not speaking: “Mary looked at me steadily, but neither spoke nor moved. Her eyes gleamed angrily.” When Soper explained to her that “you don’t keep your hands clean enough,” Mallon did not “utter a word.” When he offered to write a book about her, hiding her identity but promising her the profits, if she would only talk to him, “Mary rose. She pulled her bathrobe about her and, not taking her eyes off mine, slowly opened the door of her toilet and vanished within. The door slammed.”38
Soper was at a loss. In his experience people did not act like this; everything about this woman was foreign to him. After their first interaction, he put some of the blame on himself, admitting he needed to figure out ways to say the words more comprehensibly. But after the second time, when he followed her home, he put more of the onus on her. By the third encounter when he met her in the hospital he could hardly contain himself. He concluded that she “possessed a violent temper against which, when fully aroused, few persons had ever been willing to contend.” She used her “weapon” against him three times, and during her incarceration threatened to use her temper more often to keep people at bay. Soper related, “Mary knew how to throw herself into a state of what Dr. John A. Cahill, Superintendent of Riverside Hospital, called ‘almost pathological anger.’ ” As Soper told it, Mary was in the driver’s
seat, able to use her “personal weapon” at will.39
How do we interpret this description of Mary Mallon’s behavior and temper? Was Soper venting his feelings about the Irish alongside his own frustration at not having events go the way he planned? Were his notions of womanly behavior so totally attacked by this woman that he could not himself respond rationally? Was it coldness and authoritarianism that characterized his reactions? Or was Mary Mallon really acting beyond the bounds of normal human response? Because of our distance and the limited documentation available, we will never be able to answer these questions fully. Nonetheless, it is clear that the feelings Mallon evoked in Soper were powerful, and his telling of their interactions was clearly filtered through the lens of his own frustration, bewilderment, and anger. He may be describing Mallon’s temper, but we see his own anger at work in the process. His rational, considered, and socially acceptable notions of how people should behave were deeply challenged by this “stubborn” and “perverse” woman. He thought he approached her with “tact and judgment”; she responded with “indignant and peremptory denials” to his appeals.40
The most positive explanation Soper provided for why Mary Mallon behaved the way she did is that she did not understand her unfortunate condition. He blamed this on her refusal to talk with officials about the meaning of being a healthy carrier. Soper suggested, on the one hand, that she did not understand what it meant to be a healthy carrier, that she did not accept “the claims of science and humanity” and thus was “non-communicative.” Health officials (including himself) should work harder to find ways to help her understand.41 On the other hand, he wrote, “It is beyond belief that she has failed to grasp [the scientific facts’] significance.”42
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