24. “The Average Individual as a Carrier of Typhoid,” Current Literature 47 (1909): 569. See also C. L. Overlander, “The Transmission of Typhoid Fever,” Interstate Medical Journal 21 (1914): 133–44.
25. New York American, February 21, 1910, p. 6.
26. Arthur B. Reeve, The Silent Bullet (New York: Harper & Bros., 1910). I am grateful to Gerard Fergerson for leading me to this novel.
27. The comparison with Sherlock Holmes must have occurred to contemporary readers, since Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories were popular at the turn of the century.
28. “The Germ-Carrier,” Punch, or the London Charivari 37 (July 7, 1909): 2.
29. (New York) Sun, March 28, 1915, p. 1.
30. “Caught at Last,” ibid., March 31, 1915, p. 6. For the Sun’s coverage, see also March 27, April 2 and 4, 1915.
31. “Typhoid Mary’ Is Again a Captive,” New York World, March 28, 1915, p. 1 of Classified section. See also March 29, 1915, p. 16. The character of Mary Mallon’s walk was also commented upon in the New York Times, March 28, 1915, sec. 2, p. 11.
32. “ ‘Typhoid Mary’ Reappears,” New York Tribune, Editorial, March 29, 1915, p. 8. See also March 28, 1915, p. 7.
33. “ ‘Typhoid Mary’ Has Reappeared: Human Culture Tube, Herself Immune, Spreads the Disease Wherever She Goes,” New York Times, sec. 5, April 4, 1915, pp. 3–4, quotation from p. 3. See also the New York Herald, March 28, 31, 1915.
34. New York Times, April 4, 1915, p. 3.
35. “Typhoid Fever,” Scientific American 112 (May 8, 1915): 428.
36. New York Times, October 13, 1922, p. 19. See also January 21, 1923, p. 22. A Newark newspaper did mention his “native Italy” when wondering if Labella could be deported, and described the situation: “He has been warned repeatedly to stay away from places where food is handled, and persistently returns.” Newark Evening News, October 14, 1922, p. 1.
37. See, for example, New York World, January 21, 1923, p. 9. See also the Annual Reports of the Department of Health of the State of New Jersey, 1922, p. 40, and 1923, p. 21; and NYCDH, AR, 1922, p. 92; and Newark Evening News, October 13, 1922, p. 1 and October 14, p. 1. In January, 1923, Labella was released from surveillance in New Jersey, and New York health officials issued a warning that he might have returned to New York City. New York Times, January 21, 1923, p. 22.
38. New York Times, March 14, 1924, p. 19. See also ibid., March 15, 1924, p. 13. The possibility that Cotils returned to cooking comes from the fact that he is listed at his bakery in the 1925 City Directory.
39. New York Tribune, March 15, 1924, p. 20.
40. Ibid., March 14, 1924, p. 24.
41. New York World, March 14, 1924, p. 15, and March 15, 1924, p. 13.
42. Gene Fowler, “Health Board Bars Robust Baker, Typhoid Carrier,” New York American, March 14, 1924, p. 13. See also March 15, 1924, p. 8.
43. New York World, March 15, 1924, p. 13.
44. Daily Mirror, October 8, 1928. This newspaper wrote, “ ‘Typhoid Freddie’ Moersch, isolated on suspicion of causing nearly 50 typhoid cases in Greenwich Village, probably will be committed for life to a city hospital. . . . His daughter, Mrs. Fredericka Kraus, a young widow, will begin a desperate fight to free him today believing he is the victim of a ‘frame-up.’ ” For other articles on Frederick Moersch, see Sunday News, October 7, 1928, p. 6; Daily News, October 7, 1928, p. 8; and New York American, October 7, 1928, pp. 1, 36, and October 7, 1928.
45. New York World, October 7, 1928.
46. Will F. Clarke, “City Watches 208 Typhoid Carriers,” ibid., October 14, 1928.
47. “I Wonder What’s Become of—’Typhoid Mary,’ ” Sunday Mirror, Magazine sec, December 17, 1933, p. 19.
48. According to the 1931 and 1933 City Directories, Fred Moersch was employed as a “helper” at the hospital during those years.
49. Stanley Walker, “Profiles: Typhoid Carrier No. 36,” New Yorker 10 (January 26, 1935): 21–25. Mary Mallon became number 36 in 1923, when the health department began a new registry of typhoid carriers and listed the ones then under observation alphabetically. Frederick Moersch was number 46.
50. Soper’s real complaint was that he did not receive enough credit in the article. See Soper’s letter to the editor, “The Discovery of Typhoid Mary,” British Medical Journal, January 7, 1939, pp. 37–38, quotations from p. 37.
51. Walker, “Typhoid Carrier,” p. 21.
52. Ibid., p. 25.
53. An example of a distortion in a medical article is the report by C. L. Overlander, of Harvard, that in 1914 Mallon had caused twenty-seven cases of typhoid fever “with three or four deaths” when Soper had reported twenty-six cases, with one death, and I reconstruct (see chap. 1) twenty-two cases and one death. Overlander, “Transmission of Typhoid Fever,” p. 139.
54. New York Times, November 12, 1938, p. 17. See also, New York Herald Tribune, November 12, 1938, p. 12; New York Journal and American, November 12, 1938, p. 4; (New York) Sun, November 12, 1938, p. 4; and Daily Mirror, November 12, 1938, p. 5.
55. New York World-Telegram, November 12, 1938, p. 26 (story begins on p. 1).
56. The California longitudinal study of healthy typhoid carriers concluded that 25 percent of 753 carriers they studied were uncooperative. Among 175 food handlers the investigators traced, 89 were cooperative and 78 were not (8 could not be determined). 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. 85, 89.
57. The usual date given for Mary Mallon’s major stroke is Christmas day, 1932, a date that seems to have originated in one of George Soper’s articles. The Daily Mirror, December 17, 1933, dated the stroke to sometime in October, 1933. Emma Sherman, who found Mary Mallon in her cottage after the stroke, knows for certain that it did not occur on Christmas day, because she did not work on the holiday. On the day of Mallon’s stroke, Sherman was at work and expecting Mary to come in. When she did not appear, Sherman went looking for her and found her disabled by the stroke. Emma Rose Sherman, Interview with author, New York City, July 16, 1993. December 4, 1932, is the date given on her death certificate, as the day she was admitted to the hospital for the final time. I have accepted this as the correct date for her last stroke.
58. The phrase is from the headline for the article in the New York World-Telegram, November 12, 1938, p. 1 (“Nine Mysterious Mourners Pay Last Tribute to Typhoid Mary”).
59. New York American, November 12, 1938, p. 4. For an out-of-town obituary, see, for example, “Typhoid Mary Pardoned by Death,” Minneapolis Journal, December 11, 1938. I am grateful to Nina Ackerberg and Peter Ackerberg for recovering this article for me.
CHAPTER SIX: “Banished Like a Leper”
1. Cotils was quoted in Gene Fowler, “Health Board Bars Robust Baker, Typhoid Carrier,” New York American, March 14, 1924, p. 13.
2. New York World, July 20, 1909, p. 18.
3. The information is provided on her death certificate, Number 1137–1935, Bureau of Records, Department of Health of the City of New York, Register No. 9799. Copy in Hoffman/Marr Collection, in private hands. Mary Mallon sometimes claimed that she had been born in the United States, but her noted Irish brogue and the frequent reference to her Irish birth convinced me that the information on the death certificate is correct. A search of birth records in New York turned up no record. See Carlyle R. Bennett, Director of the Municipal Archives and Records Center, to John S. Marr, May 5, 1975, in Hoffman/Marr Collection.
The identification of her place of birth as Cookstown, County Tyrone, is provided by John Concannon, National Historian of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America in an enclosure to his letter to author, November 22, 1993. I am grateful for his help, especially since the town and county of her place of birth does not appear on her death certificate and is not otherwise confirm-able. See also, for example, Mary C. McLaugh
lin, “Mary Mallon: Alias Typhoid Mary,” The Recorder 40 (1979): 44–57. The name Mallon can be found in many of the northern counties, including Tyrone, Antrim, and Armagh. See the “Mallon” entry in the Garvin-Mallon Family History Newsletter, no. 2, p. 19.
4. Adelaide Jane Offspring, “Petition to the Surrogate’s Court of the County of Bronx,” November 15, 1938. Filed with the Last Will and Testament of Mary Mallon, number P894–1938, Surrogate’s Court, Bronx County, New York.
5. Death Certificate. Reproduction of the death certificate is prohibited by Section 3.21 of the New York City Health Code. The certificate carries the notice that the city “does not certify to the truth of the statements made thereon.” Hoffman/Marr Collection.
6. Emma Rose Sherman, Interview with author, New York City, July 16, 1993.
7. The land ownership system in Ireland reduced and delayed marriage in the post-famine period, thus encouraging young women to emigrate. See Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland 1885–1920 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989).
8. Patrick J. Blessing, “Irish,” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Steven Thernstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 531.
9. Nolan, Ourselves Alone, p. 68. See also Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), especially chap. 4, and Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
10. Blessing, “Irish,” pp. 524–45.
11. Ibid., p. 532. See also Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), passim.
12. See, for example, Inez Goodman, “A Nine-Hour Day for Domestic Servants,” The Independent 54 (February 13, 1902), excerpted in America’s Working Women, comp. and ed. Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), pp. 213–14. See also other documents in this collection.
13. Mary Heaton Vorse, “Making or Marring, The Experiences of a Hired Girl,” 1901, excerpted in Baxandall, Gordon, and Reverby, America’s Working Women, pp. 137–38.
14. See Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, with Susan Reverby, America’s Working Women: A Documentary History 1600 to the Present, rev. and updated (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. 200–201.
15. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. 170. See also, for example, Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
16. Quoted in David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 31.
17. Katzman, Seven Days, p. 163.
18. Frances A. Kellor, Out of Work: A Study of Employment Agencies: Their Treatment of the Unemployed, and Their Influence Upon Homes and Business (New York: B. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904).
19. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
20. Ibid., pp. 316–37.
21. Ibid., pp. 144, 147.
22. On women’s work, see especially Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). It is interesting to note that Irish women immigrants boasted high literacy rates and “were more literate than were either their counterparts at home or the men and women in most other immigrant groups.” Nolan, Ourselves Alone, p. 69.
23. I am grateful to Barbara Therese Ryan, at the University of Michigan, for her thoughtful comments about domestic servants and cooks and where they were likely to live.
24. Offspring, “Petition.”
25. New York World, July 20, 1909, p. 18.
26. George A. Soper, “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 15 (1939): 698–712. Drayton told Soper that “when it was over he had been so grateful to Mary for all the help she had given him that he rewarded her with fifty dollars in addition to her full wages” (p. 703).
27. Ibid., p. 702.
28. George A. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” The Military Surgeon 45 (July, 1919): 7.
29. George A. Soper, “The Work of a Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor,” JAMA 48 (1907): 2022.
30. Stanley Walker, “Profiles: Typhoid Carrier No. 36,” New Yorker 10 (January 26, 1935): 21.
31. See, for example, “The Tragedy of Vacation Typhoid,” American Journal of Public Health 5 (1915): 204–5.
32. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 705.
33. Ibid., p. 699.
34. Ibid., p. 709.
35. On average wages, see Katzman, Seven Days, app. 3, pp. 303–14. Mallon’s wage is given in Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 701.
36. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 7.
37. Soper documents investigations into the cause of previous outbreaks of typhoid fever in homes in which Mallon worked in “Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor,” pp. 2019–22; see also his “Typhoid Mary” and “Curious Career.”
38. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 705.
39. See ibid., p. 706, for Baker quotation.
40. S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 75.
41. Although Soper and Baker give essentially the same account of Mallon’s capture, there are some discrepancies. For example, Soper wrote that Mallon was finally cornered in an “outside closet” (privy?) in the rear of the next-door house; Baker (who was there) said she finally found Mallon in an “areaway closet under the high outside stairway leading to the front door.” See Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 706 and Baker, Fighting for Life, p. 75.
42. Baker, Fighting for Life, pp. 75–76. This was not an unreasonable worry, given the risks of abdominal surgery in these years.
43. Soper, “Typhoid Mary,” p. 7.
44. Soper, “Curious Career,” p. 705.
45. The description is Soper’s, from “Curious Career,” p. 709. He does not say how he gained Briehof’s confidence, nor if any money was involved in the bargain.
46. Ibid., pp. 704–5.
47. Cecil K. Blanchard, “Typhoid Carriers: Their Detection and Control,” Public Health News (Trenton) 9 (1924): 250–58, quotations from p. 251.
48. On Riverside Hospital, see New York City Department of Health, Annual Reports, passim. See also “Local Island-Hopping,” New York Times, July 24, 1994. My thanks to Bert Hansen for calling the article to my attention. The island’s history is told also by Dee Wedemeyer, “City Selling Parcels to Bidders with Better Ideas,” New York Times, August 15, 1982, sec. 8, p. 7. The island was a private residence before 1871, when it became part of Morrisania and the Bronx. Riverside Hospital was built in 1885 and used until 1943 as a tuberculosis and contagious disease hospital. Then it was leased to the state and, in 1951, transformed into an institution for teenage drug rehabilitation. That function ceased in 1963. See also New York Times, August 11, 1960, p. 16.
49. The Hoffman/Marr Collection contains a 1944 list of the thirty-two buildings on the island which provides the date and type of construction, the cubic feet, and the cost.
50. Emma Rose Sherman studied the plot plan and identified for me which building Mary Mallon occupied. When Sherman came to the island in 1929, she set up the bacteriology laboratory on the second floor of the chapel, directly across from Mallon’s cottage. Sherman, Interview, July 16, 1993.
51. Sherman, Interview, July 16, 1993. See accounts in the New York newspapers for June 15 and 16, 1904, about the heroic rescues of steamboat passengers by Riverside Hospital patients.
52. The (New York) Sun, June 30, 1909. The New York Times essentially repeated the story: “She was treated like a leper and compelled to occupy a house by herself, with a dog as her only companion. Food was brought to her three times a day by a nurse, she said, who left it at the door and turned away” (July 17, 1909, p. 3).
53
. New York American, June 30, 1909, p. 3. It is interesting that Mallon explicitly distinguished herself from other infected people; she did not question that people with leprosy should be isolated.
54. The family of Dr. John Cahill, who was head of the island hospital for many of the years of Mallon’s stay, assures me that he left no papers, and they do not know of any patient records extant. The city and state health departments confirm that no hospital records survive.
55. New York World, July 20, 1909, p. 18.
56. Quoted in the New York World, July 20, 1909, p. 18.
57. Offspring, “Petition.” The context of the passage where Offspring refers to Mallon’s visitors leaves it slightly ambiguous whether this applied to the years of Mallon’s first or second incarceration. Offspring was born in Canada and immigrated to the United States either in 1895 or 1901. She was twenty-three years old when she first became acquainted with Mallon. Offspring is listed in the Thirteenth Census and Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1910 and 1920, enumeration for Riverside Hospital. Mallon did not appear in the census listing of hospital patients in either year. The first enumeration was taken on April 15, 1910, and Mallon had already been released in February. According to the Civil List (New York Municipal Archives), Offspring began employment as a nurse at Riverside Hospital on July 9, 1906.
58. Mary Mallon, Part Seven of her Last Will and Testament, Offspring inherited the amount of $3,572.05, residuary from the total estate value of $4,172.05.
59. Quoted in New York World, July 20, 1909, p. 18. There is no clear evidence that Mary Mallon connected the injustice she felt specifically with her Irish background, nor that she strongly identified with, and was spurred on by, the Irish National Movement, a connection posited by Mary McLaughlin, “Mary Mallon: Alias Typhoid Mary,” The Recorder 40 (1979): 44–57, and repeated by Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers, p. 101. I am grateful to Dr. McLaughlin for consulting with me about her statements that Mallon was hired by the Bryant family of Marblehead, Massachusetts, sometime during the years of her release between 1910 and 1915 (not confirmed by Soper’s speculations about her jobs during those years). The Bryants’ grandson told McLaughlin that his family had employed “Typhoid Mary” and that the cook had ties to the Irish movement, and that a petition in the Irish press raised money to gain Mallon’s release. This information could not be confirmed. I have reason to question it because of the frequency with which people named any Irish-born cook who might be associated with illness as “Typhoid Mary.” A close reading of the New York Irish newspapers in this period revealed no petition, nor even mention of Mary Mallon’s case, her initial isolation, her release, or her reincarceration. I am grateful, too, to John Concannon, Historian of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America, for his help in tracing Mallon’s Irish connections, and to the many others who answered my query in the Irish Echo.
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