Health Commissioner Lederle himself may have been affected by the public sympathy toward Mallon’s situation when he decided to release her from North Brother Island in February, 1910. Interestingly, this action evoked only a little press attention. Those newspapers that carried the story seemed to support release from “the torture of solitary confinement” for the unfortunate woman.21 The New York Times agreed with the health commissioner that she had paid long enough for her situation, especially given that “there might be other persons quite as dangerous to their neighbors as ‘Typhoid Mary,’ ” and that “she should [not] be any longer singled out for confinement.”22 The media consensus was that Mary Mallon deserved help, not isolation.
The Times mentioned in this story that there were possibly large numbers of typhoid carriers. Newspapers had barely noticed this fact in the reports they published during Mary Mallon’s habeas corpus hearing in 1909, but the information made more of an impact elsewhere. Medical writers especially emphasized that Mary Mallon had a lot of company in her condition as a healthy carrier. For example, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal wrote: “There is reason to believe that there are other persons now at large who may be quite as dangerous to the community as regards the spread of typhoid as this woman,” continuing, “and this was one reason why it was thought that she should no longer be singled out for confinement.”23 Health authorities and lay observers around the country agreed that Mary Mallon was one of many—perhaps tens of thousands—healthy typhoid carriers in the country. “The young woman is not a scientific wonder . . . in spite of the sensation she creates in the newspaper,” wrote one author. “Individuals who are chronic spreaders of typhoid fever are not rarities at all.”24
Despite clear medical unanimity on this point, Mary Mallon remained the best known among typhoid carriers, and many people continued to think she was “unique in the annals of medical history,” as the American put it.25 Maintaining this singular view of Mary Mallon (especially when opinion about her turned in a decidedly negative direction in 1915) helped promote public interest in her story and sold newspapers. The emphasis on her uniqueness represents one way in which media perspectives differed from other points of view and indicates how the press helped to shape events. In the popular portrayals of her uniqueness we can begin to understand the particular burden she carried and why her story resonated so strongly in the public’s perceptions.
A novel published in 1910, the year Mary Mallon was released, offers a different but revealing popular representation of her story.26 Arthur Reeve, who had made a name for himself as a columnist for The Survey, a magazine of social work and reform, wrote his first fiction to promote the use of science to solve crimes. His hero was chemist Craig Kennedy (an American Sherlock Holmes), who, aided by his sidekick, old college chum and reporter Walter Jameson (Dr. Watson), solves society’s crimes by using the most up-to-date scientific methods.27 Kennedy wants to run “the criminal himself down, scientifically, relentlessly.” He tells his friend, “I am going to apply science to the detection of crime, the same sort of methods by which you trace out the presence of a chemical, or run an unknown germ to earth.” In a series of episodes, erudite and suave Kennedy does just that.
One of his first challenges involves investigating the death of oil magnate Jim Bisbee at the request of Bisbee’s ward, the beautiful Eveline. The rich man had died from typhoid fever, and around him servants similarly fell prey to the disease. Eveline suspects foul play, and, fearing for her own life, consults the modern science sleuth. Kennedy proves her suspicions correct using the latest bacteriological, fingerprinting, and handwriting analyses. Kennedy’s efforts demonstrate that Bisbee’s lawyer, and heir under his latest will (to be revealed as a forgery), had hired Bridget Fallon (notice only one letter and a substitution of a different popular Irish name separates her from Mary Mallon), referred to as “Typhoid Bridget,” to cook for the old man, knowing she was a carrier. The lawyer carefully immunized himself before dining with Bisbee. (This is a very advanced use of typhoid immunization, since the procedure was adopted by the military in 1911 and in public use only after that: Reeve had done his homework.) Reeve does not present the cook in a positive light. While she claims her innocence, she is characterized as a drunk and an abusive person. She is nonetheless not a villain but instead the pawn of a villain; she is an instrument of someone else’s evil. This perspective on Mary Mallon’s story adds a new dimension to the range of public thinking about her meaning. A carrier was someone to be feared, someone to sympathize with, someone dangerous to others, and now someone whose dangers might be manipulated for specific gain or malice.
Another early literary rendition of Typhoid Mary is a satiric poem, “The Germ-Carrier,” written by “O. S.,” and published in the British humor magazine Punch.28
In U.S.A. (across the brook)
There lives, unless the papers err,
A very curious Irish cook
In whom the strangest things occur:
Beneath her outside’s healthy gloze
Masses of microbes seethe and wallow
And everywhere that MARY goes
Infernal epidemics follow.
The poem recounts the story of her cooking for unsuspecting families, who “bite the dust” in her wake, while she, after two years of life in isolation, “is just as germy as the day / On which she went in quarantine.” O. S., perhaps with typical British sensibility toward those whom he considers the inferior Irish, seems to approve her ultimate fate of lifelong quarantine and concludes the poem wishing similar treatment of the germ carrier’s political analogue (to the poet’s mind), Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George.
And yet she’s not the only one
That flings destruction far and wide,
And still contrives somehow to shun
The horrid poison housed inside.
O. S. draws the analogy to the liberal member of parliament whose government had recently raised taxes on wealthy Britons with his “People’s Budget.” The poet writes,
Yet where he goes the microbes spread;
You mark, though he is never ailing,
Horror that vainly scoots ahead,
And pestilence behind him trailing.
O. S. would have George (“the one who bears about / These germs of Socialistic rot”), like Mallon, “clapped in quarantine, / There to abide the country’s pleasure.” The poem, accepting Mallon’s danger at face value, expropriates her story as a tool for political commentary.
There are three representations of Mary Mallon in these earliest public productions of her character and life. The first, the social deviant cognizant of her own evil and insistently continuing her dangerous behavior, is the most powerful image, but it was not yet very common at the time of her release in 1910. This image, represented most strongly by the drawing of the cook who kills, puts the blame squarely on the carrier and absolves her captors from any guilt. The second, the innocent who unknowingly or unwittingly causes harm, is similarly compelling and as resonant today as it was in Mallon’s time. A basically humane stance, it excuses the person of conscious complicity and guilt—she was an inadvertent menace—but still admits that sanctions may be brought and remedies applied. The third depiction, of a person who has no say in how her dangers will be used and is a mere instrument in the hands of evil, is significantly less appealing in American culture today when human agency and will are such valued attributes. But it, too, has not disappeared, and remnants of “Typhoid Bridget” can be recognized in our present-day efforts to find villains and assign blame for our own epidemic woes.
In these early-twentieth-century portrayals there is a range of responses to Mary Mallon that continued throughout her life. We recognize a level of comfort sought by the healthy and established in stigmatizing an identifiable enemy, an enemy determined by science but also recognizable by specific social markers. Mary Mallon, in all of her various levels of culpability, represents pollution—pollution of food, pollution of healthy
unsuspecting bodies, pollution of womanhood and the home. She is a deviant, a threat to the very core of society through the germs that grow in her body and spew out to infect others. She must be shunned. She may stir the pot innocently, but the ultimate result is sickness and death for those who come into contact with her. Mallon herself remains healthy, perhaps the final proof of her guilt and her power to harm. No matter what she brings upon others, she remains unscathed. She gets away with it.
When Mary Mallon resurfaced in 1915 after five years out of the news and was found to have violated the agreement she made with the health department not to cook again, the tide of public sympathy as depicted in the popular press turned sharply against her. The news reports of her capture, although still very dramatic, this time lacked compassion for her situation. The (New York) Sun, for example, published a gripping account:
A squad of sanitary police who had been immunized against typhoid climbed into a department automobile and surrounded the house. . . . Down a side street lurked another automobile in which sat waiting Dr. Westmoreland of the Health Department and more policemen. When all was ready Sergt. Coneally rang the door bell. There was silence. He rang again and again, but no sound came from the house.
Having thus captured readers’ attention, the report continued: “A ladder was then found and Coneally climbed to a window at the second floor.” When Coneally “poked his head into a semi-dark room,” a dog “snarl[ed] from the shadows,” and another dog joined the chorus. “Down the ladder came the sergeant discreetly and procured some pieces of meat.”
The peace offering allowed the officers to enter the house by the second floor window. They heard the “muffled sound of a slamming door in a room beyond.”
And so the officers last Friday were expectant of trouble. As they went from room to room the muffled door slamming was always just a room ahead of them. At last they pushed open the door of a bathroom and found a woman crouching there. She told them finally, they say, that she was Mary Mallon.29
Cornered. The editor showed no “cheap sympathy” with Mary Mallon this time. “What would have been done in the case of a man with hysterical homicidal tendencies who had been convicted of murder and had fought detention by every legal and other quibble?” he asked, immediately answering his own question, “Surely he would not have been discharged under parole.” And neither should Mary Mallon have been given a second chance to harm people. This “wretch who disregarded the plain warning of the health authorities and deliberately went forth on her mission of death and misery” should be kept in “real isolation.” And other carriers too, the editor continued, should not receive any “sentimental sympathy on account of innocence and misfortune.” He called for laws to protect the people against such menaces to the public’s health.30
Other newspapers added vivid details to the story. The New York World revealed that the woman had been “well veiled and apparently very anxious to escape attention,” but that an officer was convinced it was Mary Mallon “since he remembered peculiarities of her walk from having had a part in her apprehension eight years before”—an assessment that hearkens back to George Soper’s description of Mallon’s walk (and her mind) as “masculine.”31
The New York Tribune put the common media view about Mallon starkly the second time around: “The sympathy which would naturally be granted to Mary Mallon is largely modified for this reason,” wrote the editors. “The chance was given to her five years ago to live in freedom, and . . . she deliberately elected to throw it away.” Thus, “it is impossible to feel much commiseration for her.”
Doubtless there are others no wiser—there were many, and they were very noisy, when her case first came to public notice—who think it an outrage that her liberty should be interfered with. But the plain and obvious fact is that we have no way of dealing with these unlucky persons except by keeping them where they cannot do harm to others. Many epidemic outbreaks of typhoid fever have been traced indisputably to carriers. These may involve hundreds of people and cause many deaths. Are such sacrifices to be made on the score of individual liberty where we have to deal with persons that do not know how to make a reasonable use of their liberty?32
Mallon’s use of an alias, “Mrs. Brown,” at the Sloane Hospital where she was caught cooking in 1915 particularly angered public commentators. Using a pseudonym more than implied—it seemed to demonstrate—that Mallon was aware that she should not be in the kitchen. She had been deliberately deceptive. As George Soper told the New York Times, which now seemed to agree, given these conditions, “liberty is an impossible privilege to allow her.”33
The 1915 popular reports on Mary Mallon helped turn public opinion from sympathy and curiosity to anger and fear and gave support to her long-term isolation. Her high profile, as well as the strong negative judgment that dominated the media, made it easier for health officials to isolate Mary Mallon once again. Officials acted in the wake of loudly voiced public approval. She was now Typhoid Mary, a villain who could not be trusted, who had to be locked away in order to protect innocent people.
Although commentators continued to see personal misfortune in the situation after 1915, few lamented it anymore. Mary Mallon could now be blamed outright; this time she had consciously done wrong. Newspapers supported and advertized Soper’s views: “She has long been confronted with the facts and yet, she has had the assurance to go to a hospital, and of all places, a maternity hospital, to cook and possibly pollute the food of some 300 people.”34 This was unforgivable. This was evil. By 1915, the negativism voiced first in 1907 about potential danger and pollution from healthy carriers now dominated the media’s perception of Typhoid Mary. The human qualities and personal tragedy of Mary Mallon fell away to be replaced by an inhuman monster who would deliberately use her body to inflict harm on others.
Scientific American united all the negative qualities assigned to Typhoid Mary in a single editorial and indicated how closely the popular media and the scientific community interacted by 1915 when Mallon reemerged as a cook:
The great trouble with Typhoid Mary has been her perversity, exceeding even that which obtains in her most temperamental of callings. She has never conceded herself a menace; she has not obeyed the sanitary directions given her; she would not wash and disinfect her hands as required; she will not change her occupation for one in which she will not endanger the lives of others; under an assumed name she had competed with the Wandering Jew in scattering destruction in her path.35
The litany identified the areas of Mary Mallon’s culpability: she refused to accept official authority, she persisted in cooking, an occupation itself without virtue, and she consciously deceived. The analogy to the “Wandering Jew” emphasized an ethnic component to Mallon’s perceived guilt and made it clear how her story evoked deep-seated social prejudices and powerful emotions.
The passion evident against Mary Mallon in this period of her second, and now to be life-long, incarceration was stronger than any attached to other healthy carriers who also disobeyed health department regulations and continued to cook after being informed about their danger. Just as health officials did not usually label and stigmatize men like Alphonse Cotils, Tony Labella, and Frederick Moersch as to their ethnicity, sex, or personal appearance, the news media remained nonjudgmental and unemotional about the culpability of these other recalcitrant carriers, people who returned to cooking after being informed they endangered others. In their lopsided coverage, the editors showed themselves to be players and shapers, and not just reflectors, in the events.
The New York Times articles about Tony Labella, for example, called him an “alleged” typhoid carrier even though both the New York and New Jersey health officials had determined this to be his status. The reporter concluded a matter-of-fact story about him (with no personal description) with, “He persists in handling food, although he has been warned repeatedly by the State Board not to do so, it is alleged.”36 Labella, who had been traced to more cases and deaths from typhoid fever
than Mary Mallon and had disobeyed health regulations repeatedly, was only very briefly isolated by the health department (in New Jersey) and never received an emotional condemnation by the press.37
Personal details about Alphonse Cotils are also scarce in the news stories informing the public that this bakery owner, “despite warnings from the Health Department . . . had been discovered preparing a strawberry shortcake.”38 The judge’s suspended sentence that permitted Cotils to return home, and possibly to his surreptitious cooking, received no disapproving judgment in the press. The Tribune revealed that “the Health Department at various times . . . had tried to keep Cotils away from food handling, but was unsuccessful until his recent arrest.” Identifying the accused as a “Belgian baker,” with no other social identifiers, the reporter added, “He was frequently warned . . . but did not heed the warnings.”39 When the health department “asked him to sign a pledge never to engage in business having to do with foodstuffs,” and “Cotils refused, declaring his physician . . . had found him in a perfectly healthy condition,” the court released him anyway and the newspaper still did not find fault with this judgment.40 Similarly, the World reported that Cotils may have “obtained the [food-handling] certificate under false pretenses,” and yet did not question whether or not he could be trusted when “Cotils said he would leave his wife and two children, for a while at least, [and] take a residence in the country.”41 Apparently, his defiance of authorities after being informed of his dangerous carrier state did not cause authorities or the press to distrust him.
The American, true to form, headlined a lengthy story on Cotils, “Health Board Bars Robust Baker, Typhoid Carrier.” This rendition was the only news story to give a physical description of Cotils, noticing his “ruddy cheeks and broad shoulders.” The image presented of a robust man in the prime of health was positive, whereas nearly identical words were used to describe Mary Mallon negatively. “I am a well man,” Cotils told Gene Fowler, the American reporter. “Do I look sick? . . . You say I am a menace. I am not a menace, for all I do is mind my own business and work hard.”42
Typhoid Mary Page 16