The Scandalous Typhoid Mary

In 1907, Mary Mallon was working as a household cook when an inspector named George Soper knocked on her employer’s door. Soper explained to Mary that he represented the New York City Department of Health. He believed she was a carrier of typhoid and had caused many people to become sick; some had even died. Mallon retorted that she felt healthy. She cursed at this intrusive man, who insisted on collecting blood and urine and stool samples, and she advanced toward him with a carving knife. 

Typhoid Mary in a 1909 was a famous case of a subclinical infection of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, the infectious agent of typhoid fever
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Soper fled the scene, but the epidemiologist soon pursued Mallon again with the aid of an assistant. The two men followed her to a friend’s tenement house. Again enraged, she frightened the men away. Their next strategy of sending a female doctor was also met with resistance. In the end, the doctor reappeared with police officers, more assistants, and an ambulance. Mallon lunged at her visitors with a kitchen fork and ran away, only to be discovered hours later when her dress poked through a closet door. The resistant Mary Mallon was carted off to a hospital with one aid sitting on her chest! 

At the hospital, suspicions of Mallon’s typhoid carrier status was confirmed. To avoid contaminating other people, health officials banished her to a cottage on a hospital island in New York’s East River. (The property had been designed years ago to quarantine smallpox patients.)

Had Mallon known that she was infecting people with typhoid? During her employment as a cook on Long Island that summer, eleven people in her household came down with typhoid fever. An investigator researching her employment history found that typhoid outbreaks coincided with most of her previous jobs. Between 1900 and 1907, she had taken seven jobs and apparently infected 22 people. Sufferers endured about a month of high fever, upset stomach, headache, and rash. One girl died of fever shortly after Mallon came to work her family. 

Still, Mallon claimed to believe she was unfairly accused. She said she didn’t understand how she could be related to all the sickness surrounding her when she herself seemed healthy. In 1909 – after spending two years on the island -- she sued the health department, saying that stool samples she’d sent to a private lab tested negative. However, the judge ruled in favor of the government, who countered her claim with a series of mostly positive tests. Mallon was returned to the quarantine island with only a dog for companionship. 

Better news came for Mary Mallon in 1910 when a new health commissioner reached a different decision: Mallon would be set free, provided that she did not work as a cook and promised to always take hygienic precautions. Mallon agreed and next found employment laundering clothing. The terms of her release required her reporting to health officials every three months.

Mary Mallon (foreground) in a hospital bed during her first quarantine
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For some reason, however, Mallon did not report to authorities as instructed. She eventually went back to working as a cook! Perhaps she could not survive on lower wages. Maybe she didn’t believe that a healthy person could really infect people, or maybe she had malicious intentions all along. 

In any case, five years after her release from the island, New York's Sloane Hospital for Women suffered a typhoid fever outbreak that resulted in two deaths. Co-workers joked that Typhoid Mary worked among them, but nobody suspected this was truly the case. Investigators turned to a newly-hired cook who called herself Mrs. Brown. Sure enough – Mrs. Brown was the infamous Mary Mallon! 

Mallon was sent once again to the North Brother Island cottage. There she lived for twenty-three more years. She did not live in total isolation; she helped around the hospital and by 1925 was assisting in the hospital’s lab. She was even allowed to visit friends off of the island. In 1932 she suffered a paralyzing stroke. Mallon was then transferred to a ward of the hospital and there remained until her death six years later.