Typhoid Mary

by Judith Walzer Leavitt

  Soper grew harsher in his evaluation after Mallon was found cooking in 1915, following her three years of incarceration and five years after her release on the promise that she would not handle food. “She did this deliberately and in a hospital where the risk of detection and severe punishment were particularly great,” Soper reflected. Her behavior argued “a mental attitude which is difficult to explain.” But, Soper continued, “Aside from such behavior as this, Mary Mallon appears to be an unusually intelligent woman. She writes an excellent hand, and the composition of her letters leaves little room for criticism.”43 This is a striking juxtaposition. Soper brought up Mallon’s handwriting at the height of his criticism about her behavior and her refusal to accept scientific expertise. He would not have expected that a woman of her class would have good penmanship. The fact that she did indicated she had some education, and she should therefore behave more reasonably. His expectations for her station in life were minimal, but they helped to define her deviance: “Most persons will agree that no amount of dullness, anywhere this side of downright feeble-mindedness, can excuse [her return to cooking], and Mary Mallon is not feeble, either in mind or body She is an excellent cook and has shown considerable ability in various other ways.”44 If a person is smart enough to write a letter and cook a meal, Soper implies, she should be expected rationally to accept the authority of science.

  The idea of intelligence repeatedly emerged in the literature about typhoid carriers, and Soper was not alone in concentrating on it. Only if carriers were considered intelligent could they be released to their homes, for on that basis rested public assurance that they would obey the rules. For example, public health official L. L. Lumsden wrote that “to require a strict isolation or quarantine of [carriers] as a class would be decidedly radical, almost as radical, in fact, as it would be to require the isolation of all cases of incipient pulmonary tuberculosis.” Yet Lumsden believed that local officials should keep in quarantine “any typhoid bacillus carrier who will not take or who from lack of intelligence can not be expected to take the necessary precautions prescribed by the health officer.”45 For Lumsden and Soper, only “intelligent and conscientious” carriers could be trusted to take the necessary precautions.

  By 1915, Soper threw up his hands and retreated. He acknowledged it was very hard to teach carriers of their dangers. “Mary had ample opportunity to know the danger which she constituted toward those whose food she prepared. . . . She knew that when she cooked she killed people, and yet she deliberately sought employment as a cook.”46 As if in response to Charles Chapin and his belief that typhoid carriers did not need to be locked up, Soper wrote, “To many persons who did not know Mary it seemed that she ought to be given her liberty.” But, he believed, those who knew her best knew better than to let her go free. “Mysterious” and “noncommunicative,” Mary Mallon was “a character apart, by nature and by circumstance,” Soper concluded, “strangely chosen to bear the burden of a great lesson to the world.”47 To him, Mary Mallon’s incarcerations were justified in the name of protecting the public from this woman who could not and would not act to protect herself.

  S. Josephine Baker’s descriptions of Mary Mallon and her detailed accounts of health department activities in the early years of the twentieth century provide another window on officials’ attitudes toward the first healthy carrier to be traced by the health department. In her autobiography, Baker provided numerous examples of her attitudes and those of her fellow public health officials about issues that concern us here.48 She shared the American-born, Protestant, middle-class views about immigrants in general and about the Irish specifically, and, despite her own unusual career choice, she held many traditional views of women’s roles as well. When she was a child, her mother had taught her to cook because she believed all women should have this skill. Baker seemed to agree, although she did not enjoy or use the skill as an adult. Because of her training, not her experience, she boasted, “I feel quite confident that I could walk out into my own kitchen tomorrow and bake bread that would be a credit to our old Bridget.”49

  Baker’s attitudes toward the Irish were on the whole condescending and negative, although she saw herself as compassionate. Baker was a professional woman who spent her career promoting progressive causes, including child welfare and women’s rights. She, like Soper and other urban professionals of the period, worked to increase democratic reforms yet did so from a platform of elitist assumptions and perspectives. Her attitudes toward immigrants reflected this ambivalent progressive stance.50 We might assume that she thought her own cook diligent and hardworking, but Baker described the Irish more often as “shiftless.” After caring in her clinic for an Irish woman who had burned her feet while trying to keep them warm and dry in her oven, Baker decided the best word to describe her was “Numb—that seems to be the right word for all of them.”51

  When Baker began her work as a medical inspector for the health department, she worked in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan peopled at the time mainly by Irish and African Americans. She described her days:

  The heat, the smells, the squalor made it something not to be believed. Its residents were largely Irish, incredibly shiftless, altogether charming in their abject helplessness, wholly lacking in any ambition and dirty to an unbelievable degree. . . . Both races lived well below any decent level of subsistence. . . . I climbed stair after stair, knocked on door after door, met drunk after drunk, filthy mother after filthy mother and dying baby after dying baby.52

  She had chosen to spend her life improving conditions of the urban poor, and in so doing analyzed their poverty as largely situational, but she did not seem to respect the people among whom she toiled.

  Baker’s descriptions of Mary Mallon largely fit this pattern, although her personal connection led, at least in retrospect, to genuine sympathy. She had not been warned “that Dr. Soper had reasons to suspect that Mary might make trouble” when her supervisor, Walter Bensel, sent her to collect blood, stool, and urine specimens in March of 1907. Baker found Mary to be “a clean, neat, obviously self-respecting Irish-woman with a firm mouth and her hair done in a tight knot at the back of her head.” With the exception of “firm mouth,” the description was straightforward and positive. But the fact that Baker did find it necessary to note the clean and neat appearance suggests that she did not expect it, given Mary’s Irish immigrant status and her occupation. The firm mouth notation indicates that Baker observed some physical evidence of resistance. She, like Soper, described her approach to Mallon as “using as much routine tact as possible,” and her initial encounter yielded, again, a set jaw, glinting eyes, and a firm “No.” Baker thought, “Obviously here was another case of that blind, panicky distrust of doctors and all their works which crops up so often among the uneducated.” Baker did not regard Mary Mallon as an individual but rather as someone representing a class, the uneducated, who behaved as Baker would expect, irrationally.53

  Baker found herself in a difficult position. Unlike Soper, she was a department of health employee, and her superior officer instructed her to get the specimens or to bring the cook to the Willard Parker Hospital. Possibly Dr. Bensel had sent Baker thinking that a woman could approach Mallon more successfully than a man, and he expected results. But Mallon greeted Baker with the same kitchen fork she had used against Soper. The two women’s worlds collided during the five-hour search for Mallon. The servants (many of whom themselves may have been Irish immigrants) helped Mary Mallon; the police helped S. Josephine Baker. It was, in some respects, a class war. Baker wrote, “The rest of the servants denied knowing anything about her or where she was; even in my distress, I liked that loyalty.”54

  Despite the show of what Baker termed “class solidarity,” the physician’s resources were greater and she got her woman. When Mallon emerged from her hiding place “fighting and swearing,” Baker “made another effort to talk to her sensibly.” But Mallon, after five hours in a dark corner contemplati
ng her situation, “was convinced that the law was wantonly persecuting her, when she had done nothing wrong.” Baker took the “maniacal” woman into the ambulance, and “literally sat on her all the way to the hospital; it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.”55

  This characterization of Mary Mallon, some of which I repeat from chapter 2, bears closer scrutiny here because it is so stark. The two women represented two opposing groups in America at that moment: educated, privileged, American-born, physician Baker, armed with science, public health expertise, and the police, against working-class, ill-educated, Irish immigrant Mallon, who eked out her living as a domestic servant. How could the two have comprehended each other? Mallon was confused and hostile in the face of Baker’s direct onslaught; Baker on the other hand was afraid of possibly having to face Dr. Bensel without having accomplished her duty. The two women each experienced a certain lack of power within her own world; neither had much room for compromise.

  Writing after Mallon’s death, Baker confided, “I learned to like her and to respect her point of view.” As one woman to another, Baker felt some compassion for Mallon. Yet despite the connection of gender, the gulf between these two women was enormous. Mallon evoked Baker’s negative feelings about immigrants and the poor that she had voiced repeatedly. In forcing Mary Mallon into the Willard Parker Hospital, Baker was doing her job; she helped bring a public health menace under control. Baker’s focus on Mallon’s refusal “to listen to reason,” on her temper, and on her inability to believe “all this mystery about germs” overtook her sympathy and dominated her perceptions. Believing as she did, she was able to carry out her duties.

  Mary Mallon became, as historian Alan Kraut puts it, “synonymous with the health menace posed by the foreign-born.”56 Kraut includes the Mallon story in his account of America’s long history of fear of contamination from abroad, a medicalized nativism that he traces from colonial times to the present. Certainly this attitude was present in Baker’s anti-immigrant prejudices.

  Anti-immigrant sentiment, widespread among health officials, might in this period have been aimed more often against southern and eastern Europeans than it was against the Irish, who, having emigrated earlier, already dominated much of New York’s public and political life. Alan Kraut, too, found that by Mary Mallon’s time, the Irish Catholics were “increasingly assimilated socially and dispersed geographically” and did not arouse as much open prejudice as did newer central European immigrant groups, and especially Asian and African groups whose physical appearance set them apart from native whites.57 Nonetheless, Irish people like Mary Mallon, who were not well integrated into middle-class New York City life and did not meet American standards, still felt the stings of officials’ disrespect.58

  Perhaps if Mary Mallon had had a home to shelter her that authorities recognized as safe or a family to take care of her, she might have been released despite her initial refusal to cooperate with health department guidelines. Perhaps if she had been a housewife and not a domestic laborer, no matter how hot her temper, health authorities might have found reason to liberate her. Certainly Alphonse Cotils gained liberty, if we can read meaning into the judge’s decision in his case, in part because he had some of these social options in his life: he could promise to carry out his business from his home on the telephone, for example. Perhaps if Mallon had not been Irish, with a stereotypical hot temper, she might have been coerced less. We can never know what would have happened if Mallon had been someone else, if the first healthy carrier followed so carefully in this country had been someone who, even if uncooperative, represented more “respectable” middle-class America. We can know that gender, class, and ethnic biases did much to shape official thinking about Mary Mallon.

  Soper’s and Baker’s descriptions of Mary Mallon’s appearance and behavior differed considerably from officials’ descriptions of Alphonse Cotils, the Belgian-born New York baker who refused to cooperate with authorities, and of Tony Labella, the uncooperative typhoid carrier who escaped to New Jersey from the health department’s surveillance during these years. Officials and the news reporters who covered the stories did not explicitly label these two male carriers in terms of sex, ethnicity, race, or personal habits. Whereas officials almost always referred to Mary Mallon as an “Irish woman,” they did not put such identifiers on these two men. Nor did they once describe them as clean or neat, as if they did not expect them to be. Officials did not indicate anything about these carriers’ education level or handwriting ability, or remark extensively on their appearance. They did not even write about how either of these men behaved when approached by health authorities. Apparently health officials did not deem the social signifiers necessary in these instances, even though they routinely used them to label and denigrate Mallon. Health officials indicated their own social biases when they omitted labels as much as when they used them.

  Cotils and Labella were on the healthy carrier list because they had been found to carry the typhoid bacilli and because they were in the food handling business. Both did not cooperate with restrictions placed on them and continued to prepare food for others. I have already examined the case of Alphonse Cotils, who in 1924 received a suspended sentence from the New York municipal court judge who reviewed his case, and was back in his bakery the following year.59 Labella needs some further discussion. He disappeared from New York health department view after causing an outbreak of typhoid affecting eighty-seven people and resulting in two deaths. New Jersey health authorities found him after tracing another outbreak to him, one that resulted in thirty-five cases of typhoid fever and three deaths. They isolated him for two weeks and then released him. Rather than incarcerating this healthy carrier for repeated violations and breaking parole when he returned to the city in 1922, the health officials in New York added him to the list of carriers and concluded the case with the remark, “This carrier is now employed in this City as a laborer in building construction work and is required to report to us weekly.”60

  By all public health measures, Labella was as dangerous to the health of others as was Mallon. In fact, he had already been identified with more typhoid fever cases and more deaths than Mallon. He had disobeyed the law in two states with repeated violations, certainly showing a lack of respect for science and refusal to cooperate with the law. Yet health officials continued to allow him his freedom to find construction work and live at liberty. One reading of Labella’s story, which unfortunately cannot be followed more closely with extant documentation, is that as a male (even though possibly immigrant and Catholic) wage earner, he was viewed as a family breadwinner and necessary to the family economy As recalcitrant as he was and as much a menace to the public health as he was proven to be, he was not locked up. Mary Mallon, in parallel circumstances, was denied her freedom and not retrained for a different job.61

  The cases of Cotils and Labella evoked an official stance very different from the one in Mary Mallon’s case; for these two men lifelong isolation was not considered a necessary response to the public health danger posed. The same was true for the Adirondack guide described in chapter 3. A case of a typhoid carrier who had infected ten employees at a New York hospital where he worked as a kitchen helper reveals another way in which health officials perceived Mary Mallon differently from others they identified and tracked. In this 1923 instance, health officials located the unnamed carrier, “a man who for twelve years had been an inmate of an institution for the care of mental cases.” The man’s duties included slicing bread, which provided ample opportunity for him to transmit typhoid bacilli from his hands to the food of others. The health commissioner, in releasing the information to the press, blamed the “laxity on the part of hospital authorities in the method of engaging employs who may handle their food supply.” The carrier himself was released and added to the list of carriers under the observation of the health department.62 Unfortunately, there is no extant discussion of this case, and we can only speculate about how and why health officials differentia
ted this man with his long-term history of mental problems from Mary Mallon. In Mallon’s case, officials relied on descriptions of her antisocial behavior to help condemn her, yet evidently they did not consider this unnamed carrier’s long history of mental health problems to be a factor necessitating his isolation.

  Unfortunately the extant records do not permit a very complete search of the people other than Mary Mallon who, as healthy typhoid carriers, found themselves in health department isolation hospitals. One such carrier was Richard Voigt, who went to Riverside Hospital in early 1916 voluntarily seeking treatment for his condition. He was a fifty-six-year-old married man, who earned his living as a waiter in a restaurant. He was discovered to be a carrier after four stool samples tested positive in December, 1915, and he admitted himself to the hospital for therapy on January 10, 1916. He stayed for one month. We cannot follow him further.63

  Two unnamed women voluntarily accepted hospitalization in the 1920s when health officials identified them as typhoid carriers. According to a news account mentioning them, they had “been in Riverside Hospital two years, but are not forcibly detained. They have no home and have elected to remain in the hospital” indefinitely. From the same source, we learn that an eighteen-year-old female carrier was hospitalized for treatment and released. Those few carriers who were hospitalized seem most often to have followed this pattern of brief hospitalization for observation and treatment and then release.64

  The case of Frederick Moersch, about whom we can learn a little more, helps us understand that the social factors influencing Mary Mallon’s case were not uniformly or predictably applied. Moersch, a German-born confectioner from Brooklyn, was identified as a carrier in 1915, following an outbreak of typhoid affecting fifty-nine people, traced to ice cream that he dispensed.65 Moersch was not isolated for his role in the outbreak; he was, however, placed in Riverside Hospital following a later 1928 epidemic traced to him.66