Typhoid Mary
Page 19
Fig. 6.1. One of the concrete buildings of Riverside Hospital, North Brother Island, date unknown.
Let us return to North Brother Island, where health officials moved a resistant, scared, and angry Mary Mallon weeks after seizing her in March, 1907. North Brother Island is one of a pair of small land masses in the East River (the other is South Brother Island), between the Bronx and Riker’s Island. A ferry connected the island with the mainland at 132nd Street in the Bronx, and it shuttled doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and patients back and forth across the water. In those years, Riverside Hospital, a city hospital that catered to tuberculosis patients, dominated the island (see fig. 6.1).48 Mercifully for her, the health department did not put Mallon inside the main hospital or in any of its various concrete satellites, where she would have been exposed to the respiratory ailment, but instead let her live in a one-room frame bungalow on the grounds, where she could contemplate her fate alone (see fig. 6.2).
Fig. 6.2. Mary Mallon’s cottage, North Brother Island, date unknown.
When Mary Mallon arrived, there were sixteen buildings on the island, which ultimately doubled to thirty-two (see fig. 6.3). Half of the buildings were already aging in 1907, having been built around the time the island saw its first contagious disease patients in 1885, and the rest had been built in the past three years.49 Mary Mallon may have lived in two different buildings during her first confinement, the main one of which was a small building near the chapel.50 Her view, if she looked off the island toward the docks, was of the Bronx looming across the river (see fig. 6.4). She later told an associate that before she moved there, she knew the island, as did most New Yorkers of the period, as the site of the disastrous sinking of the General Slocum steamboat, during a fiery accident in June, 1904, in which over one thousand German-born New Yorkers on a pleasure outing had drowned.51
Fig. 6.3. North Brother Island plot plan, 1943.
Fig. 6.4. View from North Brother Island showing the Bronx and the East River, date unknown.
The only extant health department records of Mary Mallon’s early years on North Brother Island indicate that her stools underwent repeated and frequent analysis (see chap. 1). There is no evidence beyond Soper’s account of his own attempts to explain the situation to Mary Mallon that officials tried to implement for her a program of education or rehabilitation. Given Mallon’s strong resistance to being held at Willard Parker Hospital and her determined resolve to keep her own counsel, it is probable that officials initially wanted to study the laboratory reports and meanwhile give Mallon time to cool off. If they had plans beyond this, they left no records of them, nor did they implement any efforts to try to return Mary Mallon to the community.
At the time of her habeas corpus hearing in 1909, the media spread the story that Mary Mallon had been confined alone during her early years on North Brother Island. “She says she has been kept like a leper for the last two years, with only a dog for company,” wrote the reporter for the (New York) Sun: “She says that her food has been shoved through the door three times a day by a nurse, who immediately ran away.”52 The New York American, especially, portrayed the injustice of an attractive and healthy woman, at mid-career, living out her days in complete isolation. “I never had typhoid in my life, and have always been healthy,” the reporter quoted from his interview with Mary Mallon. “Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only a dog for a companion?” The reporter believed that her appearance in court was “the first time in two years she had been released from the cabin on North Brother Island.” The reporter quoted Mallon as saying:
This contention that I am a perpetual menace in the spread of typhoid germs is not true. My own doctors say I have no typhoid germs. I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast—a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.
The American reporter insisted that on the island “a keeper, three times each day, brings food to her door and then flees as if from a pestilence.” The news account claimed that Mallon’s “chief fear” during her years on the island was that doctors would “etherize her and perform a surgical operation to prove their theory.”53
We recognize in this account the voice of a woman who perceived herself to be alone in a hostile world in which she could trust no one and in which she had no allies. The American reporter gave her, for the first time in twenty-six months, a sympathetic audience. She could hope that with a lawyer speaking for her and an eager media ready to believe her it might be possible to return to the life she had been forced abruptly to abandon. If she exaggerated her situation in describing the degree of her isolation, it was in the cause of producing sympathy for her attempt to gain her freedom.
Although alone in her cottage, Mary Mallon probably had more opportunities to mingle with nurses, physicians, and possibly tuberculosis patients on the island than these accounts indicate, though unfortunately, there is no logbook record of daily activities on North Brother Island for these early isolation years, either inside or outside of Riverside Hospital.54 The photographs published in the American themselves belied the text, in purporting to show Mary Mallon sitting in the sun with other patients or eating in the common dining room (see chap. 5). Furthermore, there would have been no medical or public health reason to keep Mary Mallon from wandering around the island and seeking companionship.
It is probable that in the early days, weeks, and even months of her stay on North Brother Island that Mallon was in no mood to seek social encounters or graciously receive approaches of friendship. It is also possible that word of her dangers had seeped into island gossip, and that many people went out of their way to avoid her. But there is also some evidence to suggest that, despite such possible barriers, Mallon made friends during the years of her first incarceration and that she interacted socially with at least a few others on the island.
In an interview with a reporter from the New York World, Mallon depicted her days as including social interactions. The reporter sympathized with Mallon’s “imprisonment which would drive most people insane,” but portrayed a less onerous imprisonment than the other newspapers:
Mary Mallon is permitted the freedom of the island, and the doctors are glad to have her nurse the children who are there with every kind of contagious disease. . . . Not only does she nurse them but she prepares their meals. She is allowed to mingle freely with all the other patients on the island and she is employed by both doctors and nurses to do their finer pieces of laundry for them. Doctors and nurses on the Island frequently go to her room and eat the good things she has cooked.55
It is hard to believe this description. Just as the American portrayal of a woman totally isolated from all human contact seems overdrawn, this one suggesting Mallon often prepared food for others is also suspect. Food preparation was the specific known way that Mallon was said to have transmitted typhoid fever. Her days on the island probably fall somewhere between the two accounts. She described her daily routine to the World reporter in these terms: “I get up in the morning, fix my room, eat my breakfast, and then wait until it is time to go to bed again. Often I help nurse the other patients on the Island and often the children will have no one else take care of them when they are very sick.”56 This part of her story, which includes no food preparation, seems believable, especially when compared to descriptions of the years of her second incarceration (see below).
A nurse later confirmed that her acquaintance and ultimate friendship with Mary Mallon began in these months immediately following Mallon’s 1907 arrival on the island, clear evidence that Mallon did not live completely unconnected to others. Adelaide Jane Offspring, a registered nurse employed at Riverside Hospital, wrote that she “met Mary Mallon . . . at the said Riverside Hospital in 1907,” and that she was “in constant and intimate association” with her during all the years the two were on the island
together, 1907 to 1910, and 1915 until Offspring’s retirement in 1935. Offspring returned to the island in 1938 to nurse Mallon through her final illness. The nurse wrote that Mallon “was freely permitted to have visitors.”57
Mary Mallon claimed only a few friends when she wrote her will in 1933, and Offspring seemed to be closest to her. Mallon made Offspring the executor of the will, and, after designating a few small gifts to others, bequeathed everything to her. Mallon left her money and valuables to her friend, “in appreciation of the many courtesies and kindnesses which she has extended to me during the association of twenty-six years.”58 The sullen temper Mallon showed to health authorities obviously did not extend to all of her social encounters.
During the years from March, 1907, until her February, 1910, release, Mallon did not have any formal employment on North Brother Island, or any formal demands placed on her. She had considerable time to think about her situation, which seemed merely to harden her resistance to the health department. She told reporters in 1909 that she felt there were “two kinds of justice in America.” The kind meted out to her did not give the benefit of reasonable doubt that even “murderers” were permitted, but rather she was “flung into prison without a fair trial, denied the privilege of seeing her lawyer and given no chance to clear herself.” From this, Mallon concluded, “All the water in the ocean wouldn’t clear me from this charge, in the eyes of the Health Department. They want to make a showing; they want to get credit for protecting the rich, and I am the victim.”59
Most who observed and commented on Mallon’s situation and on that of other healthy carriers did not mention the possibility of class biases in any way affecting their treatment as Mallon voiced here. One exception was the socialist newspaper, the New York Call, and a second was the antivivisectionists’ magazine, The Starry Cross. The latter wrote: “There is one common characteristic of carriers, it never varies; they are always plain people in humble circumstances; those with more money and influence who could fight back are never pronounced dangerous.”60
In addition to the clear class antagonism evident in Mallon’s words, she voiced particular animosity toward Soper, whose report on the seven families in which she had allegedly spread typhoid seemed to her to be completely unfair. “He did not see fit to mention the family I always lived with in the Bronx when I was out of work, and where I slept with the children without ever giving them typhoid,” she told the World reporter. “Will I submit quietly to staying here a prisoner all my life?” Mallon asked rhetorically. “No! As there is a God in Heaven I will get justice, somehow, sometime.”61
In these 1909 statements, Mallon revealed that “every time the Health Department examines me I send specimens by a friend to a specialist in New York.” The friend in this case was A. Briehof, the man Mallon had been living with when Soper located her in March, 1907. Mallon used the Ferguson laboratory to build her own case, wisely choosing a laboratory operated by a professor at the respected New York College of Pharmacy.62 She was triumphant about Ferguson’s findings: “The Health Department report always comes back stating that the typhus [sic] bacilli have been found. From the same specimens my own specialist, who is at the head of his profession, reports that he had found none.”63 In 1909, as in 1907, Mary Mallon had continuing reason to doubt the medical evidence behind her forcible incarceration.
For both medical and personal reasons, then, Mallon refused to accept the authority of science purporting to explain her situation and necessitate her isolation. She continued to protest her banishment. She may have found it useful to refer to herself as a victim of discrimination and unjust government forces amassed against her, but most of her language and behavior in 1909 belied passive victimhood. Although captive to the greater force of the state, Mallon behaved as a feisty and still disbelieving and angry woman actively trying to change her fate. She understood her position in opposition to the health department, and she found logic, reason, and even science on her side.
It occurred to Mary Mallon that authorities should have tried to rehabilitate her to return her to society. In her July, 1909, letter, one first intended for the editor of the New York American to respond to the June 20 story, but which she redirected to her lawyer, and which remains today with the court record, she wrote, “There was never any effort by the Board authority to do anything for me excepting to cast me on the Island & keep me a prisoner.” Because this letter remains one of the very few instances of Mallon’s own words and handwriting to survive, it is worth close examination.64
Mallon wrote, “When I first came here I was so nervous & almost prostrated with grief & trouble my eyes began to twitch & the left eye did become Paralized & would not move remained in that condition for Six Months[.]” Mallon recognized her poor mental state immediately following her capture, and she had certain expectations that her hospitalization would at least provide access to some needed medical care. While she did not feel she needed medical attention for her carrier state, she did seek it for other ailments that developed. “[T]here was an eye Specialist visited the Island 3 & 4 times a week he was never asked to visit me[.] I did not even get a cover for my eye had to hold my hand on it whilst going about & at night tie a bandage on it.” The eye continued to bother her. In December, 1907, a new physician, Dr. Wilson, “took charge.”65 Mallon wrote, “I told him about it he said that was news to him & that he would send me his Electrick battery but he never sent [it.]” Her frustration about this problem abated when “my eye got better thanks to the Almighty God In spite of the medical staff[.]”
From Mallon’s account, physicians did attend to her typhoid infectivity. They tried various remedies, including treating her unsuccessfully with urotropin (see chap. 1), and then considered releasing her. “When in January [1908] they were about to discharge me when the resident Physician came to me & asked me where was I going when I got out of here naturally I said to N.Y. so there was a stop put to my getting out of here then the Supervising Nurse told me I was a hopeless case & if Id write to [health commissioner] Dr. Darlington & tell him Id go to my Sisters in Connecticut.” Mallon refused to state what was not true: “Now I have no Sister in that state or any other in the U.S.”66
Instead of being released, Mallon got a bureaucratic run-around. “Then in April [1908] a friend of mine went to Dr. Darlington & asked him when [I] was to get away he replied that woman is all right now & she is a very expensive woman but I cannot let her go my self the Board has to sit.” The friend was Briehof, who was told, Mallon said, to “come around Saturday[.] When he did Dr. Darlington told this man Ive nothing more to do with this woman go to Dr. Studiford [sic] [.]67 He went to that Doctor,” Mallon continued, “& he said I cannot let that woman go & all the people that she gave the typhoid to & so many deaths occurred in the families she was with.”68
The only chance Studdiford provided for Mallon to be released, according to Mallon’s account, was “to have an Operation performed to have her Gall Bladder removed.” The physician asked Briehof to convince Mallon to undergo the surgery. (As we have seen, most physicians at the time regarded such surgery as risky and not likely to relieve the carrier condition.) He told Briehof, according to Mallon,
She’ll have the best Surgeon in town to do the Cutting. I said no[.] no Knife will be put on me I’ve nothing the matter with my gall bladder. Dr. Wilson asked me the very same question I also told him no then he replied it might not do you any good also the Supervising nurse asked me to have an operation performed. I also told her no & she made the remark would it not be better for you to have it done than remain here I told her no.69
Mallon continued to refuse surgery, seeing it as part of a plot against her. She wanted to be freed, but not at such a risk. Obviously, she valued her life, even within its severe restraints.
Then, in October, 1908, another physician visited Mallon on North Brother Island. “[H]e did take quite an interest in me he really thought I liked it here that I did not care for my freedom.” Although Mallon set hi
m straight on that issue, she did promise him to try some more medicine. But she was tired of the experiments. She wrote, “I have been in fact a peep show for Every body even the Internes had to come to see me & ask about the facts alredy Known to the whole wide World[.]” She did not like being exhibited: “the Tuberculosis men would say there she is the Kidnapped woman[.]” She resented William Park’s lecture describing her situation to the American Medical Association in Chicago: “Dr Parks has had me Illustrated in Chicago I wonder how the Said Dr Wm H. Park would like to be insulted and put in the Journal & call him or his wife Typhoid William Park” (see fig. 6.5).