Typhoid Mary
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Moersch was a married man, aged thirty-eight at the time of the 1915 outbreak; he then had four children. The health department described him as “well disposed and quite amenable,” and entered him on the roster of carriers, releasing him with instructions to find work that did not involve food handling.67 He apparently worked for a time as a mechanic’s assistant and as a plumber. Beginning in June, 1915, the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities paid his rent.
What little information is available about Moersch indicates that health officials viewed his situation with sympathy and generosity. “The case of Fred Morsch [sic] is worthy of special68 note,” wrote G. L. Nicholas, chief of the division of epidemiology, to his director at the Bureau of Infectious Diseases in 1916. “His wife is not in good health and cannot help with earning money. They have four small children and a fifth child, born a few months ago, has since died.” Significantly, Nicholas noted, “He is a skilled workman, and . . . he was suddenly excluded from work at his trade.” Nicholas used the worthiness of Moersch’s case to suggest that the department find ways to subsidize or find employment for needy carriers.69 “It appears quite probable,” agreed Bill Waters, the acting director of the Bureau of Infectious Diseases to the health commissioner, “that this Department will have to provide, through some source, for the maintenance of those dependent upon such persons as are prevented by us from continuing their usual occupation.”70 Moersch was discovered the same year as Mary Mallon’s second incarceration, but health officials thought more sympathetically about his case and treated him much more leniently.
In March, 1916, the health department approved Moersch for innovative medical treatment (which they also gave to Mary Mallon) to try to alleviate his carrier state, but unfortunately we cannot follow his course in the extant records. He may have been hospitalized briefly for this treatment.71 Health officials were convinced in 1916 that Moersch “made no attempt to work at his trade in secret,” and were pleased to note that he did find work as a plumber. The health department did not isolate him and continued to list him as a carrier living at his Brooklyn home.72
In 1928, when he was out of work, Moersch returned to the confectionery business, this time in partnership with his daughters. Authorities traced as many as sixty cases of typhoid and a few deaths to him when they found him dispensing ice cream on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in October, 1928.73 Knowing Moersch had a history of typhoid transmission and had been informed of his status as a healthy carrier, the health commissioner sent him to Riverside Hospital. The health official promised to protect the public from this health menace, telling the press: “His isolation will now be made permanent.”74 Another department spokesperson, Dr. Edward L. Creedon, head of the division of communicable diseases, hedged on this promise, telling the press only that Moersch “would be kept [at Riverside Hospital] for prolonged observation.”75
It seems that Moersch did, in fact, spend many years on North Brother Island, but the records do not reveal whether he was kept voluntarily or forcibly.76 Emma Sherman, who ran the bacteriology laboratory on North Brother Island beginning in 1929 and who worked with Mary Mallon in that laboratory, insists that Mallon was the only healthy typhoid carrier on the island.77 The fact that Sherman did not know about Fred Moersch suggests that his presence during those years was significantly more private than was Mallon’s. There are a few possible explanations for this: it might have been a voluntary detention, or Moersch’s identity might have been known only as a hospital worker, or the passage of time might have made his case seem more ordinary and therefore less memorable. Officials issued few public statements about Moersch, and they did not write about him in their own publications or private writings. This itself seems to indicate that they distinguished between Moersch and Mallon.78
Officials distinguished between the two healthy carriers in another important respect. Not only did they not isolate Moersch in 1915, after he had infected more people than Mallon, and instead sympathetically helped him find financial aid, but they also provided him with work shortly after taking him to North Brother Island. The city employed Moersch as a “hospital helper” at Riverside Hospital fifteen months after they brought him there, presumably when they decided his carrier state was intractable. He retained that job until he moved off the island and returned to his Brooklyn home, sometime in 1944. The fact that Moersch was able to leave North Brother Island may mean that he had stayed there as a voluntary employee, a very different status from Mallon’s. He remained on the city payroll, with a job at Kingston Avenue Hospital in Brooklyn (giving a home address in Brooklyn), until his death.79
Differences in the treatment of Mallon and Moersch by officials cast doubt on any notion that health officials based their decisions about healthy carriers solely on scientific or objective criteria. Clearly, socially constructed views of the two carriers intruded into decisions made about them. The factors that most strongly labeled Mary Mallon and stigmatized her, which officials used repeatedly in their descriptions, were based on views of appropriate gender roles and influenced strongly by prejudices about class and ethnicity. Officials repeatedly used identifiers that connoted stigma and deviance in Mallon’s case when they did not do so when referring to other carriers, including Moersch and Tony Labella, whose specific and documented dangers to the public were larger than her own.
It is reasonable to conclude, as Clarence Darrow observed in a different carrier case in Chicago, that the vagueness of the quarantine laws permitted health officials to “discriminate between individuals”:
They may permit one carrier complete liberty to go about in his usual manner, transacting his ordinary business, while another may be confined under the strictest quarantine. Or one may be allowed his freedom upon merely giving his word that he would sterilize his discharges and another denied that privilege. . . . At present the Board [of health] assumes the right to arbitrarily discriminate between persons of the same class.80
Clearly, there were no strict rules to determine which carriers health officials should isolate, and officials had considerable latitude to decide who would receive the strongest application of the possible regulations.81
The definition of the danger Mary Mallon posed was not limited to bacteria counts; it extended to include the social context within which typhoid itself was most often transmitted. The social views of health officials—conscious and unconscious—were potent. They could help determine whether a particular healthy carrier would go free under health department observation or whether a carrier would be isolated. All healthy carriers could potentially endanger the public’s health, but only a select few individuals were singled out to pay the price of their freedom in the name of protecting the public health. Expectations and prejudices about Mary Mallon’s social position—her Irish immigrant status, her job as a domestic servant, her femaleness—all contributed to defining her as dangerous in the eyes of those who pursued her.
“This Human Culture Tube”
Media and the Cultural Construction of “Typhoid Mary”
CHAPTER FIVE
Health officials labeled Mary Mallon a social undesirable and helped to build a case against her by setting her up as an example of how carriers should not act. Creating an image of an unnatural woman became an important part of the case—social stereotyping in the service of protecting the people’s health. But the health department was not alone in developing a negative connotation to the term Typhoid Mary. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which the media’s portrayals of Mallon even more strongly shaped and reflected public opinion about healthy carriers, first to challenge and then to reinforce the health department’s representation of Typhoid Mary as a social pariah. The public viewpoints about Mary Mallon, however, insofar as they are recoverable and reflected in published writing, retained an emotional connection to the human misfortune represented in her story. Early accounts foregrounded sympathy for the woman caught by circumstance. The media later combined this sympathy with a stronger story
of the public health menace she represented to construct a lasting negative imprint. Especially around the time of her reappearance in 1915, the media, in blaming Mary Mallon for her return to cooking, capped and gave permanence to this singularly negative construction of Typhoid Mary.
The obvious place to begin to explore the construction of cultural meanings of Mary Mallon’s story is with the words “Typhoid Mary” themselves which have become a metaphor for a dangerous person who should be reviled and avoided. While the press helped the term gain national notoriety—keeping it alive and in use throughout Mallon’s life—reporters did not invent it. As far as I can determine, a national public health expert first publicly used the term in a medical setting. The scene was a joint meeting of the Section on the Practice of Medicine and the Section on Pathology and Physiology at the American Medical Association Annual Meeting in Chicago in June, 1908. William Hallock Park, the head of New York City’s bacteriology laboratory, presented a paper on typhoid bacilli carriers in which he related the first sixteen months’ experience with “a cook” found to be a healthy typhoid carrier. Park did not name Mary Mallon, nor did he use any descriptor to identify her except for “cook” and “woman.” Park was not present at the discussion of his paper, and his colleague Milton J. Rosenau of Washington, D.C., responded to a comment by a physician from Tennessee who suggested that carriers undergo a surgical operation to cure their condition: “I can not take Dr. Park’s place,” said Rosenau, “but [I] feel sure that if he were here he would say that ‘typhoid Mary’ refuses to submit to surgical interference.”1
This first public use of the term appeared in print when Park’s paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on September 19, 1908. Using the small “t,” the editor emphasized the descriptive nature of the term. In the same year biologist George Whipple published a textbook about typhoid fever, and in it he reported on the new phenomenon of healthy typhoid carriers. “One of the best known,” carriers, he wrote, is “ ‘Typhoid Mary,’ a cook in New York City, who . . . left a trail of at least twenty-eight [sic] cases in the houses where she had served.” Whipple’s almost casual use of the phrase seems to indicate it had already become common parlance in the medical community.2
It is possible that neither Rosenau nor Whipple knew Mary Mallon’s name in 1908. They may have used the term merely out of convenience; we should not assume that “Typhoid Mary,” now pejorative, carried a negative connotation when it was first coined. During the period before Mary Mallon’s real identity was publicly known—before June 20, 1909—anyone needing to refer to the New York City carrier may have used the term to describe and yet protect the identity of the real person.
Typhoid Mary was not the first substitution for Mary Mallon’s name to appear in print. Reporters learning about Mallon’s arrest in 1907 (two years before her habeas corpus hearing when her name became known) did not use the phrase. They used the pseudonym “Mary Ilverson”—either a name they made up or one the health officials themselves had used as a cover to reporters. The name did not have a very long life, however, and it never developed the cultural significance associated with “Typhoid Mary.”
On March 13, 1907, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American reported the new medical discovery of healthy carriers of typhoid fever. In a story called “Germs of Typhoid Carried for Life,” a reporter discussed a New York Academy of Medicine meeting at which Charles Harrington of the Massachusetts State Board of Health presented a paper on these carriers, who he said represented about 4 percent of recovering typhoid fever patients.3 The newspaper did not know that Soper was then on the trail of New York’s own healthy carrier, who would be apprehended less than a week later.
But reporters soon learned of Mary Mallon’s capture, and on April 2, about two weeks after her arrest, the American revealed the “Human Typhoid Germ” held in the city’s hospital. “Presenee kept a Secret,” the newspaper screamed. “A case hedged about with more safeguards against publicity and attended by more mysterious circumstances than any which has been recorded,” the reporter wrote, congratulating himself for breaking the Board of Health’s publicity barrier and discovering that “ ‘Mary Ilverson,’ a cook, has been a prisoner in the institution for some time.”4
“The startling fact was revealed,” boasted the reporter, “that this woman . . . has caused thirty-eight [sic] persons for whom she worked to contract typhoid fever. It was also disclosed that she is practically a human vehicle for typhoid fever germs.” There was more:
It was admitted to an American reporter last night by a well-known member of the Board of Health that this human culture tube has worked for prominent families in this city and communicated the disease to some of its members. . . . “Mary” is an Irish girl. . . . she constantly makes attempts to escape. . . . “Mary” is rosy of cheek and buxom of form. Her spirits are always at concert pitch, and the only thing in life that worries her is the restraint.
The reporter went on to quote Walter Bensei (S. Josephine Baker’s superior officer) as saying, “This woman is a great menace to health, a danger to the community, and she has been made a prisoner on that account. In her wake are many cases of typhoid fever,” which she caused when she “unwittingly disseminated—or, as we might say, sprinkled—germs in various households.”5
Here was a story worth breaking, but it was not followed in the press. As far as I have been able to learn, only one other newspaper ran the story. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World—the American’s biggest rival—wrote about Mary Ilverson, using no quotation marks. Reporters in that newspaper depicted a “walking typhoid fever factory,” but also “a buxom woman, a cook, in perfect health.”6 Nothing more followed in either newspaper, indicating perhaps that health officials successfully reimposed a veil of secrecy.
In this first public telling, the description of “Mary Ilverson” revealed attitudes that later reemerged attached to “Typhoid Mary.” The language of the 1907 reports began a process of dehumanizing Mary Mallon. She became a “germ,” “vehicle,” “factory,” and “culture tube.” In articulating the connection between “typhoid carrier” and “menace,” the articles indicated an acceptance of Mary Mallon as “prisoner.” They reported that she, a cook, had infected members of “prominent” families, suggesting she was a threat not only to public health but to social hierarchy as well. Yet, even though much in these early accounts reduced Mary Mallon to a social evil, they still evoked some sympathy for her. She had acted “unwittingly” and “unconsciously,” they reported, and they remarked on her Irish heritage in a fairly positive, if patronizing, manner.
The health department might have chosen to turn the American’s and World’s revelations of Mary Mallon’s capture into a lesson for public education. Health officials had come to understand that they needed social as well as medical arguments to help shape public opinion and discourse about healthy carriers. The articles and quotations from officials created an image of a social undesirable, a frightening and dangerous person, which officials could have used directly to educate the public about this new danger to their health. In 1907, however, New York health officials did not yet themselves understand the full dimensions of the situation they had on their hands, and they did not consider turning the media interest to public use. They were more interested in keeping the story to themselves while they figured out how to handle it. The suppression of news about Mary Mallon’s detention indicates the health department retained control of information dissemination.
But in 1909, when the popular media and the medical press no longer needed a pseudonym like Mary Ilverson for a woman whose real identity was finally publicly known because of her habeas corpus hearing, the health officials could no longer contain public interest. The public, cultural construction of Mary Mallon’s story and of “Typhoid Mary,” separate from the woman and from official definition, began to emerge. It was not until 1915, upon Mary Mallon’s second incarceration, that it took full form.
Media
scholars now recognize the extent to which news reports are not merely accounts of what happened, but stories “with characters, action, plot, point of view, dramatic closure.”7 The dramatic qualities of news reporting are possibly no better exemplified than in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers at the turn of the century, and the telling of Mary Mallon’s story epitomizes the genre.
Hearst believed daily newspapers should grab their readers’ attention with bold statements and dramatic stories. His biographer wrote of him that any story “that did not cause its reader to rise out of his chair and cry, ‘Great God!’ was counted a failure.” Hearst worked to “convulse his readers with excitement,” and in the process helped to change the standards of American journalism. In the 1890s, Hearst set out to compete with New York’s highest circulation daily, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. As a young reporter, he had worked for Pulitzer and learned his technique of mixing sensationalism with democratic idealism. Now, with his Morning Journal, which changed its name to the New York American in 1901, Hearst proved himself the master of the new journalism. He shamelessly courted readers with crime and scandal stories alongside some anti-establishment rhetoric and support for public reforms. In the words of his biographer,
In the strict sense, the Hearst papers were not newspapers at all. They were printed entertainment and excitement—the equivalent in newsprint of bombs exploding, bands blaring, firecrackers popping, victims screaming, flags waving, cannons roaring, houris dancing, and smoke rising from the singed flesh of executed criminals.8