‘Typhoid Mary’
A century ago, a public health disaster hit New York City in the form of “Typhoid Mary,” a cook who carried typhoid fever, spreading the disease to a number of households she worked without showing any symptoms herself.
She was identified in the spring of 1907 as Mary Mallon by the doctor and sanitary worker George Soper, who had been tracing her employment through New York. Soper was unable to make Mallon consent to an examination until March, as the concept of a disease carrier with no symptoms of the disease was yet uncharacterized. The apparently healthy Mallon insisted she was being unjustly persecuted, and refused to take precautions against spreading the disease.
By the time Mallon was forcibly apprehended, she had caused 26 cases of typhoid fever, and one death. At the Riverside Hospital where she was detained, tests on her urine and stool confirmed large amounts of the “Bacillus typhosus,” today known as Salmonella typhi. Twice, the stool samples failed to confirm bacteria in Mallon’s body, and she appeared to show, according to Soper, “remarkable bodily strength and agility.”
As one of the first known asymptomatic carriers of an infectious disease, Mallon was held by the department of health in New York City until 1910, when health officials declared her free from germs. Five years later, Mallon worked as a hospital cook under a pseudonym and infected 25 more people in another outbreak. Police tracked her down, identifying the veiled Mallon “by her walk,” and confined her in quarantine again, this time for 23 years until her death in 1938. According to the New York Times, March 28, 1915, “Typhoid Mary” had become the “most celebrated germ-carrier in the world.”
Source: Journal of the American Medical Association, June 15, 1907, and New York Times, March 28, 1915.
-SANDY HUEN
