Mary Mallon & Typhoid Revisited

Mary Mallon became known as Typhoid Mary in the early 20th century. She has often been vilified in in modern references, though her story is actually quite complex. 

Research:

• "Mary Mallon." Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, vol. 21, Gale, 2001. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631007781/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=23f34010. Accessed 3 Aug. 2026.
• Brooks, J. “The sad and tragic life of Typhoid Mary.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne vol. 154,6 (1996): 915-6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1487781/
• Brooks, Janet. “The Sad and Tragic Life of Typhoid Mary.” Canadian Medical Association Journal. Vol. 154, No. 6. 3/15/1996.
• Cutter, Laura. “Typhoid Mary/Mary Mallon: An Asymptomatic Carrier of Salmonella typhi.” National Museum of Health and Medicine. 6/18/2020. https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/micrograph/index.cfm/posts/2020/typhoid_mary_mary_mallon_salmonella
• “Research Starter: Typhoid Mary.” https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/life-sciences/typhoid-mary
• Faherty, Anna. “The cook who became a pariah.” Wellcome Collection. 6/29/2017. https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/WsT4Ex8AAHruGfW_
• Leavitt, Judith Walzer. “‘Typhoid Mary’ Strikes Back: Bacteriological Theory and Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Public Health.” Isis , Dec., 1992, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Dec., 1992). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/234261
• Leavitt, Judith Walzer. "Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public Health." Beacon Press. 1997. 
• Mallon, Mary. Letter to Dr. William H. Park. June 1909. Via PBS NOVA. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/typhoid/letter.html
• Marineli, Filio et al. “Mary Mallon (1869-1938) and the history of typhoid fever.” Annals of gastroenterology vol. 26,2 (2013): 132-134. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3959940/
• Mason, W.P. “Typhoid Mary.” Science. Vol. 30, No. 760. 7/23/1909. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1635174
• Murtagh, Joseh. “David DeKok presents gripping, heartbreaking view into Ithaca’s 1903 typhoid outbreak.” Ithica.com. 4/11/2012. https://www.ithaca.com/visit_ithaca/david-dekok-presents-gripping-heartbreaking-view-into-ithaca-s-1903-typhoid-outbreak/article_943a556c-6b6d-11e0-92b9-001cc4c002e0.html
• New York Times. “Hospital Epidemic from Typhoid Mary.” 3/28/1915.
• New York Times. “HOSPITAL EPIDEMIC FROM TYPHOID MARY; Germ Carrier, Cooking Under False Name, Spread Disease in Sloane Institution. CAUGHT HIDING IN QUEENS Blamed for Twenty-five Cases of Fever Among Doctors and Nurses -- Now In Quarantine.” 2/28/1915. https://www.nytimes.com/1915/03/28/archives/hospital-epidemic-from-typhoid-mary-germ-carrier-cooking-under.html?eafs_enabled=false
• Ogan, ML. “Immunization in a Typhoid Outbreak in the Sloane Hospital for Women.” New York Medical Journal. 3/27/1915. 609-610.
• Othman, Amani and William W. Darrow. “The Wall, the Ban, and the Objectification of Women.” The International Journal of Social Quality, Winter 2019, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter 2019). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26948452
• Poczai P and Karvalics LZ (2022) The little-known history of cleanliness and the forgotten pioneers of handwashing. Front. Public Health 10:979464. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.979464
• Prabhu, Maya. “The tragedy of Typhoid Mary.” Gavi. 6/18/2021. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/tragedy-typhoid-mary
• Pusey, Allen. “Precedents.” ABA Journal. Vol. 104, No. 3. March 2018. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26516280
• Sawyer, Wilbur. “The Efficiency of Various Anti-Typhoid Vaccines.” Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. LXV, No. 17. 10/13/2015.
• Soper, G A. “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 15,10 (1939): 698-712. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1911442/
• Soper, George A. “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary.” Read May 10, 1939 before the Section of Historical and Cultural Medicine. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. Vol. 15, No. 10. October 1939. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1911442/
• Soper, George A. “Typhoid Mary.” The Military Surgeon. Vol. XLV. No. 1. July 1919.
• Soper, George. A. “The Work of a Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor.” Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. XLVIII. No. 24. 6/15/1907.
• Teicher, Amir. “Typhoid Mary Was Not a Super-Spreader (and Super-Spreaders Are Not "Typhoid Marys").” American journal of public health vol. 113,12 (2023): 1249-125

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye Holly. A while back, you
and I talked about the possibility of revisiting very old

(00:23):
episodes of the show, from back when episodes were only
like thirteen or fifteen or ten minutes long. Yeah, which
we have done before. Yeah, that's how we wound up
with a three parter on Charles Sumner last winter. Yeah.
And we did Zenobia of Palaira as well. Oh, we
did do that, this one that got covered. Yeah. So

(00:44):
things that number one totally different approach to the show
when they were made much shorter episodes than we do now.
And then also, most of them are not even in
listeners players anymore. So if you wanted to go listen
to the ten minute episode on whatever, there are very
limited options to do so, so we're doing that today.

(01:07):
We are revisiting Mary Mallin, who became known as Typhoid
Mary in the early twentieth century. She was originally the
subject of a thirteen minute episode of our show back
in two thousand and nine. Mary Mallin was born in
Cookston County, Tyrone, Ireland on September twenty third, eighteen sixty nine.

(01:28):
She immigrated to the United States in eighteen eighty three
or eighteen eighty four, where she probably started out living
with an aunt and uncle. She would have been in
her mid teens at that point, and as far as
we know, she came to the United States alone. She
did various types of domestic work and eventually became a cook,
working mostly for well off families in jobs that she

(01:51):
got through an employment agency or that she found through advertisements.
In nineteen oh six, Charles Henry Warren her for the
summer at a house he was renting on Oyster Bay
in Long Island. She started working in early August, and
about three weeks later, people who were either staying or
working at the house started to get sick. By early September,

(02:15):
six of the eleven people connected to the household had
developed typhoid that included three family members and three staff.
Two people had to be hospitalized. Typhoid is caused by
the bacteria Salmonilla typhe, which is spread through human fecal matter,
and it causes symptoms like high fever, constipation, nausea, headaches,

(02:38):
joint pain, and sometimes a rash across the abdomen. It
can also progress to include intestinal perforations, myocarditis, meningitis, pneumonia, convulsions,
and shock. In places that don't have reliable sewers or
wastewater treatment, water used for drinking or irrigation can come contaminated,

(03:01):
and that leads to major outbreaks. Typhoid can also spread
when sick people or healthy carriers prepare food for other people,
especially if they have not washed their hands thoroughly. Today,
typhoid continues to be a major issue in some parts
of the world. According to the World Health Organization, there

(03:22):
are between eleven and twenty million typhoid infections every year,
and between one hundred and twenty eight thousand and one
hundred and sixty one thousand of those cases are fatal.
In the US, today, the vast majority of typhoid cases
are in people who have just traveled internationally, so they
contracted it somewhere else. But in the early twentieth century,

(03:44):
outbreaks were pretty common in the US, and they tended
to happen in the summer when they were connected to
events like weddings and family gatherings. They really made headlines
in nineteen oh six. Doctors knew what caused typhoid. The
vacillius was isolated in eighteen eighty. They knew the bacteria
were shed in bodily waste, and that latrines and cesspits

(04:08):
could contaminate water sources. Typhoid was also associated with contaminated milk,
sewer gas, and general unsanitary conditions, but since antibiotics had
not been invented, there wasn't an effective treatment for it yet.
Of the three thousand, four hundred sixty seven cases reported

(04:29):
in New York in nineteen oh six, there were six
hundred thirty nine deaths. That's a fatality rate of more
than eighteen percent. Those are just the reported cases, so
that is also likely an undercount. Investigators looked into the
outbreak at the house at Oyster Bay, but they did
not find a cause for it. George Thompson, who owned

(04:51):
the house, was worried that he would not be able
to find good tenants if people were afraid there was
a source of typhoid lurking around, so he hired sanit
engineer George Soper of the New York City Department of
Health to look into it further. Soper's training was as
a civil engineer, which had evolved into sanitary engineering. After

(05:12):
the Galveston Hurricane of nineteen hundred, he was in charge
of sanitary reconstruction work in Galveston. By the time Thompson
hired him to investigate the Oyster Bay outbreak, Soper had
worked on a few other typhoid outbreaks. One of those
was in Ithaca, New York in nineteen oh three, and
had involved an estimated one thousand illnesses and more than

(05:34):
eighty deaths, including twenty nine students from Cornell University. A
big part of this outbreak was a lack of sanitary
procedures at the Ithaca waterworks, and Malin didn't have anything
to do with it, but sometimes people attribute that outbreak
to her, possibly because of Soaper's work on both of
the outbreaks. When Soper arrived at Oyster Bay to investigate,

(05:59):
he expected to find that previous investigators had missed something obvious.
They'd made some kind of oversight, but it seemed like
they had been thorough given how people understood typhoid to
spread at the time. He checked the family's sources for
milk and cream, the condition of the properties well, and
how far it was from the privy that the servants used,

(06:21):
the condition of the indoor water closet that the family used,
and the condition of the manure vault at the stable.
This family liked to eat clams, and at first he
thought that might be the culprit. Sometimes clams were harvested
from places that could be contaminated with raw sewage, but
if that was the case, that would have affected other

(06:42):
households as well. Soper concluded that someone must have come
to the house and brought typhoid with them. After eliminating
all of the other candidates, the only possibility was Malin,
who was no longer working there by the time he
came to this conclusion. Well. At first, Soper thought this
was actually unlikely. Typhoid bacteria can't survive the high temperatures

(07:07):
involved in cooking, and in most households, the cook might
serve food to the staff, but they didn't typically plate
or serve the food to the family. It turned out
that one of the dishes on the Sunday menu was
ice cream with fresh peaches cut into it, something that
had no cooking step to kill the bacteria, and that
seemed like the most likely cause of infection. Mary Mallin

(07:30):
had left this household a few weeks after the outbreak,
and Soper started trying to track her down. He also
contacted the employment agency that Thompson had used to hire
her to find out where else she had worked. He
wound up with a partial work history going back to
nineteen hundred, and he started interviewing those families. Seven of

(07:52):
the eight families that he spoke with said that people
in their household had gotten typhoid, and that those infections
had started after Malin had started working there. Soper wrote
a paper about all of this, and he presented that
to the Biological Society of Washington, d C. In April
of nineteen oh seven. He also published it in the
Journal of the American Medical Association that June. By that point,

(08:17):
Malin had been found and she was taken into custody,
and we're going to get into all of that in
just a moment. And it had been confirmed that even
though she did not seem sick, she did have typhoid
bacteria in her stool. Soaper described her as a quote
chronic typhoid germ distributor. Today, it is estimated that between

(08:40):
one percent and six percent of people who developed typhoid
become chronic carriers of the bacteria. But this nineteen oh
seven paper was the first ever English language description of
a chronic carrier. The idea had previously appeared in German
language medical writing, but that was also very recent. The

(09:00):
oldest use I could find of the German word that
was coined for this was also from nineteen oh seven.
In other words, healthy typhoid carriers were a brand new
idea in the European medical tradition. We're going to get
into what happened after Soper tracked Mary Mallin down. After
we paused for a sponsor break. When George Soper tracks

(09:33):
down Mary Mallin, she was working for a family that
lived on Park Avenue in New York. Their laundress was
in the hospital with typhoid, and their daughter was dying
of it. Soper seems to have genuinely thought that if
he went to Malin and explained to her that her
cooking was making people sick, she would welcome this information

(09:55):
and immediately do whatever it was that he asked of
her to try to resold the situation. Maybe she even
suspected this of herself already. It does not seem to
have dawned on him that what he would be doing
was showing up at her workplace unannounced, where she was
doing a job that she'd been doing for more than
a decade, and telling her something that was not part

(10:19):
of the public understanding of disease at all, and on
top of that would probably come off as insulting and accusatory.
She chased him out of the house with a carving fork.
Soper learned that Melan was staying at a boarding house
with a man named A Bryhoff. Soper went there, where
he found Melin understandably still angry. She was probably also

(10:43):
feeling betrayed since Bryhoff, who is variously described as her friend,
her best friend sometimes her boyfriend, was actually the person
that let Soper in. Malan argued that she was healthy,
that she had never had typhoid, that no one she
had ever worked for or had ever accused her of
making them sick, and that there was no more typhoid

(11:04):
in the places she had worked than there was anywhere else.
As we said, outbreaks in New York were common, although
they were more associated with poorer, more crowded neighborhoods than
the well off families. She typically worked for. Soaper told
doctor Herman M. Biggs, medical officer of the New York
City Department of Health, that he thought Malan was spreading typhoid.

(11:28):
Biggs enlisted the help of doctor Sarah Josephine Baker. The
first time Baker tried to talk to Malan, Malan slammed
the door in her face. The next day, Baker returned
with police, and Malan fled the house and hid. She
was ultimately found in an exterior closet of a neighboring home.
In Baker's words quote, she fought and struggled and cursed.

(11:52):
I tried to explain to her that I only wanted
the specimens and that then she could go back home.
She again refused us, and I told the policeman to
pick her up and put her in the ambulance. This
we did, and the ride down to the hospital was
quite a wild one. During that ride, Baker reportedly sat
on top of Malin to hold her down. They took

(12:16):
mallin to Willard Parker Hospital, which was a communicable disease hospital,
and placed her in an isolation Ward and Soaper's words quote,
it was not an attractive or particularly comfortable room and
there was no reason why a strong, active woman of
forty who felt herself to be in perfect health should
be contented with it, and Mary Mallin was not. The

(12:39):
staff at the hospital collected stool and urine samples from Malin,
and her stool samples, as we mentioned earlier, contained salmonilla
type bacteria. She was transferred to North brother Island, home
to Riverside Hospital, which was primarily being used to house
and treat tuberculosis patients. Main was housed in a bungalow

(13:01):
that had originally been built for the superintendent of nurses
to live in. At this point, health authorities in New
York were empowered to confine people against their will if
they were deemed to be public health breads, but this
was mostly done in active cases of smallpox or tuberculosis,
not people who were by all outward appearances healthy and

(13:25):
not for an indefinite period of time. So Malan was
at this point unique in two ways. She was the
only known chronic typhoid carrier in the United States and
the only apparently healthy person being held indefinitely due to
public health concerns. So we should take a moment here

(13:46):
to address some widely repeated characterizations of Mary Mallin that
just do not seem to be true. She was definitely
angry and combative, but descriptions of her personal hygiene are contradictory,
and it's also hard to take them at face value,
since the people writing them were often trying to characterize
her as a public health threat. Sometimes there is an

(14:09):
assumption that she knew she was giving people typhoid, and
that she callously kept working, always leaving for new jobs
right after an outbreak started. Again. The idea that a
healthy person could give someone typhoid was an incredibly new
medical development, so it's really not something that a layperson
was likely to have even thought of. Aside from that,

(14:32):
the timeline between when Mallan arrived and when an outbreak
started was all over the place, anywhere between a few
days and more than a month, or in one household
that we know of. Never she did leave a few
days after one of the outbreaks started, but in other
outbreaks she kept working for weeks or months after it

(14:53):
was over, and at least one case she helped take
care of the sick. New York doctor Coleman Drayton gave
her a fifty dollars bonus on top of her regular
pay for her help caring for members of his household.
At the same time, it would have been reasonable for
her or for anybody else on the staff to find
a different job in the face of a contagious and

(15:15):
sometimes deadly illness that was spreading in their workplace. And
then there is the idea that Malin didn't understand that
she was a typhoid carrier because she wasn't very smart.
Sober described her as unusually intelligent. She also seems to
have been savvy in her efforts to be released from
North brother Island. Medical staff, as we said, collected stool

(15:39):
and urine samples from her at first three times a
week and then weekly. They collected one hundred sixty two
samples between nineteen oh seven and nineteen oh nine, one
hundred nineteen of which were positive for typhoid. In nineteen
oh eight, Mallin started sending a stool sample to Bryhoff
whenever the hospital a collected one, and Bryhoff sent them

(16:02):
to Ferguson Laboratories for independent testing. Ferguson Laboratories tested ten
of her samples and reported that all ten of those
were negative for typhoid. Eight of those samples were from
weeks when the sample tested at North Brother Island was
also negative. These independent lab tests became evidence when Malin

(16:24):
took the matter to court in nineteen oh nine. She
was represented by attorney George Francis O'Neill, who filed a
writ of habeas corpus on her behalf. At the hearing,
O'Neill made the very straightforward and in my opinion, correct
argument that Mallan was being imprisoned without due process and

(16:44):
had not been offered legal counsel. But even though none
of the tests run at Ferguson Laboratories showed evidence of
typhoid bacteria and malins stool, the New York Health authorities
had all of those other positive tests that had been
run at Brother Island. So Judge Mitchell Erlinger ultimately dismissed
the case and Malan had to stay in isolation. During

(17:09):
these court proceedings, newspapers started reporting on Mallin using her
real name. Earlier reports had either not used a name
or they had used the pseudonym Mary Liverson, and they
started calling her by the nickname she's been known for years,
Typhoid Mary. The New York World quoted her as saying, quote,
before God and in the eyes of decent men, my

(17:31):
name is Mary Mallin. I was christened and baptized Mary Mallin.
I lived a decent, upright life under the name of
Mary Mallin until I was seized. She went on to
say that she had been locked up in a pest
house and re christened typhoid Mary quote the name by
which the world has ever since known me. A lot

(17:52):
of this reporting was sympathetic to Malan, and so was
the public response. The New York American interviewed her and
quoted her as saying, quote, I am an innocent human being.
I have committed no crime, and I am treated like
an outcast, a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. She
also asked, quote, why should I be banished like a

(18:15):
leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only
a dog for a companion. The New York American was
owned by William Randolph Hearst, and there is speculation that
Hurst or his sympathetic readers paid for O'Neill to represent
Mallan in court. Malan also had some support from members

(18:35):
of the medical and public health community when Soper first
reported on her case in April of nineteen oh seven.
Milton L. Rosno of the US Public Health Service responded, quote,
it is not necessary to imprison the Basila's carrier. It
is sufficient to restrict the activities of such an individual.

(18:55):
In nineteen ten, public health pioneer Charles V. Chapin published
a book called Sources and Modes of Infection, in which
he discussed healthy disease carriers. He was critical of how
Melan was being treated, writing quote, what result is secured
by keeping her in confinement other than the placing of
discredit on public health work? It is difficult to see

(19:19):
by this point. Doctors also understood that Mallin was not unique.
In nineteen oh nine, W. P. Mason of the Renstler
Polytechnic Institute published an article in the journal Science that
concluded that about four percent of people continued to shed
bacteria after recovering from typhoid. He wrote, quote, there are

(19:41):
at the present moment, probably five hundred and sixty such
persons in the state of New York, representing four percent
of the fourteen thousand cases of typhoid fever occurring during
the past year. We cannot keep in detention all these people,
then why single out and imprison one. We also have
Mallan's thoughts from a letter that she wrote to William H. Park,

(20:05):
head of the New York Department of Health Bacteriology Lab,
in June of nineteen oh nine. She wrote, quote, there
was never any effort by the board authority to do
anything for me except to cast me on the island
and keep me a prisoner without being sick nor needing
medical treatment. After describing being forced to give stool samples

(20:26):
and blood cultures, she wrote that when she first arrived,
she was so nervous and grief stricken that her eye
started to twitch and her eyelid became paralyzed. An I
specialist who visited the island multiple times a week was
never asked to examine her. She wrote quote, I did
not even get a cover for my eye. I had

(20:47):
to hold my hand on it whilst going about and
at night tie a bandage on it. She also described
being treated with eurotropine, which has been used since the
late nineteenth century to treat the things like urinary tract infections.
She was treated with it for months, and she wrote quote,
if I should have continued, it would certainly have killed me,

(21:09):
for it was very severe. Everyone knows who is acquainted
in any kind of medicine that it's used for kidney trouble.
Kidney trouble is underlined, and she said multiple people at
the hospital had tried to, in her words Inveigel her
into having her gallbladder removed. It was thought that typhoid

(21:30):
bacteria lived in the gallbladder, so gallbladder removal would cure
chronic carriers, but this surgery had obvious risks, especially in
the pre antibiotic era. In her autobiography, s. Josephine Baker
wrote that Malan thought this surgery was a pretext for
hospital staff to kill her, and Malin stated that she

(21:51):
had refused it because there was nothing wrong with her gallbladder.
It also quickly became clear that this procedure, of course,
did not work. By nineteen twenty one, five known typhoid
carriers had their gallbladders removed, and none of them were
cured afterward. To return to Mallin's letter, she concluded, quote,
I have been, in fact a peep show for everybody.

(22:15):
Even the interns had to come see me and ask
about the facts already known to the whole wide world.
The tuberculosis men would say, there she is the kidnapped woman.
Doctor Park has had me illustrated in Chicago. I wonder
how the said doctor William H. Park would like to
be insulted and put in the journal and call him

(22:36):
or his wife Typhoid William Park. We will talk about
how Mallin was finally released from North Brother Island after
a sponsor break. Mary Mallan is usually characterized as being

(22:57):
held in absolute isolation on North Brother Island, but she
was eventually given some freedom to move around. By her
own account, she helped care for children who had been
hospitalized and didn't have family there to look after them
or to keep them company. Malin liked children. Accounts from
her earlier employment said that she liked looking after and

(23:18):
playing with the children and the households where she worked.
She was also allowed to have visitors, and she made
friends with some of the staff. This should not distract
from the fact that she was being held against her will.
Though in nineteen ten, the new head of the New
York City Health Department, Ernst Jay Letterley, planned to release

(23:38):
Malin from the island. She signed a sworn statement that
she would change occupations and would take measures to protect
anyone that she came in contact with from infection. She
also had to periodically check in with the health department.
We don't really know how thoroughly anything about her situation
was explained to her, but the assumption was that Malan

(24:00):
and would find other work that did not involve cooking.
But most of those other domestic service jobs were a
lot more physically demanding, and they paid less money than
cooking did, especially since Mallin was a good enough cook
to be able to get high wages and good positions.
There was no social safety net at all, and it

(24:20):
doesn't seem like anybody other than Mallan really thought about
what it would take for her to support herself if
she could not cook anymore. When she said that she
was having trouble finding work, Letterly apparently arranged for her
to work as a laundress, which would not have been
an appealing job. In nineteen ten. The electric washing machine

(24:41):
was brand new, first patented in the United States in
nineteen oh four, and not in widespread use yet. In
those first electric machines, the only thing that was powered
was turning the drum. Fully automatic machines like we have
today were still decades away, so doing laundry was an
hensley manual job that involved a lot of hard work,

(25:03):
hot water, and harsh chemicals. In nineteen eleven, still having
trouble earning a living, Malan unsuccessfully tried to sue the
city for damages. At some point after this, A. Bryhoff died.
It's possible that this was a factor in Malin going
back to cooking around nineteen fourteen. She might have been

(25:25):
able to get by when she had somebody to live with,
but she couldn't when she was on her own. There
were only a couple of employment agencies in New York
City that worked with domestic workers, and they, of course
knew who she was. She couldn't use the name Mary
Mallin since it had been all over the newspapers along
with the moniker typhoid Mary, so when she applied to

(25:47):
work as a cook at Sloan Maternity Hospital in Manhattan
in nineteen fifteen, she used the name Mary Brown. Three
months later, a typhoid outbreak started at the hospital. At
least twenty five people got sick and two people died.
Doctor Edward B. Craigan, the head obstetrician, and gynecologist called

(26:08):
George Soper to investigate. Reportedly, and for reasons that are unclear,
staff at the hospital had started calling Mallin typhoid Mary.
She was not at the hospital the day soaper came
to investigate, but he heard about this nickname, and then
was offered something that she had written to see if
he recognized her handwriting, and he did. A health official

(26:32):
who went to take her in recognized her by her walk,
which was described as very distinctive and masculine, according to
an article in The New York Times. This time, when
authorities went to try to capture Mallin, they were denied
entry into the house where she was staying, and they
had to gain access to her room through a window

(26:52):
using a ladder. Public support for her really vanished as
newspapers reported on her return to cooking and the typhoid
outbreak at the hospital. She was returned to North Brother Island,
and this time people described her as seeming resigned about
it and not fighting back. She described herself as having

(27:12):
faced continual intrusive questions in the years since being released,
so it's possible she just thought that people would leave
her alone there outside of the island, though she was
criticized and ridiculed. Newspapers had been calling her typhoid Mary
for years, and by nineteen twenty they were also using
the term typhoid Mary in stories about disease outbreaks that

(27:36):
had nothing to do with her, and in some cases
weren't even outbreaks of typhoid and other typhoid carriers took
pains to describe themselves as not like her. This included
New York bakery owner Alphonse Kotil, who had immigrated from Belgium.
After he was taken to court after returning to food

(27:57):
preparation and defiance of health authorities in nineteen twenty four,
he described himself as not a typhoid Mary, and in
court about this he received a suspended sentence after a
judge said that he could not be imprisoned for his health.
At least two other typhoid carriers temporarily spent some time

(28:18):
at North Brother Island during Mallin's second incarceration there. One
of those was dairy worker Tony Labella, who was connected
to more than eighty cases and two deaths in New York.
After agreeing to change jobs, he moved to New Jersey
and went back to dairywork, and in nineteen twenty two
he was connected to thirty five cases of typhoid and

(28:41):
three deaths there. And then there was confectioner Frederick Mersh
who sold ice cream. More than one hundred and ten
infections and several deaths were traced back to him. In
nineteen fifteen, he agreed to get a job as a plumber,
but then went back to food service work and caused
another outbreak in nineteen twenty eight, with that second outbreak

(29:03):
involving more than eighty cases and two deaths. Accounts of
Mercia's time on the island are a little odd. It
seems like he might have gone there so he could
work at the hospital and earn enough money to support
his family while not cooking. Other staff did not seem
to realize that he, like Mallin, was a chronic typhoid

(29:25):
carrier who had caused multiple outbreaks and that he was
actually being detained. He did eventually return home. While at
North Brother Island for the second time, Malan kept herself
busy by reading and writing letters. She regularly corresponded with friends,
and she got letters from around the world from people
who were curious about her or who were themselves chronic

(29:48):
typhoid carriers. She also made crafts, including beadwork, that she
sold to earn some money for herself. There are also
accounts saying that she baked for people, which she seems
kind of wild considering her status as a typhoid carrier,
which was the entire reason she was on the island.
Perhaps her customers felt safe because they were hospital workers

(30:12):
who had been vaccinated, and because the food was cooked.
This part is really not clear. Yeah, there are some
I'm like, was she really cooking or is there a
misunderstanding somewhere? I don't know. Did they think cooking and
baking were different somehow? Yeah. Starting in June of nineteen eighteen,
Mallan was allowed to leave the island without supervision. She'd

(30:35):
go to visit friends, sometimes for extended periods, and she
wasn't really questioned about where she'd gone or what she'd
done while she was away. Also, in nineteen eighteen, she
started working at the hospital on the island, and that
is work for which she was paid. She did cleaning,
domestic type work and then was eventually designated as a

(30:55):
hospital helper and then eventually as a nurse. In nineteen
twenty five, Doctor Alexandra Plavska trained Malin to work at
the hospital laboratory, where she cleaned up, washed lab vessels,
and ran tests. Plavska's successor apparently did not trust Mallin
to run the tests and would rerun them all herself

(31:18):
or himself. I don't remember that person's gender, but let
Malan continue to do this work because it seemed important
to her. Malin did not arrive for work one morning
in December of nineteen thirty two, and someone went to
check on her, and they found her on the floor.
She'd had a massive stroke. After this, she was unable

(31:40):
to walk, and she spent the next six years being
cared for at Riverside Hospital. She died there on November eleventh,
nineteen thirty eight, at the age of sixty nine. She
was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. Authorities
ran advertisements looking for Malin's relatives for two months, even
though she had told people that she didn't have any family.

(32:02):
Nine people attended her funeral, including Klavska and her daughter
and Malan's friend Mary Limpy and some of her family.
Malan left Plavska two hundred dollars in her will and
left all of her possessions to Limpy. She also left
some charitable donations and other bequests, and she paid for
her own grave marker, which reads Mary Mallan died November eleventh,

(32:27):
nineteen thirty eight, Jesus Mercy. According to some accounts, an
autopsy was performed on Malan's body, and it revealed that
she had gallstones that were full of typhoid bacteria, suggesting
that she might have been cured as she'd agreed to
have that surgery. Boy, do I have thoughts about this
to talk about on Friday? But there is no record

(32:47):
of an autopsy, and Soaper's later writing about her specifically
says that no autopsy was conducted. Yeah, it sort of
comes across as something that was spread to justify her
being held for her whole life, even though it was
already established that she was a chronic carrier. We didn't
also need a possibly fake autopsy story. By the time

(33:09):
Malin died, the City of New York was monitoring at
least four hundred chronic typhoid carriers, none of whom were
being isolated or quarantined, but typhoid was becoming less and
less common in the city. Water chlorination introduced in nineteen
oh nine made a big difference in typhoid rates, as

(33:30):
did the vaccines that were first used in nineteen eleven.
Antibiotics that were effective against typhoid were developed in nineteen
forty eight, and today chronic typhoid can usually be cured
with a longer course of antibiotics. There are many possible
reasons for why Malin was treated differently from other typhoid

(33:50):
carriers of her era, including other carriers who also went
back to working with food and caused additional outbreaks, some
of them larger and dea than anything that was ever
traced to Malin. Immigrants from Ireland at this time were
perceived as unclean and untrustworthy. Some health officials described Malan

(34:12):
as dirty or untidy, although doctor Sarah Josephine Baker said
the opposite, describing Malin as a quote clean, neat obviously
self respecting irishwoman. Malan was also angry, even violently so,
in her earliest encounters with health officials and police. Baker
once wrote of her quote, it was her own bad

(34:33):
behavior that inevitably led to her doom. The hospital authorities
treated her as kindly as possible, but she never learned
to listen to reason. It also seems like health officials
put more effort into training typhoid carriers to do other
types of work if they were men, specially men with
families who were expected to be the breadwinners. The typhoid

(34:58):
Mary moniker can used to be used today, of course,
especially in situations where someone is perceived as carelessly or
callously spreading disease, and Malan's story has continued to be
relevant as health authorities have tried to figure out how
to balance personal freedoms and constitutional protections with public health,

(35:20):
including things like isolation and quarantine protocols in the early
years of the global HIV pandemic, the early COVID nineteen pandemic,
and outbreaks of diseases like ebola today. Do you have
listener mail to top off this episode? I do have
listener mail. This listener mail is from Greg and Greg

(35:42):
wrote Holly and Tracy. At the conclusion of your recent
Unearthed podcast, you discussed how the current administration is trying
to push a whitewashed version of history at our national parks, monuments,
historical sites, and museums. It got me thinking about the
complicated history of Shenandoah National Park, which you covered on

(36:03):
a podcast about a year ago. I lived in Virginia
before retiring from the federal government in twenty twenty five,
as many of us did that year, and moving to
South Carolina, and for decades in Virginia, I was a
Scout leader. Frequently. I would take my scouts hiking in
Shenandoah National Park, and one of our favorite hikes was
the loop known as Little Devil Stairs. Part of that

(36:25):
trail follows the Kaiser Run fire Road, and there it
passes a cemetery used by the families who once lived
in that part of what became the Shenandoah National Park.
I would always have my scouts stop there at the
cemetery and we'd have a talk about how and why
the park was created. Why do you think there's a
cemetery located here, what happened to the people who lived here.

(36:49):
I've attached a photo of a plaque found in that cemetery.
On it is a poem Why the Mountains Are Blue?
By Wayne Baldwin. I would have my scouts read it
and then discuss their thoughts. My scouts would express surprise
at the history of the park, of course they had
never heard of the history of it in school, and
express empathy for the uprooted families. They would draw parallels

(37:10):
to Native Americans. They'd raise questions about other stories in
American history and wonder how much of them were mythological.
Quote get curious, ask hard questions, see how the interpretations
have changed over time, and they talk about how much
they loved Shindoah National Park and how grateful they were
for the opportunity to enjoy its beauty. I think Baldwin's

(37:31):
poem captures exactly why we should never whitewash history. No
matter how noble the outcome, real people paid a very
real price for what we have come to enjoy today.
We should not forget about them nor what happened to them.
It's fashionable patriotism to thank soldiers for their service, yet
we don't recognize the sacrifices of so many others, like

(37:52):
those whose homes were taken for the creation of this
beautiful park. American history should not be framed like a
Disney theme park, where everything is pristine while all the
garbage is kept hidden behind the scenes. It is in
the understanding of these complicated stories that we are able
to move closer toward the ideals set forth in our
nation's founding documents. I also wanted to add that I

(38:14):
was delighted to see your show on the Color Blue
at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC several
years ago. It was a lot of fun to be
part of the audience. Thank you for bringing your show
on the road. Hopefully you'll come to Charleston sometime soon. Greg.
Thank you so much, Greg for this email, which is lovely,
and also for this picture. I did not know about

(38:35):
this plaque and the poem why the Mountains Are Blue.
It is basically I cannot read the poem. I do
not know it's copyright status, whether we would be infringing
on things to read it. But if you google why
the Mountains Are Blue by Wayne Baldwin, or use any
other search engine of your choice, you'll be able to

(38:55):
find it and read it. And it is basically about
remembering the sacrifice that was made to be able to
create Shenandoah National Parks. So thank you so much for
this email and this picture. Greg. If you would like
to write to us, we are at History Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com and if you would like to look

(39:17):
at the show notes for this episode, which are honestly
longer than normal, that is at our website, which is
at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere
else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed

(39:39):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
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