Typhoid Mary

by Judith Walzer Leavitt

  One of the reasons health officials did not trust Mary Mallon was that she claimed not to accept the medical finding that she was a dangerous carrier. Alphonse Cotils, too, told reporters, “I am a healthy, normal person.” Cotils continued, “To-day we asked our regular customers if they had any typhoid fever in their families. They all said no.”43 His skepticism seemed as genuine as Mallon’s, although the fact that he was informed of his carrier state seventeen years after Mary Mallon’s initial capture and nine years after her rearrest had familiarized the public with the carrier phenomenon should have made his excuse somewhat less convincing. Yet the popular press, like the judge, accepted his promise that this time he would stay out of his bakery. Perhaps influenced by the same class-, ethnicity-, and gender-based perceptions that affected the health officials, the media seemed content with Cotils’s suspended sentence and did not voice a desire to isolate him from his fellow New Yorkers either by words or in fact.

  News reporters got a little more excited when Frederick Moersch reappeared in 1928 as a healthy carrier who knowingly continued to prepare food for other people. The dramatic quality of their stories almost equalled those about Mary Mallon. But the coverage was, for the most part, nonjudgmental regarding Moersch himself. Only one newspaper made reference to “Typhoid Freddie,” and the term was not used elsewhere. Moersch was not stigmatized in the reporting, and writers noted no public anger directed against him. On the other hand, reporters remembered Typhoid Mary in all articles about these other typhoid fever carriers, and set her aside as the example of the ultimate in potential health danger.44

  Writing about the fifty-one-year-old Moersch, the World bemoaned that he was “fated to spread disease and death in his path.” Yet the focus of their news story was on the scene at his ice cream parlor: “Crowds, aroused by rumors of the case, surged about it all yesterday afternoon. Children, unaware of all the aspects of the tragedy, darted in to throw insults and curses upon Moersch’s oldest daughter.” The twenty-eight-year-old “blond and strikingly pretty” woman particularly concerned the reporter, who noted sympathetically, “She perhaps will suffer more than many other innocent victims of her father’s germ-spreading influence. . . . She already has experienced more than the average share of misfortune.” The woman’s husband had died four months before this event, and she had given birth to her second child only weeks following his death. “Now the store, her only means of livelihood, is doomed to certain failure.”

  “What’s going to happen to me and my children?” Fredericka Kraus sobbed to the reporter: “It’s not our savings alone that’s invested in this store. It’s our insurance, every penny we have. . . . And the way people are treating us! Don’t they realize it isn’t our fault?”45 The health department closed the store, destroyed the ice cream that Moersch had made, sterilized the display cases, and then allowed the ice cream parlor to reopen.

  As a result of the excitement over Moersch’s case in Greenwich Village, Will F. Clarke of the World studied the phenomenon of healthy carriers of typhoid fever and reported his findings to the public in “City Watches 208 Typhoid Carriers.” Clark wrote about all the healthy people “walking about the streets of New York almost every day” who could cause typhoid epidemics. “Just so long as they exercise such judgment [not to prepare food] they are permitted their liberty,” he wrote. Realizing that Moersch had returned to confectionery work knowing he was a carrier, Clarke wondered “whether this was done unthinkingly or willfully.” The press had not posed such a generous question about Mary Mallon’s 1915 return to cooking. Clarke did not mention Tony Labella or Alphonse Cotils here, but he wrote the outline of Mary Mallon’s story, finding that after “the better part of twenty-one years in isolation . . . she is near sixty, has her own little cottage and seems resigned.”46

  Over the years Mary Mallon lived on North Brother Island, occasional stories about her appeared in the public press. For example, in 1935, the Sunday magazine section of the New York Daily Mirror printed, “I Wonder What’s Become of—‘Typhoid Mary.’ ”47 Both the text and visuals of this article are softer than the earlier hostility toward Mary Mallon. Reprinting the original and much used 1909 photograph of Mallon in bed at Willard Parker Hospital following her initial detention, the article featured a sketch of a kindly older woman, a contemporary rendition of the aging Mallon (see fig. 5.7). Bespectacled and grandmotherly, the portrait looks directly from the page with honesty and innocence. The woman here is again the innocent vehicle, one who is shown to be motherly and kind. The only “menace” on this page is in a third illustration, a separate drawing of the “germs, greatly enlarged by microscope,” that Mallon’s body carries. The difference between this and earlier benevolent depictions is that the blame is more clearly shifted away from the human carrier to the germs she carried.

  Fig. 5.7 Mary Mallon, drawing, 1933.

  Interestingly, the reporter who traveled out to North Brother Island to do his research on Mallon did not mention the other healthy carrier who then still lived and worked on the island, Frederick Moersch.48 As discussed previously (see chap. 4), Moersch was a carrier who had broken parole and had endangered about three times as many New Yorkers as did Mary Mallon, but he had never attracted an emotional response from the public media.

  In 1935, three years before Mallon’s death, Stanley Walker wrote an extended narrative on “Typhoid Carrier No. 36” for the New Yorker magazine.49 George Soper found Walker’s article “flippant” and the “source of much of the misinformation” about Mary Mallon, but, in fact, it contained no more distortion than others.50 Relying heavily on Soper’s own published work, Walker characterized Mallon as “defiant, sly, and difficult to capture or control,” again repeating and accepting some of the social prejudices that earlier characterized stories about Mallon. Perry Barlow’s drawing that accompanied the story depicted a cook, a woman without a face, hard at her work (see fig. 5.8). No skulls floated out of her cooking pot, but the large shadow lurking behind the cook is more than a suggestion that all is not right.

  Walker’s visit to Mary Mallon on North Brother Island convinced him that in her later years Catholicism provided “some of the consolation which was denied to her during a lifetime as a pariah—unwanted and untouchable.”51 Walker did not question the health department’s decision to hold Mallon on North Brother Island, and he painted the picture of a health department in control of the difficult problem of healthy carriers. He acknowledged that for Mary Mallon “life has been pretty tough,” and he noted that “the jolly girl who went out to cook when McKinley was President turned out to be that symbol of pestilence known as Typhoid Mary.”52

  In the telling and the retelling of Mary Mallon’s story, news reporters and other writers sometimes confused the facts, changing the dates of her incarceration and the number of people she supposedly infected.53 But more important in analyzing the meaning of the news stories is to understand the characterizations and representations of Mary Mallon and the evolution of the concept of Typhoid Mary. Perhaps because she was the first carrier to be traced and publicized, perhaps because of her social class, or perhaps because the media had already made her story a symbol for something much larger, Mary Mallon continued to fascinate newspaper readers. Her story reached deep into America’s cultural imagination, provoking curiosity, fear, and hostility Even today the phrase “Typhoid Mary” echoes around the world as a rallying cry for the need for protection against individuals who threaten the public’s health.

  Fig. 5.8. Mary Mallon at stove, drawing, 1935.

  In 1958, when reporters covered Mary Mallon’s death, as earlier, they continued to use the dehumanizing terms “human culture tube” and “veritable peripatetic breeding ground” and continued to imply that her situation was anomalous.54 The New York World-Telegram guessed that as many as 200,000 typhoid carriers lived in the United States and noted that 237 were under the New York City Health Department’s observation. Nonetheless, their writers believed that “ ‘Typhoid Mary�
� was distinct by [being] what psychologists call ‘uncooperative.’ ” Hearkening to gender expectations, the newspaper reflected, “She was not imbued with that sweet reasonableness which would have allowed her to listen to the explanations of learned men about her peculiar case.”55 The implication was that had Mary Mallon been reasonable and sweet—more traditionally feminine—she might not have become Typhoid Mary, a conclusion that continued to single her out while ignoring the numerous other reported uncooperative carriers.56

  Mary Mallon suffered a series of small strokes, and late in 1932 a major one paralyzed her and left her bedridden until her death on November 11, 1938.57 The newspapers covered her funeral at St. Luke’s Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx. “Nine Mysterious Mourners” attended it, but refused to speak with reporters or identify themselves.58 She was “alone in death as she had been in life,” wrote her advocate, the New York American. “In later years Mary lost some of her bitterness after she became interested in the Roman Catholic Faith. But it was a gray, leaden existence at best.”59 More than half of her adult life had been spent in her island confinement.

  Over the years of Mallon’s life, the popular media did more than report on the first woman in America to be labeled and traced as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. From the beginning, led by William Randolph Hearst and followed by his competitors for the New York newspaper market, the press presented Mallon’s story to the public in a stylized form. Newspaper writers and editors (and their publishing colleagues) shaped and reshaped the message, through positive and negative representations, through omissions, through an emphasis on her uniqueness, through efforts to arouse emotions, and through language that negated Mallon’s humanity. In these ways they created and presented their own perspective on why Mary Mallon’s story was significant. In so doing, they influenced public opinion and official actions and underscored a potent construction of Typhoid Mary as a woman polluted, a social pariah to be feared and shunned.

  “Banished Like a Leper”

  Loss of Liberty and Personal Misfortune

  CHAPTER SIX

  When health officials apprehended Alphonse Cotils in 1924 for violating the health code and preparing food in his restaurant even though he was a known typhoid fever carrier, Cotils protested to the authorities, “I am not a Typhoid Mary . . . I always wear a white coat and a white hat and white working pants. I am a clean man.”1 With these words, Cotils set himself apart from Mary Mallon, though both were healthy people accused of knowingly carrying and disseminating pathogenic bacteria through their cooking. His case was different, Cotils thought, because his personal hygiene habits were superior. Cotils refused to ally himself with the notorious woman then isolated on North Brother Island.

  Herein lies Mary Mallon’s particular tragedy. Not even her fellow carriers would claim her as their own. People accused of transmitting disease to others in the same ways that Mallon did thought themselves innocent, but believed the worst about her. She was dirty; they were clean. She was evil; they were good. She was deviant; they were normal. Alienated even from those who carried the same disease she did, Mary Mallon stood truly alone.

  If the world insisted in keeping her at arms’ length, Mallon responded by building her own armor to keep the world at bay. Her defenses were very strong and her instincts very private; thus her inner thoughts and her full motivations will never be known. But we can examine and begin to piece together an understanding of how she experienced her role as America’s first monitored healthy carrier. We can understand how the early caricature of her as a social evil influenced much of what happened to her. We can see, beyond the caricature, a real woman, of flesh and blood, who stood necessarily in defiance against her public definition.

  If Alphonse Cotils could have known Mary Mallon, perhaps he might have recognized a certain kinship in adversity with a woman who believed as he did that she was not a menace to society, and who believed herself to be, as he did, a person misjudged, a person who should be allowed to earn her living doing what she knew best. “I’m Persecuted!” Mallon shouted in the newspaper headline when her story broke. “Before God and in the eyes of decent men my name is Mary Mallon. I was christened and baptized Mary Mallon. I lived a decent, upright life under the name of Mary Mallon until I was seized,” she said. Then, she pointed out, in a statement that indicates her understanding of the full power of symbols, “[I was] locked up in a pest-house and rechristened ‘Typhoid Mary,’ the name by which the world has ever since known me.”2

  Mary Mallon was born on September 23, 1869, in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland. Her parents were John Mallon and Catherine Igo Mallon.3 She told friends that she had come to the United States in 1883, at the age of about fifteen, and had lived for a while with her aunt and uncle.4 She told officials that she had lived in New York City since her emigration.5 As an adult she spoke with a “lilting brogue.”6

  Her employment record before 1897, when she began her three-year engagement as a cook for the New York family that summered in Mamaroneck, is not recoverable. However, in the fourteen years between 1883, when she arrived in the United States and may have first worked out of her relatives’ home, and 1897, when Soper picked up her record, it is probable that Mary Mallon, like legions of other Irish-American young single women, followed a typical work pattern of domestic labor in the homes of relatively well-to-do native-born New Yorkers.

  More than any other ethnic group, Irish-born young single women frequently came to the United States alone.7 The large majority of these women found work as domestic laborers throughout the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth: by 1920 still “81 percent of those employed worked as domestic servants.”8 In the words of one historian, “Irish girls [who came to America] accepted servanthood as a fact of life.”9 Irish-born men and women who settled in America found themselves mired in jobs with minimal occupational mobility, although their children often moved more rapidly up the occupational ladder, the sons often through the church and politics, and the daughters in teaching or trade.10

  The Irish in America suffered poor health often related to their limited employment opportunities and concentration in congested urban areas. Irish women, particularly, fell prey to tuberculosis, and the rate of infant mortality among the Irish remained high. One historian has concluded, “In the early 20th century the Irish were the only immigrant group in the United States whose [general] mortality rate was higher than in the homeland.”11

  We know from labor and immigration historians that the conditions of Mallon’s life as a domestic servant at the turn of the century were undoubtedly grim. Domestic servants worked long and strenuous hours. They were usually single women who lived in the homes of their employers, and (except sometimes for a half-day off) they were always on call. A typical day began at 6:00 A.M. and did not end until after-dinner cleaning, well into the evening hours. Usually the women were on their feet the entire day, except when they took their own meals, which were often leftovers from the family table.12 A telling rendition of a new immigrant’s experiences with domestic labor comes from a labor journalist who wrote at the turn of the century a graphic fictionalized account of the “greenhorns” she had studied. Imitating what she thought was an uneducated immigrant’s dialect, Mary Heaton Vorse wrote, “I come to this cuntry when I was 15. . . . I was a tall girl for my age and had fat red cheeks and lookt strong and helthy.”

  Fokes dont no how strange things is I usto cry and cry most all the night just from homesickness and diseuragment. . . . nobody showed me ennything, I was willin an I am no duller than the next one and I think with a little showin I might have done fine . . . I was just fritened clear through all the time I was in that place they thought I was sullen . . . green girls is awfull bashfull and don’t know how to speak up for themselvs any more than children.13

  Historians have well documented the vulnerability of the young, single, immigrant women who had to make their own way in the labor market in the period in which Mary Mallon carved
her own niche in New York City’s kitchens. The status of domestic work, never very high, fell by the end of the century, even though most employed women continued to work in other’s homes. Working women objected to the lack of freedom that domestic work entailed and also to the uniforms that represented their servitude.14 Irish women particularly (along with African-American women) felt the added stings of discrimination. Historian Susan Strasser has concluded, “The feeling that domestic service implied social inferiority was ‘practically universal.’ ” Strasser quotes a “shop girl” from the period who said, “Young men think and say, ‘Oh, she can’t be much if she hasn’t got brains enough to make her living outside a kitchen.’ You’re just down, once for all, if you go into one.”15 A shirtmaker put it even more starkly, “My objection to housework is that in many places a hired girl is much less than a dog.”16

  According to historian David Katzman, Irish domestic workers particularly felt unwelcome in their employers’ homes. “Most were Roman Catholic and from rural Ireland, so their religion and outlook contrasted sharply with those of their employers.” Katzman has demonstrated that the “No Irish need apply” attitude of the pre-Civil War period had declined in American cities by the end of the nineteenth century, but that “the difference between the religion of the kitchen and that of the parlor” continued to characterize domestic relations. The differences were a special concern to the “mistresses” who hired the family’s help and who tried to maintain a “Calvinistic or evangelical Protestant mood in their household.”17