Mallon’s July, 1909, letter and her public statements to reporters reveal a woman still confused and upset by the events that took over her life two years earlier. She had a fairly sophisticated understanding of how the term Typhoid Mary had obscured her individuality, and she was aware that she did not have the full attention of health officials to her plight. They thoroughly examined her feces and urged her to undergo a surgical procedure, but they did not give careful consideration to her other physical complaints or to the adversity of her constrained life as a prisoner on the island. In the letter, Mallon sounds cynical and defeated, attitudes that seem to have overtaken her initial anger and resistance. These sentiments must have been strengthened in July, 1909, when the judge sent her back to the island, this time with little hope of release.
Seven months later, though, in February, 1910, Health Commissioner Ernst J. Lederle, with the approval of the board of health, did release Mary Mallon and allow her to return to Manhattan and to those parts of her former life that did not involve cooking. George Francis O’Neill, Mallon’s lawyer, precipitated the release when he wrote the new commissioner immediately after his appointment in January to call his attention to Mallon’s incarceration. The conditions of her release, which she agreed to, were that she “is prepared to change her occupation (that of cook), and will give assurance by affidavit that she will upon her release take such hygienic precautions as will protect those with whom she comes in contact, from infection.” In signing the agreement on February 19, 1910, Mary Mallon swore, “I have read and considered the said [board of health] resolution and am willing to abide by the provisions thereof.” Her statement promised, “I shall change said occupation upon being released from Riverside Hospital.” While agreeing to “take measures to protect any and all persons with whom I may come in contact from any infection,” Mallon’s statement added the phrase, “which it is possible I may cause.”70
Fig. 6.5. Excerpt from Mary Mallon letter, 1909.
Aware of her previous denial that she had transmitted typhoid fever to anyone, the added phrase resonates loudly. Even as she capitulated in a sworn statement that she would not again cook for other people, Mallon equivocated. She was not yet convinced of her culpability.
We do not know what Mallon was thinking at the time she signed the legal document binding her to change her career. Newspapers reported her release from the island, but no reporter interviewed her. Lederle issued a statement to the press about his sympathy for her: “I have taken a personal interest in her case and I am doing what I can for her,” he told the New York Times. “She is a good cook and until her detention had always made a comfortable living. Now she is debarred from it, and I really do not know what she can do.” Lederle said he knew where she was, but he did not divulge that information.71 Commissioner Lederle told an American reporter, “She was incarcerated for the public’s good, and now it is up to the public to take care of her.”72
It is not possible for us to answer with certainty why Mary Mallon agreed to the conditions set forth by the health authorities if she still had doubts about her guilt in spreading disease. Perhaps, after refusing a year before to say that she would go to live with a sister in Connecticut, she overcame such reluctance to stretch the truth, and she signed the statement realizing it was an overstatement of what she intended. A lie seemed a smaller risk than surgery. Or perhaps Lederle had convinced her that she could find employment and adequate income without returning to cooking. Whatever her reasoning, she did convince Lederle that she would desist from cooking in return for her freedom. But as Lederle realized, what was she to do? And where was she to do it?
Apparently, Mallon found ways to comply with the agreement for a few years and prepared no food from her release in February, 1910, through December, 1911, almost two years, and probably through September, 1912.73 But she claimed at the end of 1911 that since her release in February, 1910, “she ha[d] been unable to follow her trade of cooking, and her chances of making a living have been greatly reduced.” Because of her lost wages and status in the labor market, she brought a damage suit for false imprisonment against the city and the board of health again with the help of lawyer George Francis O’Neill.74 The suit was dropped, for reasons we cannot recover, and Mallon went on struggling to find gainful employment outside her area of expertise. Despite Lederle’s compassionate support and his immediate help with finding a job in a laundry, he did not provide continuing practical help over time.75
Soper misrepresented Mallon’s behavior in this period when he wrote, “On her release Mary promptly disappeared. She violated every detail of the pledge she had given to the Department of Health.”76 But it was not until November, 1914, that the health department admitted that Mallon, like many other typhoid carriers it traced, “ha[d] now been lost sight of.”77 Sometime between September, 1912, when health officials voiced confidence that they had acted wisely in releasing her from detention, and November, 1914, when they first made public that they no longer knew where she was, Mallon, probably finding it impossible to make a living by any other means, returned to cooking. Soper claimed that Mallon had cooked for a private family in Newfoundland, New Jersey, sometime in 1915 and worked in a sanatorium in the same town in 1914. The health department added that she may have worked in an inn in New Jersey in 1913 and 1914. Soper also thought he located her cooking for a small family in New York City in 1914. He said that six cases of typhoid fever resulted from these employments, but he provided no details or evidence that Mary Mallon was indeed the culprit. He also did not add these cases into his own totals for the cases traced to Mary Mallon.78 We cannot independently confirm Mallon’s return to cooking until October, 1914, when the Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan hired a Mrs. Brown as a new cook. The hospital suffered an outbreak of twenty-five cases of typhoid fever in January and February of 1915, which officials subsequently traced to the cook, whom they identified as Mary Mallon.79 Health officials located her in March, 1915, and returned her to the same cottage she had previously occupied on North Brother Island.80
What led Mary Mallon back into the kitchen in 1914? For one thing, sometime during this period her companion Briehof died.81 Although he may have betrayed her to Soper in 1907, he had stood by her throughout her incarceration and had acted as her laboratory specimen courier. His death added to her financial and emotional vulnerability. Perhaps more significant, she was repeatedly unsuccessful in finding satisfying and rewarding work, as she had already indicated, and she must have felt she had no choice but to return to the work at which she knew she could make a good living. It is possible that she tried cooking for others, and when no one got sick she was reassured and felt safe taking a job at a maternity hospital. It is more likely, though, given the attitude she later expressed, that she continued to deny, to herself and to others, that she ever transmitted typhoid fever. Whatever Mallon’s reasons, we know that these years following her 1910 release were not easy for her, and she moved around seeking work. She would not have been inclined, given her previous experiences, to ask the health department to help her. It is probable, however, that once the sympathetic Lederle stepped down at the end of 1913, officials would not have been inclined to offer such help, since in these years no policy of subsidizing or systematically helping carriers was yet in place.
There is no evidence that Mallon returned to cooking willfully knowing she would infect and probably kill people. Such a conclusion would not fit what we know about her life before or after her isolation. She may have been sullen and moody in her responses to health officials, she may have been hot tempered and greatly angered by her isolation, she may have refused to believe her carrier condition, she may have been desperate for work, but there is nothing to suggest that she was a purposeful destroyer of life.82
Mallon’s use of the pseudonym “Mrs. Brown” at the Sloane Hospital was a seemingly deliberate deception, one that convinced Soper and others that she knew what she was doing and that she deserved to be detained. She cert
ainly knew that the health authorities believed that she should not be working in people’s kitchens. But there is no reason to think that she herself had come to agree with the view of herself as dangerous to the public’s health, especially if she had, as was likely during the years of her freedom, cooked for people who did not get sick and die. In using a pseudonym she may not have been showing a disregard for public safety but rather her contempt for and disbelief in the new science.83
After her return in March, 1915, Mary Mallon’s life on North Brother Island eased somewhat. Five new four-and-one-half-story concrete buildings, housing 240 patients, had been added to the facilities, and building continued apace.84 She resumed her friendship with Adelaide Offspring, and she interacted with others. Whatever question existed about her social interactions between 1907 and 1910, it is clear that after 1915 Mary Mallon had the freedom to leave her one-room bungalow and walk around the island. She started a cottage industry of making and selling goods to hospital employees. George Edington, who grew up on the island and was the son of Edmund Edington, an engineer on the ambulance boat that shuttled between the Bronx and the island, and Edmund’s wife, a waitress in the doctor’s dining room, recalled that “Mrs. Mallon baked cakes which she sold to the other women who worked on the island.” It seems incredible that health officials might have permitted this, but Edington was very clear: “My mother explained that the City provided nothing but her room and board, and that she was a cook by profession.” Edington also remembered a safer occupation: “Mrs. Mallon also did bead work and for a long time my mother had a choker of tiny blue beads that she had made.”85
There were other people with whom Mallon interacted in these years. Adele Leadley, who called herself “a friend and correspondent of Mary’s for more than thirty-eight years,” shared an interest in the “many hundreds of letters [Mallon] received from all over the world regarding her unusual case.”86 Mallon continued to write threatening letters to Hermann Biggs and S. Josephine Baker, both of whom she blamed for her isolation. Although the letters no longer exist, Biggs’s biographer, C. E. A. Winslow, who had access to Biggs’s papers, which have since disappeared, wrote that Mallon “wrote Dr. Biggs the most violently threatening letters.” Baker wrote in her autobiography that “she had threatened to kill me if she could get out.” Both statements give insight into Mallon’s frame of mind during her years of isolation, but bear no relationship to her actions during the years she was free.87 She kept in contact with the Lempe family of Wood-side, Long Island: Mary Lempe, “my friend” to whom Mallon bequeathed “all my clothing and personal effects now located in the bungalow where I reside on North Brother Island,” and Willie Lempe, her son, upon whom Mallon bestowed $200. The Lempes may have been the family that Mallon stayed with when she was not employed.88 One of the porters on the island was Tom Cane, “a charming middle-aged man with an Irish accent,” who frequently stopped by to “chat” with Mallon.89
Two things changed most drastically for Mary Mallon during the years of her second isolation. In 1918, Mallon began gainful employment in the hospital as a domestic worker. In 1922, her title changed to “nurse,” and later to “hospital helper.” Sometime around 1925 she began to assist in the hospital laboratory.90 Also in 1918, authorities began to permit Mallon to take “time off for shopping” with day trips off the island. This gendered comment about reasons for Mallon to temporarily leave the island indicated increasing trust that she would return, and her cooperation justified continuing the practice.91
We do not know Mallon’s actual duties as a worker in the hospital, or how they changed with the title changes. We do know that her employment did not drastically alter her attitude toward health authorities. In January, 1919, Mallon “refused to Submit stool specimens for examination.” A clerk in the division of epidemiology sought advice about this situation, saying “Mary Malon [sic] is loath to give any speciments [sic] of her stools claiming she does not see any improvement in her case and thinks it is useless.” The health commissioner penned in the margin, “use persuasive methods.”92 Mallon resumed giving stool samples, but she never accepted her role in transmitting disease.93
Mallon’s employment and off-island visits provided opportunities for friendships to blossom. Her relationship with the Lempe family continued during these years, and she probably visited them on some of her day trips.94 Another friendship that was particularly important to her was with a resident physician, Dr. Alexandra Plavska, who interned at Riverside Hospital in the middle of the 1920s and who hired Mallon as her laboratory assistant. Dr. Plavska was a 1917 graduate of the University of Moscow school of medicine. She immigrated to the United States and worked in the bacteriology laboratory beginning (it seems) in 1925, and, in 1927, when she was licensed to practice medicine in New York, opened a private gynecology practice in Manhattan.95 Mallon appreciated her laboratory job and remembered Plavska in her will, in which she bequeathed her $200 in memory of their association in the laboratory. She described Plavska as a “beautiful person” who was always very kind and who “believed in her.”96 According to Plavska’s daughter, the two became “close friends.” Mallon visited their home when she was able to leave the island on day trips, and the Plavskas returned the visits once Mallon was confined to the hospital by her stroke. Plavska and her daughter attended Mallon’s funeral.97
In 1929, two years after Plavska left Riverside Hospital, a young Hunter College graduate, Emma Rose Goldberg (soon to be Sherman), took a job as laboratory technician and bacteriologist at North Brother Island.98 She set up a laboratory on the second floor of the old chapel, and Mary Mallon worked with her from then until her stroke almost four years later. According to Sherman, Mallon did general cleaning up, bottle washing, and assisted with sputum smears and urine analysis, as she had done in the laboratory previously when she worked with Plavska. Sherman felt that Mallon’s work was not very reliable (in fact, she called it “slipshod”), and she repeated most of the tests herself. But Sherman understood that the laboratory work was very important to Mallon who thought she was making a contribution. The two got along well, despite the great differences in their age, education, and experiences. Sherman said that Mallon was not forthcoming with information about her life. Sherman observed Mallon walking around the hospital grounds and talking with a nurse friend, probably Offspring, further confirmation of her continuing social interactions.
As long as typhoid fever was not a topic of conversation, Sherman disclosed, Mallon was pleasant to be with. But she would not talk about typhoid and continued to show anger and distrust of health department officials. Sherman revealed that the doctors and nurses, out of Mallon’s presence, referred to her as Typhoid Mary but never would do so to her face. If they had, Sherman believed, Mallon “would have become physically violent.”99 As Soper had noted, “Nobody ever talked to her about anything she did not want to talk about.”100 Emma Sherman, feeling the same unease, let Mary Mallon choose the topics they would talk about. Sherman remembered that Mallon remained “hostile” when she referred to health authorities and to her isolation on the island. After a day trip off the island, Mallon sometimes presented Sherman with a shiny apple as a friend might, but Sherman knew her colleague was a carrier of typhoid fever, and put it away without eating it.101
One day sometime in 1931 or 1932, Sherman and Mallon had their photograph taken (see fig. 6.6). The photograph reveals two women in white laboratory coats: petite and young Emma Sherman and Mary Mallon, showing her age, weight gain, and the possible effects of minor strokes that preceded her massive one. Mallon’s smile was distorted, Sherman says, by the loss of teeth as well as possible nerve damage. Sherman tried to get Mallon to see a dentist, but she always refused. She did not seek medical attention, and indicated she did not trust it.
Because of all the media commentary on Mallon’s large physical size, I want to examine this photograph closely. It is hard to see in this photograph the Mary Mallon of the 1909 photograph. Sherman was short, under five
feet; Mallon is one and one-half bricks taller, approximately five feet four inches in the photo, perhaps down a few inches from, but confirming, what Soper said was five feet six inches when he first met her in 1907. The average height of women in this period was five feet four and one-half inches, indicating that Mallon in her prime was only one and one-half inches taller than average.102 The photograph shows the elderly Mallon as a heavy-set woman, but even so she does not appear to be a 200-pound “Amazon,” as reporters described her in 1907 and 1909, when she likely would have weighed less. One suspects they must have exaggerated her physical appearance as huge in light of their perceptions of her personality.
Sherman said that on the days when Mary Mallon left the island to visit friends, she dressed up and looked “quite stunning, and she returned in good spirits.” She described Mallon as a steady worker in the sense of always being on time and dependable in her habits. Each morning she would climb the stairs to the laboratory, where she had her own desk and work area. Other observers of Mallon during these later years agreed that “she has apparently been satisfied with her life at Riverside Hospital.”103 From the time she began her laboratory work, Mallon seems to have settled down to the routine of her life on the island, and found some personal satisfaction.104
Fig. 6.6 Emma Sherman (right) and Mary Mallon, North Brother Island, 1931 or 1932.
Stanley Walker visited Mallon’s cottage in 1935 (after Mallon no longer lived in it), and provided a description: “A plot of lawn surrounds the cottage. There is an elm in front. The cottage is about twenty feet by twenty, a one-story affair with green-shingled walls, which are decorated with white trimmings around the windows and doors.” He revealed, “Mary lived in the one large room, where she could entertain friends. There was a large oak table in the centre, old-fashioned rocking chairs with cane seats and backs, old colored prints on the walls, and a cot at the south side of the room, where Mary slept.” The back of the house contained a bathroom and small kitchen. Walker made it sound almost cozy, and he concluded, “This was better than freedom.” There is no evidence that Mallon shared his sentiment.105
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