Typhoid Mary

by Judith Walzer Leavitt

  According to Sherman, Mallon never became convinced that she transmitted typhoid fever. Sherman said, “She said [the health officials] didn’t know what they were talking about and that they picked on her and that there was nothing wrong with her. That’s the way she put it, that they picked on her and she was healthy and how could she make people sick when she’s healthy.” Whatever efforts officials might have made earlier to convince her of her public health danger, toward the end of her life these stopped. Sherman thought the doctors on the island “were completely indifferent to her. They let her alone. . . . No doctor that I know of ever went to visit her and discuss anything with her.” Mallon thought the health department took advantage of her and blamed her for things that were never “my fault.” Officials “stuck her away for a reason she couldn’t accept.” To the end of her life Mallon denied her role in making others sick; as Sherman said, “She denied it to her teeth.”106

  One day, probably December 4, 1932, Mallon did not come to work on time.107 Sherman, knowing her work record, became worried, and went over to the bungalow, into which she had ventured only briefly before. She found Mallon lying on the floor, having suffered a stroke. She later reported that the cottage had not been well cared for, and that it smelled badly. Mallon was then removed to a bed in the children’s ward in the hospital. From that hospital bed, “considering the uncertainty of this life,” Mallon dictated her will to an attorney, on July 14, 1933.108 She remained bedridden and hospitalized the rest of her life. Adelaide Offspring returned to Riverside to attend Mallon during her last week. Mary Mallon died on November 11, 1938.109

  Some of Mary Mallon’s friends attended her funeral, indicating that her associations with them continued into her final years. The people at the funeral mass at St. Luke’s Church in the Bronx, who refused to identify themselves to reporters, were identified by Adelaide Jane Offspring as herself, Mary Lempe, Willie Lempe, Joseph Lempe (another son of Mary Lempe’s) and his wife, Alexandra Plavska, and Plavska’s daughter. Although the newspaper indicated nine people attended, Offspring mentioned only these seven. Four of them (Offspring, Mary and Willie Lempe, and Alexandra Plavska) were Mallon’s beneficiaries, along with the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York and Father Michael Lucy, who had regularly visited Mallon once she was bedridden.110

  Mary Mallon, whose own estate paid for the gravestone that read “Jesus Mercy” (see fig. 6.7), ultimately became resigned to her life on North Brother Island, and left positive memories with the people who knew her during her final years. But she never came to terms with her status as a healthy carrier, and she railed against the label Typhoid Mary.111

  Mary Mallon denied throughout her life that she transmitted typhoid fever to people for whom she cooked. Despite working for seven or eight years in a bacteriology laboratory preparing sputum slides for physicians to use in the medical diagnoses of tuberculosis, she never came to understand the connection between the sputum that carried tuberculosis bacilli and her own gallbladder that carried typhoid bacilli. She did not accept that she was dangerous to others. It may be hard for us today to see her resistance, at least by 1915 and thereafter, as anything other than a stubborn refusal to admit what she must have come to know was true. But the vehemence of her temper about the subject of typhoid fever and her lifelong refusal to engage in discussions about it indicate that her obstinacy was not a sham; it is very likely she continued until her death to believe she was not a carrier.

  Fig. 6.7. Mary Mallon’s tombstone, St. Raymond’s Cemetery, the Bronx.

  Mary Mallon felt deeply and, I think, honestly that she was not what the label “Typhoid Mary” signified. She never believed that the attributes associated with the label applied to her. She was not dirty or shiftless; her life had been, before health officials interfered, an example of hard work and skilled achievement. Furthermore, until her stroke, she was always in excellent health, which the Ferguson laboratory tests confirmed by finding no typhoid infection. In rejecting the stigma that Typhoid Mary represented, as well as the concept of healthy carrier that accompanied it, Mary Mallon refused to acquiesce or consent to her loss of freedom. She took comfort in her few friends and kept her distance from the rest of the world, secure in her beliefs.

  Health authorities saw Typhoid Mary as someone who was a threat to their efforts to preserve the public’s health; Mary Mallon saw health officials as persecutors who unfairly took away her identity, her independence, and her ability to earn a living. Neither view is entirely right; both, nonetheless, had a point.

  “Misbegotten Mary”

  The Stories Continue

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mary Mallon’s story has, over time, struck a sensitive chord with Americans, evoking strong and long-lasting impressions. The term “Typhoid Mary” has entered the English language as a phrase independent of Mary Mallon herself. The range of meanings applied to the person and the phrase, created and used throughout her life, has continued to resonate since her death in 1938. Soper’s story of tracing and finding North America’s first identified typhoid fever carrier and Mary Mallon’s 1907 capture and 1915 recapture have been often repeated in medical literature and the popular media. As with reports made during her lifetime, small misrepresentations in these later accounts alter and dramatize her story. But these modern stories are more interesting for their perpetuation of the concept of Typhoid Mary and the threat of contagion and pollution the term has come to evoke than for adding any details to our understanding of Mallon’s life. Their perspective is the final one examined in this book, the cultural persistence and long-term tenacity of Mary Mallon. Her life ended in 1938; her story and its meanings live on.

  The post-1938 representations of Typhoid Mary can be usefully divided into two chronological groups. Those written before the time when HIV and other newly emerging viruses became known examined Mallon’s story out of curiosity or human interest and frequently used it to teach an audience how much science had contributed to improving the quality of modern life. The attention given to Mary Mallon after the first cases of AIDS were publicized focus instead on the risks people can still pose to one another and try to find practical messages in her story. These accounts also examine the key dilemma her story poses, how to protect the public’s health and at the same time maintain the rights and freedoms of individuals. Throughout both periods the phrase “Typhoid Mary” continues to refer to a person to be feared and shunned, someone who carries contagion inside her body and uses it to harm people around her. Even the most recent portrayals, again following the trends of their times, which strive to find strength and some agency in the individual woman herself, have to come to terms with the deadly meaning of the metaphor.

  Fourteen years after Mallon’s death, New Yorker medical writer Berton Roueché in his popular “Annals of Medicine” series of medical detection tales chronicled a 1946 typhoid fever epidemic in New York City.1 His epidemiological adventure revealed how the epidemic was finally traced to a healthy carrier. Roueché’s articles typically championed medical successes, and this one fit his pattern of highlighting the effective work of New York City’s Bureau of Preventable Diseases. In teaching his readers about typhoid carriers, Roueché wrote, “Typhoid Mary Mallon, a housemaid and cook who was the stubborn cause of a total of fifty-three [sic] cases in and around New York City a generation ago, is, of course, the most celebrated of these hapless menaces.”2 Three parts of this sentence are significant. One, Roueché combined Typhoid Mary and Mary Mallon as if they were one name. The epithet and the woman merge and are indistinguishable. Two, he referred to Mallon as the “stubborn cause” of transmitting typhoid fever. He found her culpable. Yet, and this is the third observation, he also described carriers—generally—as “hapless menaces.” They were dangerous but blameless.

  Roueché’s observations echoed common usages. He saw Mallon as part-concept, part-human, and in his merging of phrase and name he continued the dehumanization that had begun immediately following her 1
907 incarceration. In the same vein, he found Mallon guilty of actions that caused harm to others while he acknowledged that most carriers were cooperative and would not purposely harm others. He, like many writers before and since, set Mary Mallon apart from other carriers and used her story to illustrate the benefits of modern science.3

  Also during the 1950s, Madelyn Carlisle reminded Coronet readers of “the strange story of the innocent killer.” The author emphasized the march of medical progress as she recounted Mallon’s story mainly in terms of George Soper’s heroism. She described Soper as a “health expert” who had a “burning hatred of typhoid fever” and through whose “patient investigation” the bizarre tale unfolded and was solved. Carlisle concluded that, “though the case was strange and the action regrettable, it was right that a public menace be imprisoned.” Mary Mallon, the author thought, rightfully spent the remainder of her life in “penance” for the lives she had endangered.4

  The illustration accompanying Carlisle’s article underscored the title’s “strange” and added a furrowed brow of guilt. Here a distressed and anxious woman looks up from her cooking, worried perhaps about the harmful effects she causes (see fig. 7.1). She might not be purposeful in her actions, yet she clearly has something to worry about. In this drawing readers saw their own anxiety projected onto the face of the cook.

  A few years later, M. F. King, writing in the American Mercury, depicted a more clearly guilty “Irish Pariah” whose “bacillus ridden body proved to be a major breakthrough for modern preventive medicine.” King told Mallon’s story in a way that emphasized the cook’s confusion and deception and ended in her personal defeat. When Mallon was returned to North Brother Island in 1915, King wrote, she was “now terrified by the awful knowledge of her guilt.” Through her ordeal, he claimed, “the basic secret of typhoid fever germs was made known to medical science.” King trumpeted the new successes built on her case: “Good citizens and whole-heartedly cooperative, today’s Typhoid Marys, mindful of the dreadful potential of their unique affliction, are able to live useful lives without endangering their fellowmen.”5 In this writer’s perceptions, Mary Mallon’s misfortune led directly to effective controls.

  Fig. 7.1 Mary Mallon, “Innocent Killer,” drawing, 1957.

  A decade later, in a 1966 article in Today’s Health, John Lentz wrote about Mary Mallon’s “strange case.” He focused, as many writers before him had, on Mallon’s seeming uniqueness, claiming that “for some 15 years, this woman was the sole cause of so much sickness and death that she gained a lasting, if dubious, distinction in the history of medicine.” Lentz did not inform his readers that Mary Mallon caused fewer cases and deaths from typhoid fever than other identified carriers nor that she was only one among many thousands of typhoid carriers. He did not suggest the possibility that Mary Mallon’s pioneer status might have made it difficult for her to understand or accept the accusation that she caused the deaths of people for whom she worked. He assumed that because we now understand the carrier state that she also must have understood the concept. He depicted an uncommon medical situation and a singularly evil person. She was, he wrote, “a walking reservoir . . . lacking in regard for the welfare of others.”6

  A dramatic tinted illustration accompanied Lentz’s article and underscored the theme of intent and blame. Four servants are shown on the full-page drawing, three women and a man (fig. 7.2). One young woman is depicted as feeling faint and in need of the help offered by the older woman and the man. In the foreground, not helping and understood to be in fact the cause of the problem, is Mary Mallon. She is busy with the coffee mill, but looking up with powerful emotions. In her face are fear and anxiety, with a considerable dose of malice. Readers may see reason to feel some sympathy for her, but, once again, the artist powerfully points the finger of blame.

  Fig. 7.2. Mary Mallon in kitchen, drawing, 1966.

  The following year, in 1967, medical historian and physician Gordon W. Jones wrote a survey article on “The Scourge of Typhoid” for the popular American History Illustrated.7 In a small section on Mary Mallon, Jones wrote about the “most famous” healthy carrier that “she had a great tendency to change jobs.” By picking up on a previously voiced suspicion that she must therefore have realized her culpability, Jones underscored prevailing negative views. He attributed to her the 1903 epidemic in Ithaca, New York, in which 1,300 people contracted the disease, relying on sources before him that had confused Soper’s investigation of that epidemic with Mallon’s guilt in causing it.8 At the same time as he attributed considerable blame to Mallon, however, Jones commiserated with her plight: “No leper of the Middle Ages ever felt the hostile attention of the authorities more strongly.”9

  Three years later, in 1970, writer Mark Sufrin produced “The Case of the Disappearing Cook” for American Heritage.10 Illustrated by Lawrence DiFiori and following closely upon Soper’s published work, the article presented Mallon’s story at its most dramatic. Sufrin wrote an action-packed rendition of Soper’s pursuit of Mallon, her forcible arrest, her release, her return to cooking, and her recapture, and in so doing he furthered the, by then, common understanding of Mary Mallon’s negative qualities. She was an “elusive creature”; she denied her guilt. When found hiding in 1907, she “sprang from a crouch and came out fighting and cursing. . . . A big, strong woman, Mary put up a bitter struggle for her freedom.” She was “silent and grim” when Soper tried to talk with her, and she refused to cooperate with authorities. Sufrin repeated many of Soper’s earlier observations, including that when she was released in 1910 she immediately “vanished.” She was, Sufrin concluded, “dangerous, an incorrigible.” The story, befitting a magazine that tries to make history popular with its general readership, successfully emphasized the dramatic aspects of Mallon’s story.

  DiFiori’s accompanying illustrations carried the readers’ interest one step further. Most telling was the full-page drawing of Mallon wielding her carving fork against an intimidated Soper (fig. 7.3). In a domestic setting, with a table on one side, a rug on the floor, and pots and pans stacked neatly on shelves behind, a buxom, young, and angry Mallon advances with fist clenched and weapon raised upon Soper, who, hat in hand, is ready and eager to retreat. The caption read, “Easily enraged, Mary seized a carving fork and frightened off Soper when he first told her that she was probably a typhoid carrier.”11

  Fig. 7.3. Mary Mallon advances on George Soper, drawing, 1970.

  In another drawing, DiFiori depicted an aproned Mallon, screaming and flailing her arms against the five uniformed officers who surround her (fig. 7.4). The picture captures some of Mallon’s outrage and confusion in a sympathetic way, but its caption reminds readers, “Kicking and screaming, she was rushed off to a hospital, where tests proved that she was ‘a living culture’ of typhoid bacilli.”

  Fig. 7.4. Police officers arrest Mary Mallon, drawing, 1970.

  Revealing in a different sense was DiFiori’s third illustration, a rendering of Mallon’s 1915 recapture (fig. 7.5). Here two bowler-hatted and serious health officers, called “detectives” in the caption, study a veiled woman as she walks down a street. Mallon, except perhaps for the shading that encompasses them all, is shown in a positive manner, as the essence of a lady. She is modestly veiled, with a perky hat, and her figure, not too ample, is maturely robed in the latest fashion. She carries a modest purse and looks—almost demurely—away from the men’s gaze. Were it not for the accompanying story, readers would not suspect her as a public health menace. The full measure of the illustrations plus the story, then, asserts her guilt but also evokes some sympathy.

  A 1979 illustration of “Typhoid Mary” by Gary Viskupic takes Sufrin’s story in a different direction.12 Accompanying the printing of a revised version of Sufrin’s 1970 American Heritage article almost a decade later in Newsday the popular Long Island newspaper, the artist presents an attractive, sexualized young woman ladling food onto a platter, adding skulls and bones to the mix (fig. 7.6). This Mary Mall
on knows what she is doing. She is not put off by the destruction she wields; in fact, she looks satisfied with it all. Her shirt is unbuttoned far enough to reveal some cleavage, and her apron/jumper shows the curves of her body. Except for the rough, peasant hand holding the spoon, the image would be completely feminine and extremely evil, a witch hidden in modern dress. In this instance of conscious death-dealing associated with an attractive woman, we know who to hold responsible.

  Fig. 7.5. Mary Mallon followed by health officers, drawing, 1970.

  In 1979, the same year that Long Island’s Newsday reprinted Sufrin’s article, Long Island physician Mary C. McLaughlin published her version of Mallon’s story in the American Irish Historical Society’s journal, The Recorder.13 McLaughlin concluded that Mallon had “consciously refused to face the fact that she was a source of illness and death,” and wondered if her “nights were filled with guilt and dread seeing the faces of those who became ill.” But she softened her judgment by acknowledging that Mallon might have had “a blind spot, which prevented her from recognizing her potential for harm to others.”14

  McLaughlin added a new dimension to Mallon’s story, unfortunately one that cannot be corroborated by extant documents. When doing her research, McLaughlin spoke with a friend of her husband’s, who “said his family had hired Typhoid Mary.” The informant told McLaughlin that Mary Mallon had worked for his grandparents in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and that she “was closely tied into the Irish Movement in America, raising money to support the Irish cause.” In fact, McLaughlin’s source claimed, Mallon’s cause was championed by Countess Markiewicz (the poet Yeats’ friend) who “waged a campaign through the American-Irish press to get signatures for a petition to the authorities to release Mary.” Since Mallon’s Irish heritage was always an issue in how she was perceived, her possible connection to a nationalist political movement is very intriguing. But there is no record of such a petition campaign in the Irish press, and sources at the Irish Advocate and the American Irish Historical Society as well as the National Historian of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America have found no evidence of Mallon’s political connections to an Irish national movement. It is probable that McLaughlin’s informant remembered a different Mary Mallon.15