January 13, 2018 • 36 mins
In the 19th century, typhoid was considered a disease of the lower classes. When an outbreak occurred in wealthy Oyster Bay, New York, a mystery was afoot. Tune in to learn how this event began an ongoing debate over public safety versus civil rights.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know Selects. It's
a Saturday, but I'm here anyway because I love you.
This week, I am choosing The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary
from oct two thousand eleven, and Uh, to be honest,
I think this one well for a couple of reasons.
A is because I love it. I love our history
(00:21):
podcasts and this one was super super interesting. And uh,
the other reason is, UH, to be honest, I really
just love this title, The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. I
titled this one myself, and I just wanted to see
it in our feet again because I like looking at it.
So here we go, The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. Welcome
(00:49):
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
am welcome to the podcast son Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Greeny Boy, Chuck and Bryant and Jerry back in the
his house. None more guests producing. No, that was a
(01:10):
rough week, she was, but she's back. Hey Jerry, did
you hear that? Everybody? Probably not Chuck Jerry. Have you
guys ever heard how much manure a horse produces in
a day. I'm glad you went with this. I was
(01:31):
never really occurred to me. Go ahead, pounds twenty five
pounds of manure? Did you do the math? Because I did?
All right, Well, you come with that in a second, okay, So, um,
just go back with me a little bit, chuck to
the time when Daniel day Lewis was walking around New
York with a meat cleaver, overacting a little bit in
my opinion. Um, And it's the the late nineteenth century,
(01:56):
and the horse is the is the preferred of transportation
for everything from the most humble delivery cart to the
greatest ambulance to you know, people who like to ride horses,
three musketeers, that kind of thing. Everybody had a horse
to the limit, to the airport wherever. So there were
(02:19):
about two hundred thousand horses in New York City in
use in right, Yeah, multiply that times twenty five pounds
of poop a day and what do you get? Chucked? Well?
I did two because I thought that was the number. Okay,
So that's fine, we'll go with that. More than six
point two million pounds of horse poop per day deposited
(02:42):
on the streets of New York. Okay, Now, um, let's
say that's okay, Okay, Um, there's that many horses. There's
six point two million pounds of horsepoop every day. It's
a lot of poop. But not only that, there was
no one cleaning it up. It was not enough people
cleaning it up. Let's say that for sure. It was
(03:03):
just left there basically in a lot of cases, um,
to basically be ground into the cobble stone. And you know,
it makes you think, like, I'll bet there's a substantial
layer of horse manure under the streets of New York
that make up like that initial stratum of of of Earth,
the pupa sphere. Thank oh wait, that would be an
(03:25):
utter space. No, no, because the lithospheres. Yes, so you
were dead on thank you the pupa sphere. Um, things
change a little bit. The New York institutes a Department
of Health and a group of basically an army of
cleaning guys, very much like the um the garbage man
(03:49):
that Homer Simpson envisions in the in the It's the
Garbage Commissioner episode. I can't remember which one it is, Uh,
the Loveday episode is what it is? Okay. Um. These guys,
they're called white wings. They are deployed to clean up
the streets of New York and they do a heck
of a job, and possibly the fact of the the episode,
(04:11):
if I may take it please, this is where the
term cleanliness is next to godliness is coined. Pretty cool.
The New York Department of Health slogan in downtown New
York Josh at the turn of the century. Back then
was a disgusting, filthy place. And yet I love New York.
I love the history New York. We watched that, we
(04:31):
both watched the same Nova video on Typhoid Mary today
and they had photos of mountains of manure pushed to
the sidewalks and uh, sort of like if you've ever
been in New York on garbage day, imagine all those
garbage bags is poop, Yeah, but not pooping bags, just
mound poop. And they were dead animal carcasses. Did you
(04:52):
see that. It was like these boys playing in the
street with just a dead horse right in the middle
of their little stickball bimond guess he was on base
or something. And it was just a foul, disgusting, unclean,
unsanitary place, which, like you said, led to the formation
of the Department of Sanitation, Right, So the Department the
Department of Sanitation. UM was imbued with a lot of
(05:16):
clout from the get go. Yeah. And as you said that,
the Nova documentary on on Typhoid Mary, it's called like
the Most Dangerous Woman in America, but it's also on
YouTube under Typhoid Mary Nova. That's good. It was UM.
But they had a lot of cloud. They could forcibly
(05:36):
inoculate you with these new fangled inoculations. They could forcibly
remove you to a quarantine island, and New York had
a bunch of them. Yeah, that was popular at the time. Yeah,
but basically your civil liberties could be entirely suspended without
any sort of due process of law. Um and you
if you were considered sick. And a lot of this
(05:59):
was based done this new understanding of science of germ
theory thanks to our buddy Louis past year bacteriology yep UM.
So the problem was science reporting hadn't been established yet.
So all of the people who were in charge understood
what was going on. They understood germ theory, they understood innoculations,
they understood force quarantine, but no one had explained it
(06:22):
to the public fully. Right, So it's a recipe for
disaster so there's this thing called typhus or typhoid. I'm sorry,
And apparently they were one and the same until the
nineteenth centuries. About this time, typhus and typhoid typhoid fever
were separated. But typhoid fever fever, which is the star
of this co star of this episode. Sure, Um, it's
(06:46):
particularly nasty, isn't it It is? Josh, we're talking not
just ordinary diarrhea, but doubled over cramping, painful diarrhea. I
think you'd call that violent diarrhea, violent diarrhea, high fee her,
red rashes, sleeplessness, death if you don't treat it. A
lot of people through history have been stricken with it,
(07:08):
including Mary Todd, Lincoln, Georgia O'Keeffe, Rabbi Shankar, Frank I
really uh, Frank McCourt, author, and Wilbur Wright actually of
the Wright Brothers fame died from typhoid fever. Wow, pretty
sad And that was I mean, that's a scant, uh
sampling from a long long list of famous people that
(07:29):
have Those are the people who count who had typhois.
I think Lincoln's son actually died as from it as well,
But I don't think Mary Todd Lincoln died from it, Yeah,
but you can know she died of um or something
like that is what they would have called hysterics, right, Okay. Um, So,
before we started to get a handle on typhoid fever,
(07:50):
it's by the way, it's a um it's caused by
the bacterium Salmonella TYPEE. It's a type of Salmonella UM.
And before we got a hand on it with antibiotics,
apparently twelve of people died from typhoid. So it's a
big public health problem. Yeah, New York especially there were
four thousand new cases per year and killed one in
(08:12):
ten people at the time or one in remember that
god that nationwide? Uh yeah, as I understand it before antibiotics.
So um, let's even just say tempercent. That's a big
public health problem. And because it's spread by the bacterium salmonella.
(08:35):
Did that come out weird? Because it did in my
head slightly a little bit of the lazy tongue there,
because because of because it's spread through salm manella or
because it's a results of salmonella, it's very very easily
spread from handling your own poop e g. Using the bathroom,
not washing your hands and then handling food, uncooked food specifically. Yeah,
(09:00):
it was normally considered to be like a disease of
the lower classes. Yeah, until nineteen oh six. Was it
chuck the summer of nineteen oh six in a in
a wealthy quarter of the United States on Long Island
called Oyster Bay, Billy Joels film, I believe it's neither
(09:20):
here nor there. That's one extra fact you just gave everybody.
That's true. Uh. Yeah, when it when it happened in uh,
Oyster Bay, it was a much bigger deal because it
was more closely associated with let's say, the Lower east
Side tenement housing, the filth of Lower Manhattan at the time.
They've cleaned all that up now, Um, it's expense. What
(09:43):
you get though, when you're in Oyster Bay is you
get wealthy families who can spend a little money, and
that's what you had. In the case of the Thompson family,
they were afraid that they would not be able to
rent out the house that they were living in because, uh,
people were getting sick in that house over and over
and over and they couldn't figure it out. They'd decided
to hire an investigator who turned out to be a
(10:04):
very prominent figure in this case name Dr George Soper,
a sanitation engineer and UH epidemiologists, one of the first
epidemiologists really looking to make his career well, he already had.
He had a reputation um of of you know, being
able to track any illness back to his source. So
(10:26):
this family, the Thompson family, is that the one who
owned the house or the one who's who got sick.
They owned the house, and I believe some family members
had also gotten sick. Okay, So but there's a family
that rented it originally. That's where the typhoid outbreak first happened.
So maybe maybe they were just a homeowner. The Thompson
family hired Soper I believe, yeah, and said, hey, we
(10:47):
can't rent this house anymore because people are dying from
typhoid concerned, right, Yeah, So Soaper gets on the case,
starts um finds the family where the typhoid outbreak occurred,
and arts interviewing the heck out of him, and he's stumped.
He can't figure it out, like, where did this thing
come from? There? These are clearly patient zeros right here,
(11:10):
like nobody else on the Yster Bay had it before
then they didn't bring it with them from the city.
There's somebody missing, there's something missing. And he finally says,
have I talked to everybody who was in this house
in the summer of nineteen o six and they said
you should talk to typhoid Mary. I don't know. I
didn't think of that, because what you know, what he
(11:32):
did was he interviewed kitchen staff, and it turns out
that there was a former employee that was no longer there,
Mary Mallon, And he said, wait a minute, you know,
maybe I should check this lady out. Turns out she
loved to serve this ice cream and fresh peaches, which
is uncooked, and that was her I guess her. She
was noted for that dessert, right. But even more incriminating
(11:54):
than the dessert is the idea that when he looked
into her history, she'd worked for eight families in ten years,
and six of those families said had typhoid outbreaks. So
(12:25):
he began to think that there was something special about
Mary Mallen and and that she was what's called a
healthy carrier, meaning um and and I'm just gonna paraphrase
this awesome way that nova doc put it right, when
you get typhoid fever, there's almost always a clear winner.
If the bacteria wins, you die, and if you if
(12:49):
you win, if your immune system wins, the bacteria dies.
But there's sometimes where there's a stalemate where your immune
system continues to function and you live and the bacteria
continues to live. In your sister to him, which means
you're healthy, but you're also extremely contagious. And that's what
Soaper came to believe Mary Mallen was. So she was
technically she actually had typhoid fever, but her immune system
(13:12):
was able to suppress all of it except the killing
of all the bacteria part right, So pretty cool, Soper cool,
but interesting because this is brand new. Yeah, and this
guy's on the cutting edge of this kind of thinking. Yeah,
And he knew like, potentially she could be the face
of bacteriology. The first bacteriology lab had just set up
(13:34):
in New York City and it was a burgeoning, uh
not industry but science. So he was like, man, this
is really gonna put me on the map if I
can prove this at least so he he didn't have
any training in science reporting either, though, did he he
didn't have training in people skills student either. He goes
to her and he's like, I finally found you. I
believe you're infected with typhoid. So I need stamples of
(13:58):
your stool, your urine and your blood. By the way,
my name is George, soaper good to me. And she's like, oh, no,
you're not. Yeah. So it's about this time that that
Mary Mallen. We should describe who she is, at least
go ahead. Mary Mallen was Irish. She or Irish came
over as a teenager by herself. She was born in
the poorest town county in Ireland, and Ireland at that time,
(14:23):
especially in the poorest county not a great place to be,
also dirty, also lots of death and dying in filth
and disease. And she was born in eighteen sixty nine,
so I think that's on the heels of the Potato famine,
if not still in the middle of it. So she
comes over as a teenager, lives with her aunt and
her uncle who passed away, and then is basically on
her own in New York, and by all accounts, as
(14:46):
a result of how she grew up and then being
on her in New York. She was very, very tough,
in fiery and independent and resourceful. Like had it been
anyone else, this might not have gone down like this.
They picked, literally eat not picked. But as it turns out,
it sounds like she was the toughest, most obstinate, stubborn,
fiery woman in New York City, right. And but she
(15:07):
was also good at what she did. She worked her
way up in the domestic servant classes to the pinnacle
of it. A cook in that era in the domestic
in domestic service, and sort of manager of the kitchen staff. Well,
not just that, almost the whole house, basically the all
of the servants. The cook was pretty much at the top,
maybe tied with the butler, depending on the house. But um,
(15:30):
she was a cook for all these these families, and
not just you know, families that could afford a cook,
but like very wealthy families. Um, she was good at
her at her job. But she took no guff from
any man. And when souper came and told her that
he wanted her feces, she chased him off with a
carving fork. Supposedly, that's how Super reported it. Yeah, and
(15:55):
you know, we'll get into her specifics later and she
got a real bad rap. But at the time there was,
like you said, there was no understanding on the public's
behalf of this, this whole zero I'm sorry, healthy carrier
is not even proven yet. So I mean, what is
she supposed to do? Just say like, sure, I'll go
with you, stranger, take my poop and and put me
(16:18):
in a quarantine. Yeah, so she thought it like she
probably had every right to right most initial though, wouldn't
normally you know, brandish a fork a carving fork on somebody.
But again it's lost to history whether she really did
do that or not. A good story. So Super takes
off and he's not one to let his career just
kind of slip through his fingers, and he goes to
(16:42):
the New York Commissioner of Health, Herman Biggs. So Biggs
was he was the one. He was the first one,
and he was the one who was like, oh, by
the way, we can come into your house and forcibly
inoculate you and your children if we want, and we
will do that too, if we if we think that
it's in the interest of the public health. So Biggs
was very sympathetic to Soaper's description of the story. Of
(17:05):
this crazy Irish woman who was just patient zero and
more than one outbreak um and basically needed to be
dealt with. Yeah, so he ordered a one of his
case workers, a few a few cops in an ambulance
out to where Mary lived a tenement. Yeah. Josephine Baker
(17:25):
was the inspector and not the dancer. No, but she
apparently was pretty tough lady as well. She started her
own rainbow family. Oh really yeah. Oh, and you know,
we should also point out one of the reasons that
Mallon was so upset initially was that she got the
feeling they were essentially calling her dirty an unsantit here
(17:46):
because he explained to her like, oh, you go poop
and then you get boop in your hands and you
handle peaches that you feed people, and so she was
very uh, she was upset that they felt like they
were picking on her cleanliness. She just a dirty Irish
im mcgrinners exactly. They were you know, dirty drunks and
causing problems and that was just the stereotype at the
(18:06):
time and she wasn't like that, she said, right. So, um,
Soaper goes to Biggs Bigs orders some people out. They
used their power and grab Mary. Well, she hides out
in the house for a while though okay, like it
took three hours to find her. Well when they finally did,
apparently it took all either three or four cops to
(18:28):
drag her to the ambulance and then the the female
case workers sat on her for the whole ride to
this hospital, this quarantine hospital, where she was kept for
a while. And like you said, it's it just happened
to work out that the person who was who was
typhoid Mary was this very stubborn, obstinate, self assertive woman
(18:53):
from Ireland, and she came about at a time where
there was a big question about public health, like you know,
where do an individual, civil rights and public the greater
public good begin. That's still going on, it still is.
But she forced this, this conversation into the national spotlight
(19:13):
starting about now. Yea. So they keep her, they test her.
They they're like, you need to poop into this bag
right now, and she did um and they tested it
and they said, well, this thing's lousy with typhoid. They
called her stool a factory for typhoid. Yeah, And what
they did was they said, here's the deal, give up
(19:35):
cooking because that's how you're transmitting this and we'll let
you go. And so did they say that immediately, but
not necessarily from the document, I think they initially offered
her that deal that she refused, which was one reason
why she was you know, lambasted in the in the
public later on in newspapers. But again, at the time,
she had managed to climb up out of the uh,
(19:59):
you know, poor conditions that she was living in an
Ireland and get a really good job and one that
she was good at and she didn't want to have
to learn something new and start over again. So at
the time, you know, like later on I can doll
out some of the blame on her, but early on
she still feels well, right, it's like, I'm not sick.
This doesn't make any sense. What does this healthy carrier thing? Yes, yeah,
(20:22):
she was not buying it at all, and she basically
came to believe that the Public Health Department had a
vendetta against her personally and felt quite persecuted. Um. So
when she said no, she wasn't going to stop cooking,
they said, okay, well we're gonna take you to a
nice little island called North Brother Island. It's not a
nice island. Seven. They took her there in quarantine her
(20:43):
their North Brother Island is a or it was a
tuberculosis hospital, quarantine quarantine hospital, i should say. And she
didn't have tuberculosis, and she wasn't even sick, she didn't
have any symptoms, and yet she was being kept here
against her will on North Brother Island, which you sent
a killer urban exploration photo spread that I want everybody
(21:06):
to go check out. It's creepy. It's on Gothamist dot
com and that's g O T H A M I
S T. And it's titled a Trip to the Abandoned
North Brother Island. It is so cool. Yeah, located there
was a riverside hospital and initially there was nothing there
and they said, hey, the idea of island quarantines was
(21:27):
pretty popular at the time, so we should build a
hospital there so we can treat these people. But um,
North Brother Island sort of gained a reputation over the
years because one it was I mean, it was much
more than tuberculosis. It was like later on it was
like hero and junkies were treated their syphilis like any
kind of nasty disease or addiction they would dump you
(21:47):
on at Riverside Hospital. It was in asylum. It basically was.
It was sort of like, uh, what's the DiCaprio, shutter island,
sendal island. Um. But they had a hard time staffing
it with real doctors for a while because actors understandably
didn't want to work there, so they had nurses only
for a time. Eventually there was a public campaign to
(22:07):
clean it up and to build better buildings and change
his rep which sort of worked, sort of didn't. But um,
in New York City at the time, especially on the
Lowery Side and where poor people lived, it had a
very bad reputation as you don't want to go there
because you go there and you don't come back. People
were afraid of it, right. So that's where they send
(22:28):
this Mary Malin off to so and when she gets there, um,
she starts trying to get out. She hired a escaping
right now, using legal channels. She um. She she hired
a lab, a private lab, and started sending them samples
of her stool and they were testing it and they
(22:48):
were not getting the same results. Her boyfriend would sneak
her poop to the lab and they weren't getting the
same results that the Public Health Department said that they
were getting UM. As far as her being a factory
for typhoid right, which could have been a false negative right.
It could have been because they said that you don't
always find it in the testing, and that's what they
said in the documentary. I believe so. But there was
(23:10):
a discrepancy and it was enough for her to get
her day in court New York Supreme Court. So she
makes her way. She's allowed to UM to leave the
island to go for her court date, and basically the
Public Health Department was like, look, she's a she's a
healthy carrier, and she's a public health threat. And Mary's like,
these people are holding me against my will. And the
(23:32):
New York Supreme Court said, you're a public health threat.
Go back to North Brother Island. Yeah. And around the
same time, it started getting newspaper coverage courtesy of William
Randolph Hurst, who may have financed her UM law. That's
crazy her legal expenses. Imagine it was. It was great
for the papers, So yeah, I could see him throw
a little money toward it, totally. But that's where she
was dubbed typhoid Mary, and that's where the public cinement
(23:54):
really swung because she was painted as someone who was
willingly giving people typhoid fever. Right, Well, no, she was.
She was called typhoid Mary because they were protecting her
um her identity as well. That didn't work too well. No,
so Mary Um goes back to North brother Island and
is there um for another Well, she was there for
(24:16):
three years total, I believe, and on in the third year,
New York City got a new health commissioner and he
was not about basically squashing people's civil rights letter, so
he not. He not only freed her, he got her
a job. Yeah, and a lot of people while she
(24:36):
was incarcerated, and it wasn't incarceration, I guess. Um there
were a lot of people that did cry out for
her release at times, um public officials even, but the
Department of Health basically it was such a unique case.
They wanted to experiment on her and said, now we're
gonna test do some tests on her and not let
her out. Well, they did do some tests on or
(24:58):
they they thought that perhaps the gall block her gallbladder
was the culprit. So they were like, we're gonna take
your gallbladder out, and she's like nobody's touching me. She's
afraid they're gonna kill her, but it could have to.
They did forcibly um medicate her. They tried some stuff out,
and she said that she wrote in a diary that
she if they keep this up for much longer, she'll
(25:18):
surely die because just such as the side effects were
so horrid. So it wasn't just like, hey, stay in
this cottage, there's a nice view of the water. It was.
It was rough for her in addition to the civil
liberties being squashed exactly, and so, as you pointed out,
the new Commission comes in letterly of public health and
(25:38):
a bit more sympathetic, like you said, he found her
a job and laundry, which apparently was the bottom of
the barrel for for a woman a woman's career aspirations
and in domestic servant like no money, like the lowest pay,
the worst work. And she was like this sucks. I
don't want to do this. I don't want to work
(25:59):
in the laundry. Did you know that Atlanta has one
of the taxi drivers in Atlanta? Um is a Ghanese king. Now,
why that's what I thought of when I um, when
I when I was reading about that when when she
got a job in the laundry, it's like she worked
her way past that. She's way past that. There's a
Ghanese king coming to America who operates a cab here
(26:21):
in Atlanta. Sint none but ultra burma. That was a
good movie. I could quote it from heart, I think
in full let's start. Okay, bark like a dog. All right,
(26:57):
So back to Mary. Where are we here. She's just
been released or he offered her the job, right, yeah,
and she's out and she's yeah, but she's making contact
with the health department there, like we need to be
able to keep up with you and make sure we
know what you're doing and everything. And then they're they're like,
(27:17):
we know where she is, we know what she's doing.
We talked to her every day, and okay, we lost her. Yeah,
we don't know where she gets anymore. Yeah, it's pretty
cool at the time. He could disappear. And if you
don't leave afoarding address or it's like well yah, no
Google searching going on there, you could disappear into the
folds of Daniel day Lewis is overacting. So a few
(27:37):
years after this, Josh, after they had lost her Uh.
Dr Soapers brought in again to investigate another typhoid outbreak
at uh the upscale hospital, Sloane Hospital, and I think
it was a Baby Birthen hospital at the time, maternity hospital.
And uh what they discovered was Mary is cooking in
(28:02):
the kitchen at the hospital, yeah, under an assumed name.
Doctors and nurses were sick and I believe two of
them died. And they said, you know, um, you're in
big trouble this time. Yeah. But not only did they
discover it was Soaper himself was called into the case.
This is like Lama's a rob and he exactly, it
(28:23):
is very much like that. Um. And he comes to
the hospital and he recognizes Mary by sight as one
of the cooking Steffens, Like you were kidding me. She's
whipping up her ice cream and beaches and just stops
like a mid stroke, like um, her hands awkward. So um.
This time she goes willingly. She knows that that it's
(28:45):
it's over, it's done. She still doesn't believe that she
is the um, this a carrier or the problem, but
she knows that they think she is and that she's
broken some sort of horrendous loss. It was kind of
sad at that point. From the way uh it was
described in the documentary, she was just sort of like,
I mean, all the fight of this fiery woman was gone,
(29:07):
and she's just like, I just can't fight this anymore.
Take me. And part of it, also, I imagine it
was public opinion turned against her. Like you said, the
first time she was incarcerated at UM North Brother Island,
there's a lot of public outcry. This time there's a
lot of public outcry. But it was against her because
she had willfully and knowingly gone back into cooking UM
(29:27):
and had gotten more people sick. Yeah, and I think
fifty something cases were attributed to her in three deaths. Yeah,
I think fifty two was what I read. UM. And
you know, we gotta say, like, I'm defending her in
a lot of ways, but she They gave her a
few pretty good deals along the way that she did
not take, which was a to give up cooking be UM.
(29:50):
I think at one point they said, why don't you
just move to Connecticut with your sister, And she was like,
I don't have a sister, and they're like, sure you do, Jane,
She's like, wait, you haven't a stroke exactly so she
didn't take him up on that offer, and um Sober
promised her of the profits of a book that he
would write about her and about the situation, and she
(30:13):
was like, no, no, no, it wasn't that weird. Anthony
Bourdain is one of the experts in that Nova documentary
A little odd. Yeah, I guess he knows his typhoid Mary.
He lives on Oyster Bay. I guess with Billy Joel.
So the legacy um of typhoid Mary is this great
(30:33):
debate over how much civil liberty, how many how many
civil rights does a person get to keep when they
pose some sort of public health threat? And I guess
the answer to that is contagion. Yes, have you seen it?
I have not. You did the other night, right, it
was good? Frightening? No, it was definitely like, I don't
(30:56):
My back was tense the whole time. It wasn't frightening,
but it was kid. That was a really good editorial
piece too that I read I sent you, um We're
basically this could have gone down in so many different ways.
It was sort of like the perfect storm of headstrong woman, uh,
healthy guy that didn't have a lot of people skills.
They said, if that or his opinion was, if that
(31:16):
initial meeting had have gone down differently, the whole history
might be rewritten. But it went down as them butting
heads and just got worse from there. Pretty interesting. So
typhoid Mary was she a bad person? Josh, I can't.
I reserved judgment on historical figures. Okay, I don't. I
(31:37):
don't know enough about him. Yeah, I think you can
only judge your contemporaries. Really, all right, what about me?
I reserved judgment on on podcasters? Yeah. So, Um, if
you want to know more about type woid Mary, you
can watch Nova's excellent documentary The Most Dangerous Woman in America. UM.
(31:58):
If you want to know the origin of the word quarantine,
you should go back and listen to our Black Death episode.
But if you haven't heard it before and you've read,
don't bother emailing in. I know already, I know, I know,
I'm sorry. You can also look up the how stuff
Works article who was typhoid Mary? T Y P H
(32:21):
O I D space M A R Y question mark?
You want to type that into the search bar at
how stuff works dot com And that means it's time
for a listener mail. They should do a good movie
about that. I can't believe they haven't. Yeah, this is
like great. At the very least, there has to be
(32:42):
a book on Soper, Like this is the kind of
thing that the public is eating up right now, you know,
thanks to this um Stars, thanks to this economic collapse.
You know, the Stars Guard Starstard. Did you ever see
that live Skit was during the Stars outbreak and uh
so ours Guard. The actor what's his name, Peter, He
(33:02):
was on their pitching. It was like a little informercial
and he's pitching the Stars Guard Stars Gard. Awesome. Alrighty Josh,
I'm gonna call this, uh Moon smack down the Nicest Moon.
The nicest Moon's back down. We got all right because
we got a lot of them and this guy was
actually really really it's over behind about it. Guys. Love
the podcast. I listened as I ride my bike to
(33:24):
and from work past the Golden Gate Bridge in San
Francisco on my way to the Moon. Learning interesting facts
makes my day a little better. However, I had to
send a note about a couple of mistakes in the
Moon podcasts. You got the current theories about the formation
of the moon and how it affects Earth's precession right
as far as I know. And those are really the
hardest things to understand. Well done, Yeah, but you did
(33:46):
perpetuate a few minutes. Number one, the Moon doesn't rotate
and is dragged along by the Earth. Well sort of.
The Moon is held in place by the Earth's gravity,
but it does rotate. The reason it doesn't appear to rotate,
which is what we were trying to say, uh, is
because its period of rotation is exactly the same as
its period of revolution around the Earth, about twenty nine days.
(34:07):
It's tidally locked, which brings me two point Number two.
The moon has a quote dark side that is never illuminated.
Not true. I don't remember seeing that. Did we say that?
We must have because everyone said that we did. Maybe
we didn't save this. Okay, we've let people believe that
we don't know it, all right. The moon has one
face we never see from Earth but is not permanently
(34:28):
in darkness. That's known as the far side of the moon.
So it's Gary Larson, not Darth Vader. Huh uh. Number three,
we have tides because the moon quote pulls up on
the water on the Earth and pulls up on the
Earth underneath as well. Definitely not true. While the Moon's
gravity does pull up the Earth and its water, the
(34:49):
effect is minuscule compared to the Earth's own gravity. It's
the horizontal differential in the Moon's gravity across the Earth
that causes the water to slide towards and away the
direction of the Moon. So the water slide sideways, not up. Wow,
that's pretty cool. And that is from Chris b and
he he was very cool about it. Um. And he says, ps,
(35:09):
I'm a little worried about going back and listening to
the Sun podcast because the Sun is way more complicated
than the Moon than Chris. Don't do it. Don't do it,
just skip it. Brother. Yeah, go listen to Cannonball Run. Yeah,
that's a good one, no mistakes that. It's a great,
great one. Or Twinkies that was pretty good too. Yeah, muppets, Yeah,
anything but the Sun, anything but that. Um. I guess
(35:32):
if you have a correction, we want to hear it. Um.
We we have. We've been reading him again now lately.
I think that's a good chuck. I forgot all about him,
I forgot about being wrong. Well, we were right for
a good stretch. Well we weren't doing ones like on
the moon or whatever. Yeah, these tough ones are hard.
Yes they are. Yes. If you have a correction, you
can tweet it to us at s Y s K podcast.
(35:55):
You can um see us on Facebook at Facebook dot com,
slash suff you should know, and you can send us
a plain old fashion email at Stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know Selects. It's
a Saturday, but I'm here anyway because I love you.
This week, I am choosing The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary
from oct two thousand eleven, and Uh, to be honest,
I think this one well for a couple of reasons.
A is because I love it. I love our history
(00:21):
podcasts and this one was super super interesting. And uh,
the other reason is, UH, to be honest, I really
just love this title, The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. I
titled this one myself, and I just wanted to see
it in our feet again because I like looking at it.
So here we go, The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. Welcome
(00:49):
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
am welcome to the podcast son Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Greeny Boy, Chuck and Bryant and Jerry back in the
his house. None more guests producing. No, that was a
(01:10):
rough week, she was, but she's back. Hey Jerry, did
you hear that? Everybody? Probably not Chuck Jerry. Have you
guys ever heard how much manure a horse produces in
a day. I'm glad you went with this. I was
(01:31):
never really occurred to me. Go ahead, pounds twenty five
pounds of manure? Did you do the math? Because I did?
All right, Well, you come with that in a second, okay, So, um,
just go back with me a little bit, chuck to
the time when Daniel day Lewis was walking around New
York with a meat cleaver, overacting a little bit in
my opinion. Um, And it's the the late nineteenth century,
(01:56):
and the horse is the is the preferred of transportation
for everything from the most humble delivery cart to the
greatest ambulance to you know, people who like to ride horses,
three musketeers, that kind of thing. Everybody had a horse
to the limit, to the airport wherever. So there were
(02:19):
about two hundred thousand horses in New York City in
use in right, Yeah, multiply that times twenty five pounds
of poop a day and what do you get? Chucked? Well?
I did two because I thought that was the number. Okay,
So that's fine, we'll go with that. More than six
point two million pounds of horse poop per day deposited
(02:42):
on the streets of New York. Okay, Now, um, let's
say that's okay, Okay, Um, there's that many horses. There's
six point two million pounds of horsepoop every day. It's
a lot of poop. But not only that, there was
no one cleaning it up. It was not enough people
cleaning it up. Let's say that for sure. It was
(03:03):
just left there basically in a lot of cases, um,
to basically be ground into the cobble stone. And you know,
it makes you think, like, I'll bet there's a substantial
layer of horse manure under the streets of New York
that make up like that initial stratum of of of Earth,
the pupa sphere. Thank oh wait, that would be an
(03:25):
utter space. No, no, because the lithospheres. Yes, so you
were dead on thank you the pupa sphere. Um, things
change a little bit. The New York institutes a Department
of Health and a group of basically an army of
cleaning guys, very much like the um the garbage man
(03:49):
that Homer Simpson envisions in the in the It's the
Garbage Commissioner episode. I can't remember which one it is, Uh,
the Loveday episode is what it is? Okay. Um. These guys,
they're called white wings. They are deployed to clean up
the streets of New York and they do a heck
of a job, and possibly the fact of the the episode,
(04:11):
if I may take it please, this is where the
term cleanliness is next to godliness is coined. Pretty cool.
The New York Department of Health slogan in downtown New
York Josh at the turn of the century. Back then
was a disgusting, filthy place. And yet I love New York.
I love the history New York. We watched that, we
(04:31):
both watched the same Nova video on Typhoid Mary today
and they had photos of mountains of manure pushed to
the sidewalks and uh, sort of like if you've ever
been in New York on garbage day, imagine all those
garbage bags is poop, Yeah, but not pooping bags, just
mound poop. And they were dead animal carcasses. Did you
(04:52):
see that. It was like these boys playing in the
street with just a dead horse right in the middle
of their little stickball bimond guess he was on base
or something. And it was just a foul, disgusting, unclean,
unsanitary place, which, like you said, led to the formation
of the Department of Sanitation, Right, So the Department the
Department of Sanitation. UM was imbued with a lot of
(05:16):
clout from the get go. Yeah. And as you said that,
the Nova documentary on on Typhoid Mary, it's called like
the Most Dangerous Woman in America, but it's also on
YouTube under Typhoid Mary Nova. That's good. It was UM.
But they had a lot of cloud. They could forcibly
(05:36):
inoculate you with these new fangled inoculations. They could forcibly
remove you to a quarantine island, and New York had
a bunch of them. Yeah, that was popular at the time. Yeah,
but basically your civil liberties could be entirely suspended without
any sort of due process of law. Um and you
if you were considered sick. And a lot of this
(05:59):
was based done this new understanding of science of germ
theory thanks to our buddy Louis past year bacteriology yep UM.
So the problem was science reporting hadn't been established yet.
So all of the people who were in charge understood
what was going on. They understood germ theory, they understood innoculations,
they understood force quarantine, but no one had explained it
(06:22):
to the public fully. Right, So it's a recipe for
disaster so there's this thing called typhus or typhoid. I'm sorry,
And apparently they were one and the same until the
nineteenth centuries. About this time, typhus and typhoid typhoid fever
were separated. But typhoid fever fever, which is the star
of this co star of this episode. Sure, Um, it's
(06:46):
particularly nasty, isn't it It is? Josh, we're talking not
just ordinary diarrhea, but doubled over cramping, painful diarrhea. I
think you'd call that violent diarrhea, violent diarrhea, high fee her,
red rashes, sleeplessness, death if you don't treat it. A
lot of people through history have been stricken with it,
(07:08):
including Mary Todd, Lincoln, Georgia O'Keeffe, Rabbi Shankar, Frank I
really uh, Frank McCourt, author, and Wilbur Wright actually of
the Wright Brothers fame died from typhoid fever. Wow, pretty
sad And that was I mean, that's a scant, uh
sampling from a long long list of famous people that
(07:29):
have Those are the people who count who had typhois.
I think Lincoln's son actually died as from it as well,
But I don't think Mary Todd Lincoln died from it, Yeah,
but you can know she died of um or something
like that is what they would have called hysterics, right, Okay. Um, So,
before we started to get a handle on typhoid fever,
(07:50):
it's by the way, it's a um it's caused by
the bacterium Salmonella TYPEE. It's a type of Salmonella UM.
And before we got a hand on it with antibiotics,
apparently twelve of people died from typhoid. So it's a
big public health problem. Yeah, New York especially there were
four thousand new cases per year and killed one in
(08:12):
ten people at the time or one in remember that
god that nationwide? Uh yeah, as I understand it before antibiotics.
So um, let's even just say tempercent. That's a big
public health problem. And because it's spread by the bacterium salmonella.
(08:35):
Did that come out weird? Because it did in my
head slightly a little bit of the lazy tongue there,
because because of because it's spread through salm manella or
because it's a results of salmonella, it's very very easily
spread from handling your own poop e g. Using the bathroom,
not washing your hands and then handling food, uncooked food specifically. Yeah,
(09:00):
it was normally considered to be like a disease of
the lower classes. Yeah, until nineteen oh six. Was it
chuck the summer of nineteen oh six in a in
a wealthy quarter of the United States on Long Island
called Oyster Bay, Billy Joels film, I believe it's neither
(09:20):
here nor there. That's one extra fact you just gave everybody.
That's true. Uh. Yeah, when it when it happened in uh,
Oyster Bay, it was a much bigger deal because it
was more closely associated with let's say, the Lower east
Side tenement housing, the filth of Lower Manhattan at the time.
They've cleaned all that up now, Um, it's expense. What
(09:43):
you get though, when you're in Oyster Bay is you
get wealthy families who can spend a little money, and
that's what you had. In the case of the Thompson family,
they were afraid that they would not be able to
rent out the house that they were living in because, uh,
people were getting sick in that house over and over
and over and they couldn't figure it out. They'd decided
to hire an investigator who turned out to be a
(10:04):
very prominent figure in this case name Dr George Soper,
a sanitation engineer and UH epidemiologists, one of the first
epidemiologists really looking to make his career well, he already had.
He had a reputation um of of you know, being
able to track any illness back to his source. So
(10:26):
this family, the Thompson family, is that the one who
owned the house or the one who's who got sick.
They owned the house, and I believe some family members
had also gotten sick. Okay, So but there's a family
that rented it originally. That's where the typhoid outbreak first happened.
So maybe maybe they were just a homeowner. The Thompson
family hired Soper I believe, yeah, and said, hey, we
(10:47):
can't rent this house anymore because people are dying from
typhoid concerned, right, Yeah, So Soaper gets on the case,
starts um finds the family where the typhoid outbreak occurred,
and arts interviewing the heck out of him, and he's stumped.
He can't figure it out, like, where did this thing
come from? There? These are clearly patient zeros right here,
(11:10):
like nobody else on the Yster Bay had it before
then they didn't bring it with them from the city.
There's somebody missing, there's something missing. And he finally says,
have I talked to everybody who was in this house
in the summer of nineteen o six and they said
you should talk to typhoid Mary. I don't know. I
didn't think of that, because what you know, what he
(11:32):
did was he interviewed kitchen staff, and it turns out
that there was a former employee that was no longer there,
Mary Mallon, And he said, wait a minute, you know,
maybe I should check this lady out. Turns out she
loved to serve this ice cream and fresh peaches, which
is uncooked, and that was her I guess her. She
was noted for that dessert, right. But even more incriminating
(11:54):
than the dessert is the idea that when he looked
into her history, she'd worked for eight families in ten years,
and six of those families said had typhoid outbreaks. So
(12:25):
he began to think that there was something special about
Mary Mallen and and that she was what's called a
healthy carrier, meaning um and and I'm just gonna paraphrase
this awesome way that nova doc put it right, when
you get typhoid fever, there's almost always a clear winner.
If the bacteria wins, you die, and if you if
(12:49):
you win, if your immune system wins, the bacteria dies.
But there's sometimes where there's a stalemate where your immune
system continues to function and you live and the bacteria
continues to live. In your sister to him, which means
you're healthy, but you're also extremely contagious. And that's what
Soaper came to believe Mary Mallen was. So she was
technically she actually had typhoid fever, but her immune system
(13:12):
was able to suppress all of it except the killing
of all the bacteria part right, So pretty cool, Soper cool,
but interesting because this is brand new. Yeah, and this
guy's on the cutting edge of this kind of thinking. Yeah,
And he knew like, potentially she could be the face
of bacteriology. The first bacteriology lab had just set up
(13:34):
in New York City and it was a burgeoning, uh
not industry but science. So he was like, man, this
is really gonna put me on the map if I
can prove this at least so he he didn't have
any training in science reporting either, though, did he he
didn't have training in people skills student either. He goes
to her and he's like, I finally found you. I
believe you're infected with typhoid. So I need stamples of
(13:58):
your stool, your urine and your blood. By the way,
my name is George, soaper good to me. And she's like, oh, no,
you're not. Yeah. So it's about this time that that
Mary Mallen. We should describe who she is, at least
go ahead. Mary Mallen was Irish. She or Irish came
over as a teenager by herself. She was born in
the poorest town county in Ireland, and Ireland at that time,
(14:23):
especially in the poorest county not a great place to be,
also dirty, also lots of death and dying in filth
and disease. And she was born in eighteen sixty nine,
so I think that's on the heels of the Potato famine,
if not still in the middle of it. So she
comes over as a teenager, lives with her aunt and
her uncle who passed away, and then is basically on
her own in New York, and by all accounts, as
(14:46):
a result of how she grew up and then being
on her in New York. She was very, very tough,
in fiery and independent and resourceful. Like had it been
anyone else, this might not have gone down like this.
They picked, literally eat not picked. But as it turns out,
it sounds like she was the toughest, most obstinate, stubborn,
fiery woman in New York City, right. And but she
(15:07):
was also good at what she did. She worked her
way up in the domestic servant classes to the pinnacle
of it. A cook in that era in the domestic
in domestic service, and sort of manager of the kitchen staff. Well,
not just that, almost the whole house, basically the all
of the servants. The cook was pretty much at the top,
maybe tied with the butler, depending on the house. But um,
(15:30):
she was a cook for all these these families, and
not just you know, families that could afford a cook,
but like very wealthy families. Um, she was good at
her at her job. But she took no guff from
any man. And when souper came and told her that
he wanted her feces, she chased him off with a
carving fork. Supposedly, that's how Super reported it. Yeah, and
(15:55):
you know, we'll get into her specifics later and she
got a real bad rap. But at the time there was,
like you said, there was no understanding on the public's
behalf of this, this whole zero I'm sorry, healthy carrier
is not even proven yet. So I mean, what is
she supposed to do? Just say like, sure, I'll go
with you, stranger, take my poop and and put me
(16:18):
in a quarantine. Yeah, so she thought it like she
probably had every right to right most initial though, wouldn't
normally you know, brandish a fork a carving fork on somebody.
But again it's lost to history whether she really did
do that or not. A good story. So Super takes
off and he's not one to let his career just
kind of slip through his fingers, and he goes to
(16:42):
the New York Commissioner of Health, Herman Biggs. So Biggs
was he was the one. He was the first one,
and he was the one who was like, oh, by
the way, we can come into your house and forcibly
inoculate you and your children if we want, and we
will do that too, if we if we think that
it's in the interest of the public health. So Biggs
was very sympathetic to Soaper's description of the story. Of
(17:05):
this crazy Irish woman who was just patient zero and
more than one outbreak um and basically needed to be
dealt with. Yeah, so he ordered a one of his
case workers, a few a few cops in an ambulance
out to where Mary lived a tenement. Yeah. Josephine Baker
(17:25):
was the inspector and not the dancer. No, but she
apparently was pretty tough lady as well. She started her
own rainbow family. Oh really yeah. Oh, and you know,
we should also point out one of the reasons that
Mallon was so upset initially was that she got the
feeling they were essentially calling her dirty an unsantit here
(17:46):
because he explained to her like, oh, you go poop
and then you get boop in your hands and you
handle peaches that you feed people, and so she was
very uh, she was upset that they felt like they
were picking on her cleanliness. She just a dirty Irish
im mcgrinners exactly. They were you know, dirty drunks and
causing problems and that was just the stereotype at the
(18:06):
time and she wasn't like that, she said, right. So, um,
Soaper goes to Biggs Bigs orders some people out. They
used their power and grab Mary. Well, she hides out
in the house for a while though okay, like it
took three hours to find her. Well when they finally did,
apparently it took all either three or four cops to
(18:28):
drag her to the ambulance and then the the female
case workers sat on her for the whole ride to
this hospital, this quarantine hospital, where she was kept for
a while. And like you said, it's it just happened
to work out that the person who was who was
typhoid Mary was this very stubborn, obstinate, self assertive woman
(18:53):
from Ireland, and she came about at a time where
there was a big question about public health, like you know,
where do an individual, civil rights and public the greater
public good begin. That's still going on, it still is.
But she forced this, this conversation into the national spotlight
(19:13):
starting about now. Yea. So they keep her, they test her.
They they're like, you need to poop into this bag
right now, and she did um and they tested it
and they said, well, this thing's lousy with typhoid. They
called her stool a factory for typhoid. Yeah, And what
they did was they said, here's the deal, give up
(19:35):
cooking because that's how you're transmitting this and we'll let
you go. And so did they say that immediately, but
not necessarily from the document, I think they initially offered
her that deal that she refused, which was one reason
why she was you know, lambasted in the in the
public later on in newspapers. But again, at the time,
she had managed to climb up out of the uh,
(19:59):
you know, poor conditions that she was living in an
Ireland and get a really good job and one that
she was good at and she didn't want to have
to learn something new and start over again. So at
the time, you know, like later on I can doll
out some of the blame on her, but early on
she still feels well, right, it's like, I'm not sick.
This doesn't make any sense. What does this healthy carrier thing? Yes, yeah,
(20:22):
she was not buying it at all, and she basically
came to believe that the Public Health Department had a
vendetta against her personally and felt quite persecuted. Um. So
when she said no, she wasn't going to stop cooking,
they said, okay, well we're gonna take you to a
nice little island called North Brother Island. It's not a
nice island. Seven. They took her there in quarantine her
(20:43):
their North Brother Island is a or it was a
tuberculosis hospital, quarantine quarantine hospital, i should say. And she
didn't have tuberculosis, and she wasn't even sick, she didn't
have any symptoms, and yet she was being kept here
against her will on North Brother Island, which you sent
a killer urban exploration photo spread that I want everybody
(21:06):
to go check out. It's creepy. It's on Gothamist dot
com and that's g O T H A M I
S T. And it's titled a Trip to the Abandoned
North Brother Island. It is so cool. Yeah, located there
was a riverside hospital and initially there was nothing there
and they said, hey, the idea of island quarantines was
(21:27):
pretty popular at the time, so we should build a
hospital there so we can treat these people. But um,
North Brother Island sort of gained a reputation over the
years because one it was I mean, it was much
more than tuberculosis. It was like later on it was
like hero and junkies were treated their syphilis like any
kind of nasty disease or addiction they would dump you
(21:47):
on at Riverside Hospital. It was in asylum. It basically was.
It was sort of like, uh, what's the DiCaprio, shutter island,
sendal island. Um. But they had a hard time staffing
it with real doctors for a while because actors understandably
didn't want to work there, so they had nurses only
for a time. Eventually there was a public campaign to
(22:07):
clean it up and to build better buildings and change
his rep which sort of worked, sort of didn't. But um,
in New York City at the time, especially on the
Lowery Side and where poor people lived, it had a
very bad reputation as you don't want to go there
because you go there and you don't come back. People
were afraid of it, right. So that's where they send
(22:28):
this Mary Malin off to so and when she gets there, um,
she starts trying to get out. She hired a escaping
right now, using legal channels. She um. She she hired
a lab, a private lab, and started sending them samples
of her stool and they were testing it and they
(22:48):
were not getting the same results. Her boyfriend would sneak
her poop to the lab and they weren't getting the
same results that the Public Health Department said that they
were getting UM. As far as her being a factory
for typhoid right, which could have been a false negative right.
It could have been because they said that you don't
always find it in the testing, and that's what they
said in the documentary. I believe so. But there was
(23:10):
a discrepancy and it was enough for her to get
her day in court New York Supreme Court. So she
makes her way. She's allowed to UM to leave the
island to go for her court date, and basically the
Public Health Department was like, look, she's a she's a
healthy carrier, and she's a public health threat. And Mary's like,
these people are holding me against my will. And the
(23:32):
New York Supreme Court said, you're a public health threat.
Go back to North Brother Island. Yeah. And around the
same time, it started getting newspaper coverage courtesy of William
Randolph Hurst, who may have financed her UM law. That's
crazy her legal expenses. Imagine it was. It was great
for the papers, So yeah, I could see him throw
a little money toward it, totally. But that's where she
was dubbed typhoid Mary, and that's where the public cinement
(23:54):
really swung because she was painted as someone who was
willingly giving people typhoid fever. Right, Well, no, she was.
She was called typhoid Mary because they were protecting her
um her identity as well. That didn't work too well. No,
so Mary Um goes back to North brother Island and
is there um for another Well, she was there for
(24:16):
three years total, I believe, and on in the third year,
New York City got a new health commissioner and he
was not about basically squashing people's civil rights letter, so
he not. He not only freed her, he got her
a job. Yeah, and a lot of people while she
(24:36):
was incarcerated, and it wasn't incarceration, I guess. Um there
were a lot of people that did cry out for
her release at times, um public officials even, but the
Department of Health basically it was such a unique case.
They wanted to experiment on her and said, now we're
gonna test do some tests on her and not let
her out. Well, they did do some tests on or
(24:58):
they they thought that perhaps the gall block her gallbladder
was the culprit. So they were like, we're gonna take
your gallbladder out, and she's like nobody's touching me. She's
afraid they're gonna kill her, but it could have to.
They did forcibly um medicate her. They tried some stuff out,
and she said that she wrote in a diary that
she if they keep this up for much longer, she'll
(25:18):
surely die because just such as the side effects were
so horrid. So it wasn't just like, hey, stay in
this cottage, there's a nice view of the water. It was.
It was rough for her in addition to the civil
liberties being squashed exactly, and so, as you pointed out,
the new Commission comes in letterly of public health and
(25:38):
a bit more sympathetic, like you said, he found her
a job and laundry, which apparently was the bottom of
the barrel for for a woman a woman's career aspirations
and in domestic servant like no money, like the lowest pay,
the worst work. And she was like this sucks. I
don't want to do this. I don't want to work
(25:59):
in the laundry. Did you know that Atlanta has one
of the taxi drivers in Atlanta? Um is a Ghanese king. Now,
why that's what I thought of when I um, when
I when I was reading about that when when she
got a job in the laundry, it's like she worked
her way past that. She's way past that. There's a
Ghanese king coming to America who operates a cab here
(26:21):
in Atlanta. Sint none but ultra burma. That was a
good movie. I could quote it from heart, I think
in full let's start. Okay, bark like a dog. All right,
(26:57):
So back to Mary. Where are we here. She's just
been released or he offered her the job, right, yeah,
and she's out and she's yeah, but she's making contact
with the health department there, like we need to be
able to keep up with you and make sure we
know what you're doing and everything. And then they're they're like,
(27:17):
we know where she is, we know what she's doing.
We talked to her every day, and okay, we lost her. Yeah,
we don't know where she gets anymore. Yeah, it's pretty
cool at the time. He could disappear. And if you
don't leave afoarding address or it's like well yah, no
Google searching going on there, you could disappear into the
folds of Daniel day Lewis is overacting. So a few
(27:37):
years after this, Josh, after they had lost her Uh.
Dr Soapers brought in again to investigate another typhoid outbreak
at uh the upscale hospital, Sloane Hospital, and I think
it was a Baby Birthen hospital at the time, maternity hospital.
And uh what they discovered was Mary is cooking in
(28:02):
the kitchen at the hospital, yeah, under an assumed name.
Doctors and nurses were sick and I believe two of
them died. And they said, you know, um, you're in
big trouble this time. Yeah. But not only did they
discover it was Soaper himself was called into the case.
This is like Lama's a rob and he exactly, it
(28:23):
is very much like that. Um. And he comes to
the hospital and he recognizes Mary by sight as one
of the cooking Steffens, Like you were kidding me. She's
whipping up her ice cream and beaches and just stops
like a mid stroke, like um, her hands awkward. So um.
This time she goes willingly. She knows that that it's
(28:45):
it's over, it's done. She still doesn't believe that she
is the um, this a carrier or the problem, but
she knows that they think she is and that she's
broken some sort of horrendous loss. It was kind of
sad at that point. From the way uh it was
described in the documentary, she was just sort of like,
I mean, all the fight of this fiery woman was gone,
(29:07):
and she's just like, I just can't fight this anymore.
Take me. And part of it, also, I imagine it
was public opinion turned against her. Like you said, the
first time she was incarcerated at UM North Brother Island,
there's a lot of public outcry. This time there's a
lot of public outcry. But it was against her because
she had willfully and knowingly gone back into cooking UM
(29:27):
and had gotten more people sick. Yeah, and I think
fifty something cases were attributed to her in three deaths. Yeah,
I think fifty two was what I read. UM. And
you know, we gotta say, like, I'm defending her in
a lot of ways, but she They gave her a
few pretty good deals along the way that she did
not take, which was a to give up cooking be UM.
(29:50):
I think at one point they said, why don't you
just move to Connecticut with your sister, And she was like,
I don't have a sister, and they're like, sure you do, Jane,
She's like, wait, you haven't a stroke exactly so she
didn't take him up on that offer, and um Sober
promised her of the profits of a book that he
would write about her and about the situation, and she
(30:13):
was like, no, no, no, it wasn't that weird. Anthony
Bourdain is one of the experts in that Nova documentary
A little odd. Yeah, I guess he knows his typhoid Mary.
He lives on Oyster Bay. I guess with Billy Joel.
So the legacy um of typhoid Mary is this great
(30:33):
debate over how much civil liberty, how many how many
civil rights does a person get to keep when they
pose some sort of public health threat? And I guess
the answer to that is contagion. Yes, have you seen it?
I have not. You did the other night, right, it
was good? Frightening? No, it was definitely like, I don't
(30:56):
My back was tense the whole time. It wasn't frightening,
but it was kid. That was a really good editorial
piece too that I read I sent you, um We're
basically this could have gone down in so many different ways.
It was sort of like the perfect storm of headstrong woman, uh,
healthy guy that didn't have a lot of people skills.
They said, if that or his opinion was, if that
(31:16):
initial meeting had have gone down differently, the whole history
might be rewritten. But it went down as them butting
heads and just got worse from there. Pretty interesting. So
typhoid Mary was she a bad person? Josh, I can't.
I reserved judgment on historical figures. Okay, I don't. I
(31:37):
don't know enough about him. Yeah, I think you can
only judge your contemporaries. Really, all right, what about me?
I reserved judgment on on podcasters? Yeah. So, Um, if
you want to know more about type woid Mary, you
can watch Nova's excellent documentary The Most Dangerous Woman in America. UM.
(31:58):
If you want to know the origin of the word quarantine,
you should go back and listen to our Black Death episode.
But if you haven't heard it before and you've read,
don't bother emailing in. I know already, I know, I know,
I'm sorry. You can also look up the how stuff
Works article who was typhoid Mary? T Y P H
(32:21):
O I D space M A R Y question mark?
You want to type that into the search bar at
how stuff works dot com And that means it's time
for a listener mail. They should do a good movie
about that. I can't believe they haven't. Yeah, this is
like great. At the very least, there has to be
(32:42):
a book on Soper, Like this is the kind of
thing that the public is eating up right now, you know,
thanks to this um Stars, thanks to this economic collapse.
You know, the Stars Guard Starstard. Did you ever see
that live Skit was during the Stars outbreak and uh
so ours Guard. The actor what's his name, Peter, He
(33:02):
was on their pitching. It was like a little informercial
and he's pitching the Stars Guard Stars Gard. Awesome. Alrighty Josh,
I'm gonna call this, uh Moon smack down the Nicest Moon.
The nicest Moon's back down. We got all right because
we got a lot of them and this guy was
actually really really it's over behind about it. Guys. Love
the podcast. I listened as I ride my bike to
(33:24):
and from work past the Golden Gate Bridge in San
Francisco on my way to the Moon. Learning interesting facts
makes my day a little better. However, I had to
send a note about a couple of mistakes in the
Moon podcasts. You got the current theories about the formation
of the moon and how it affects Earth's precession right
as far as I know. And those are really the
hardest things to understand. Well done, Yeah, but you did
(33:46):
perpetuate a few minutes. Number one, the Moon doesn't rotate
and is dragged along by the Earth. Well sort of.
The Moon is held in place by the Earth's gravity,
but it does rotate. The reason it doesn't appear to rotate,
which is what we were trying to say, uh, is
because its period of rotation is exactly the same as
its period of revolution around the Earth, about twenty nine days.
(34:07):
It's tidally locked, which brings me two point Number two.
The moon has a quote dark side that is never illuminated.
Not true. I don't remember seeing that. Did we say that?
We must have because everyone said that we did. Maybe
we didn't save this. Okay, we've let people believe that
we don't know it, all right. The moon has one
face we never see from Earth but is not permanently
(34:28):
in darkness. That's known as the far side of the moon.
So it's Gary Larson, not Darth Vader. Huh uh. Number three,
we have tides because the moon quote pulls up on
the water on the Earth and pulls up on the
Earth underneath as well. Definitely not true. While the Moon's
gravity does pull up the Earth and its water, the
(34:49):
effect is minuscule compared to the Earth's own gravity. It's
the horizontal differential in the Moon's gravity across the Earth
that causes the water to slide towards and away the
direction of the Moon. So the water slide sideways, not up. Wow,
that's pretty cool. And that is from Chris b and
he he was very cool about it. Um. And he says, ps,
(35:09):
I'm a little worried about going back and listening to
the Sun podcast because the Sun is way more complicated
than the Moon than Chris. Don't do it. Don't do it,
just skip it. Brother. Yeah, go listen to Cannonball Run. Yeah,
that's a good one, no mistakes that. It's a great,
great one. Or Twinkies that was pretty good too. Yeah, muppets, Yeah,
anything but the Sun, anything but that. Um. I guess
(35:32):
if you have a correction, we want to hear it. Um.
We we have. We've been reading him again now lately.
I think that's a good chuck. I forgot all about him,
I forgot about being wrong. Well, we were right for
a good stretch. Well we weren't doing ones like on
the moon or whatever. Yeah, these tough ones are hard.
Yes they are. Yes. If you have a correction, you
can tweet it to us at s Y s K podcast.
(35:55):
You can um see us on Facebook at Facebook dot com,
slash suff you should know, and you can send us
a plain old fashion email at Stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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