37. New York Evening Post, July 16, 1909, p. 1.
38. New York American, June 30, 1909, p. 3.
39. Quoted in the New York Times, December 3, 1911, p. 9.
40. Quoted in the New York American, December 3, 1911, sec. 5, p. 6.
41. Letter to the editor, July 2, 1909.
42. On Progressive urban politics see David P. Thelen, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967); John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973); and a host of single-city studies including Zane L. Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) and Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). For the effects of reform on public health, see Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
43. Quoted in the New York Evening Post, July 16, 1909, p. 1.
44. Ibid.
45. New York World, July 20, 1909, p. 18.
46. Quoted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 29, 1909, p. 1. The identification of specific strains of typhoid bacilli that could have connected Mallon specifically to her victims—phage testing—did not exist in 1909. While the new science of bacteriology had uncovered ways to identify pathogenic bacteria within Mallon’s body, it could not definitively state that her germs were the same type that had infected or killed her twenty-two alleged victims. Indeed, the victims’ bacteria had not received the same laboratory scrutiny that Mallon’s had undergone. My thanks to Thomas Brock for his discussion of serotypes, phage types, and bacteria strains.
On phage typing and its use in connecting case to carrier, see for example, M. Dorthy Beck and Arthur C. Hollister, Typhoid Fever Cases and Carriers: An Analysis of Records of the California State Department of Public Health from 1910 through 1959 (Berkeley: State of California Department of Public Health, 1962), pp. 60–66. For an example of the debate on these issues, see W. H. Hamer, “Typhoid Carriers and Contact Infection: Some Difficulties Suggested by Study of Recent Investigations Carried out on ‘Living Lines.’ ” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 4 (1910–11): 105–46. Mary Mallon specifically is discussed on p. 109.
47. For a general argument against detaining healthy carriers, see C. L. Overlander, “The Typhoid Carrier Problem,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 169 (1913): 37–40.
48. The words isolation and quarantine were often used synonymously, as I tend to do here, but it should be noted that they have technically different meanings. Isolation refers to the separation of infected people during their period of infectivity to prevent them from spreading their disease; quarantine refers to the detention or separation of people who might be at risk for becoming sick, by virtue of, for example, being exposed to disease, to keep them from in turn exposing others. Because of Mary Mallon’s ambiguous legal and new medical definition, it could be argued that she falls into both camps. See Tobey, Public Health Law, p. 138.
49. In the Matter of . . . Mary Mallon (1909), Memorandum.
50. Ibid.
51. In the Matter of . . . Mary Mallon (1909), Return to Writ.
52. In the Matter of . . . Mary Mallon (1909), Proposed Order and Notice of Settlement.
53. S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), p. 77.
54. This position was in line with national thinking at the time. Charles Simon, for example, wrote, “while operative treatment may be urged upon every fecal carrier . . . the vast majority of the cases will not come to operation of their own free will, nor can they be compelled to subject themselves to the dangers incidental to such treatment.” Human Infection Carriers, pp. 100–1.
55. Another example of the law abridging individual rights in the name of science can be found in Susan E. Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). I explore the lure of science in this period as it became evident with regard to childbirth in Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
56. “Guide to a Walking Typhoid Factory,” New York Times, December 2, 1910.
57. New York American, March 15, 1924, p. 8. See also, the New York Tribune, which quotes Judge Cobb, “Any punishment I would impose would be in the hope that it would be a deterrent.” March 15, 1924, p. 20.
58. The healthy carrier case that did become the weathervane of how health departments might act in similar circumstances was Illinois ex rel. Barmore v. Robertson, 302 Ill. 422 (1922), a ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court, in which Clarence Darrow defended healthy typhoid carrier Jennie Barmore (unsuccessfully) in her plea for release from house quarantine. The result was the same as Mallon’s case in that it furthered health department authority to isolate carriers without systematic consideration of due process and personal liberty. I have written about this case in “Gendered Expectations: Women and Public Health in the Early Twentieth Century,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). I am grateful to Sarah Pfatteicher and Bob Conlin for helping me understand the legal traditions in publishing cases.
59. The Cuban response to HIV infection is examined in the Conclusion. See Karen Wald, “AIDS in Cuba: A Dream or a Nightmare?” Z Magazine, December, 1990, pp. 104–9; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “AIDS, Public Health, and Human Rights in Cuba,” The Lancet 342 (1993): 965–68; and Scheper-Hughes, “AIDS, Public Health and Human Rights in Cuba,” Anthropology Newsletter 34 (October, 1993): 46, 48.
60. Charles V. Chapin, The Sources and Modes of Infection (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1910), p. 110; Milton J. Rosenau, Preventive Medicine and Hygiene (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935), p. 144.
CHAPTER FOUR: “She Walked More Like a Man than a Woman”
1. Charles V. Chapin, “The Clinic,” newspaper clipping (probably from the Boston Transcript) in Charles V. Chapin Papers, 1909 Scrapbook, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.
2. Parts of this chapter are derived from my essay, “Gendered Expectations: Women and Early Twentieth-Century Public Health,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 147–69, and are used here with permission.
3. A 1916 Minnesota study found twenty-five of thirty identified carriers were women. The investigators noted that because women cook for their families and friends, as well as take many low-paying jobs in food handling occupations, it was natural to find more women than men among healthy carriers. Men were less likely to be discovered, and were also less likely to become public health hazards, because their daily tasks and their occupations did not center upon food preparation. Chesley et al., “Three Years’ Experience in the Search for Typhoid Carriers in Minnesota,” JAMA 68 (1917): 1884. A Boston study similarly concluded that “we have a preponderance of women on our carrier list, this is largely because they handle food more frequently and are therefore more frequently discovered in connection with outbreaks.” George H. Bigelow and Gaylord W. Anderson, “Cures of Typhoid Carriers,” JAMA 101 (1933): 348–52. It was not until the 1940s that studies began to document more women carriers in the population at large, and not just among those found in food handling jobs, transmitting the disease. See sources given in chap. 1, nn. 43 and 44.
4. This is the only year, other than 1916, when the city submitted its carrier cards to the federal government, for which records allow us to definitely identify the carriers by sex. See the list in Minutes, Board of Health of the City of New York, New York Municipal Archives, Box 3948, vol. 43, May 24, 1923
.
5. Soper is quoted in the New York Times, April 4, 1915, sec. 5, p. 3. Soper was not alone in focusing on domestic laborers as potentially dangerous in this regard. See, for example, William Royal Stokes, “Typhoid Fever Spread by Chronic Carriers,” U.S. Public Health Reports 32 (1917): 1926–29. Stokes concludes, “We believe that whenever possible domestics in private service . . . should not be admitted to such positions until a careful inquiry has been made into their previous medical history as to a possible former attack of typhoid fever” (p. 1929).
6. Charles F. Bolduan and Samuel Frant, “The Typhoid Carrier Situation in New York City,” The Medical Officer, February 13, 1937, p. 66.
7. The only other historian I know of who has studied Mary Mallon and considered the role gender might play is Andrew Mendelsohn, whose Harvard undergraduate thesis was on the subject. Mendelsohn wrote (in a footnote): “Mary was not directly discriminated against for her class, religion, ethnicity, or gender.” John Andrew Mendelsohn, “Typhoid Mary: Medical Science, the State, and the ‘Germ Carrier,’ ” B.A. thesis, History of Science, Harvard University, December, 1988, p. 115. Alan Kraut discussed the ethnic component of the story effectively in Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 97–103.
8. Apparently Mary Mallon used two employment agencies, one called Mrs. Strickers’, the one Soper relied upon, and one called Mrs. Seeleys’.
9. On single working domestics, consult Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), chap. 9; Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); America’s Working Women, comp. and ed. Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); and Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
10. Soper’s account of his first encounter with Mary Mallon is in Soper, “The Work of a Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor,” JAMA 48 (1907): 2019–22. See also his “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 15 (October, 1939): 698–712, and his “Typhoid Mary,” The Military Surgeon 45 (July, 1919): 1–15. S. Josephine Baker’s account is in her autobiography, Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), pp. 73–75. See also Isabelle Keating, “Dr. Baker Tells How She Got Her Woman,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 8, 1932.
11. See, as an example, Science Citation Index, 1961 to the present.
12. Susan Soper, Soper’s great-granddaughter, told me that she checked with other family members and that none knew of any unpublished records. Telephone conversation from Atlanta, November 9, 1993.
13. Gilbert Wersan, pseud. for Warren Boroson, “The Truth (For a Change) About Typhoid Mary,” MD, September, 1985, pp. 91–92, 97,101, 109, quotation from p. 92. I am grateful to Mr. Boroson for sending me this article, and for his informative telephone conversations with me exploring these issues. See also his “Learning from Typhoid Mary,” Science Digest 92 (March, 1984): 91.
14. One letter, in typescript, is available in the health department records, dated November 12, 1938, immediately following Mary Mallon’s death and in anticipation of articles about her; the second is the letter to the editor cited in n. 15 below.
15. Letter to the Editor, British Medical Journal, January 7, 1939, pp. 37–38.
16. George Soper, Great Neck, New York, letter without salutation, November 12, 1938, in the files of the New York City Health Department, copy in the Hoffman/Marr Collection. It may be that a member of the AAAS recommended Soper, but it is unlikely that the association did so formally.
In his later career, Soper continued to have strong opinions about how to solve health problems. In 1923 he began a six-year job as the managing director of the Cancer Society, in which he was described as “a vigorously unconventional thinker” and “disputatious” because he believed in using “heroic methods” to gain public attention. See Richard Carter, The Gentle Legions (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1961), pp. 146–50. I am grateful to Barron Lerner for pointing out this description.
17. I use “progressive” with a small p to mean that Soper fit the characteristics consistent with the reform movement in this period. I do not know if Soper actually affiliated with the Progressive Party, the third party whose candidate for the presidency in 1912 was Theodore Roosevelt.
18. See, for example, George Soper, The Air and Ventilation of Subways (1908); Modern Methods of Street Cleaning (1909).
19. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, with Susan Reverby, eds, America’s Working Women: A Documentary History 1600 to the Present, rev. and updated ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. xxii—xxiii. For a general history of women and work patterns, see Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989).
20. Soper was born in 1870, Mallon in 1869. Biographical information on George Soper is available in Who’s Who in America 24 (1946–47): 2215. His obituaries can be found in the New York Times, June 18, 1948, p. 23, and the New York Herald Tribune, June 18, 1948, p. 30.
21. Soper’s articles on the subject were published in 1907, 1919, and 1938; in all of them he referred, he said, to notes taken at the time of the actual events.
22. These simple descriptors can be found in all of Soper’s publications, including the 1907 initial article.
23. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 698.
24. Ibid.
25. Soper never described Mallon in completely negative terms. He sometimes even seemed to acknowledge a grudging admiration for her strength, and he openly admitted to her cooking talents. But he saw Mallon foremost as a public health problem, and her characteristics as an uncooperative carrier outweighed any positive personal traits he noticed.
26. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 698.
27. This photograph, which appeared in the newspapers of the period, has been reproduced in various health department publications and in some recent historical studies. The earliest use of it, as far as I have been able to determine, was in the New York American, June 20, 1909. The most recent is in Kraut, Silent Travelers, p. 102. Emma Rose Sherman was surprised when she saw this photograph, as it did not seem to resemble the Mary Mallon she had known in the 1930s. Of course, aging can change physical appearance considerably, and the Mary Mallon that Sherman knew was in her sixties whereas the photograph depicts Mallon at thirty-seven. Emma Rose Sherman, Interview with author, New York City, July 16, 1993. There is always the possibility that the photograph was of another woman in the Willard Parker Hospital, but its authenticity was not questioned at the time by the people who had seen both the photograph and Mary Mallon herself.
28. Soper, “Curious Career,” pp. 704–5.
29. I have concluded that the man whose apartment Soper visited was A. Briehof, or Breshof, although Soper does not use his name, because that is the man who brought Mary Mallon’s stool samples to the Ferguson Laboratory and the one who died during the time between her incarcerations. Mallon sometimes used the name Marie Breshof. Their relationship is further explored in chap. 6.
30. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 11.
31. On the status of single working domestics, including cooks, see the sources given in n. 9 above.
32. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 13.
33. See, for example, “She was not particularly clean” (“Curious Career,” p. 701) or “No housekeeper ever gave me to understand that Mary was a particularly clean cook” (“Typhoid Mary,” p. 10). Soper, of course, was not alone in his thinking a
bout cleanliness being class related. See, for example, A. W. Freeman, “Typhoid Fever and Municipal Administration,” U.S. Public Health Reports 32 (1917): 642, who writes that the standards for cleanliness necessary for typhoid carriers are reasonable and “in line also with our inherited ideas of decency and cleanliness.”
34. “A Typhoid Fever Carrier,” Medical Record (June 1, 1907): 924. See also Medical Record (May 18, 1907): 818.
35. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 705.
36. Ibid., p. 705.
37. Ibid., p. 708.
38. Ibid. See also, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 9.
39. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 711. Emma Rose Sherman agreed that Mary Mallon’s temper was known and feared on North Brother Island. People rarely saw it, but stories abounded, and those who knew her tried not to arouse her. Sherman viewed Mallon as “tightly bottled up” and said she “pussyfooted around her.” Telephone conversation from her home in New York, with author, June 26, 1994. In chap. 6 I take a closer look at Mallon’s temperament and her responses to her incarceration. I am grateful to Tom Archdeacon for his confirmation that temper was considered stereotypical of the Irish in this period (February, 1995).
40. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 8.
41. Ibid., pp. 7, 4.
42. Soper is quoted in the New York Times, April 4, 1915. This sentiment is echoed by some recent observers of Mary Mallon’s situation, most recently by John Steele Gordon, “The Passion of Typhoid Mary,” American Heritage 45 (May/June, 1994): 118–21.
43. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 12.
44. Soper, New York Times, April 4, 1915.
45. L. L. Lumsden, “What the Local Health Officer Can Do in the Prevention of Typhoid Fever,” Public Health Reports 25 (1910): 111–20, quotations on p. 118.
46. Soper, “Typhoid Mary.” Soper did continue in his interest in Mary Mallon. In 1919, for example, he wrote to the health department asking for information about her. See copy of a memo in the Hoffman/Marr Collection (in private hands), from Clerk, Division of Epidemiology, to the Director, May 9, 1919, providing “information for reply to Dr. Soper’s inquiry re: Mary Mallon.” Soper continued to write about her until 1939.
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