The Legacy of Typhoid Mary Pt. 2

Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised.

This episode includes discussions of death.

Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

For most of history, humans had no idea what caused the plagues that devastated our world.

And while recent decades have brought new insights into what spreads disease, communities of yesteryear were left to wonder.

Fortunately for Mary Mallon, a cook in the early 1900s, that ignorance was exactly what she needed to stay employed.

Later shackled with the moniker Typhoid Mary, she was seemingly immune to the disease that ran rampant around her.

What Mary didn't know was that she was the cause.

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Today is our final episode on Mary Mallon, the New York cook whose wealthy employers were infected with typhoid from eating her meals.

We'll follow the heated investigation that led to Mary's forced isolation and her feverish attempts to escape it.

Stay with us.

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Various disease epidemics rocked the United States in the 1800s, and New York City in particular was a hotbed for infection.

With so many people crowded in unsanitary living conditions, disease often prowled through the city's poor communities.

And in 1907, typhoid fever was still a fairly common disease.

38-year-old Mary Mallon was lucky enough to have been healthy her whole life.

Even as a child in Ireland, she'd managed to miss the worst of the Great Potato Famine.

But now she was in New York City, working as a cook, and even though she frequently migrated between jobs, it seemed like illness followed Mary wherever she worked.

And something else had been following Mary Mallon, or should I say, someone.

Earlier in the summer, Mary had been working for the wealthy Warren family at their summer home on Long Island.

When multiple members of the household came down with typhoid fever, the Warrens hired sanitation expert George Soper to investigate.

After all, typhoid fever was thought to be a disease of the poor and working class.

The Warrens were neither.

After putting the clues together, Soper zeroed in on the Warrens' cook, Mary Mallon.

He traced back her work history and realized that almost every time Mary Mallon left another cooking job, it was right after an unexplained outbreak within the household of typhoid fever.

Soper believed that Mary didn't actually know she was carrying typhoid, and how would she?

Healthy carriers don't suffer the symptoms themselves, fever, rash, headache, and diarrhea.

Mary hadn't shown any of these symptoms in her whole life.

She knew she had never herself had typhoid fever, and in 1907, no one had ever even heard the term asymptomatic carrier before.

So it makes sense then that when Soper showed up at her home to tell her she was killing people with typhoid, she got more than a little defensive.

In fact, when Soper accused her of leaving behind a trail of disease and death, Mary picked up a carving fork and went for him.

This was definitely not a promising first encounter.

George Soper was rattled, frightened, and thoroughly disenchanted with Mary Mallon.

He acknowledged that he might not be the man for the job.

Because capturing Mary Mallon might not be a man's job.

Dr.

S.

Josephine Baker was all too familiar with sexism.

She graduated from medical school at a time when less than 5% of practicing physicians were female.

And it was Baker who was sent to Mary's home to try to complete the task that Soper had not been able to, get Mary to cooperate and provide samples for testing.

On Baker's first attempt, Mary met her, as she did Soper, with unvarnished hostility and a slammed door in the face.

But Baker had read Soper's initial report, so she was not surprised when Mary turned violent, and by their second encounter, she was ready to play defense.

This time, Baker brought a handful of policemen with her.

Unfortunately for her, this had no effect on Mary's willingness to brandish her usual weapon, the carving fork.

Perhaps Baker felt some degree of empathy towards Mary Mallon.

She understood what it was like to be a woman in New York City in the early 1900s.

But any empathy Baker felt towards Mary's plight could outweigh Baker's duty duty to her work.

Breaking the détente, Baker dived at Mary Mallon.

But Mary was faster.

Carving forks still in her fist, she ran deeper into the house, disappearing into the darkness.

By the time Baker recovered, Mary Mallon was absolutely nowhere to be found.

Baker and her police escort began to comb the house.

They threw open closet and wardrobe doors, overturned mattresses, and upended tables tables and chairs.

Through the chaos and clatter, Baker questioned the other women in the house, tell them where Mary was hiding.

In solidarity with their fellow worker, the servants didn't say a word.

They had never even heard of Mary Mallon, some claimed.

Baker and the police tore the house apart, but for five fruitless hours, all their search came to nothing.

Until finally, one of the policemen found Mary concealed in a closet behind a pile of ash cans.

As he tried to pull her out from behind them, she leapt at him, all the while kicking, screaming, and swearing.

After a prolonged scuffle, he managed to take hold of her.

Mary Mallon was forcibly dragged through room after room, out the front door, along the front walk, and into a waiting ambulance.

And even once she was inside the ambulance, Mary did everything she could to fight off the policemen, clawing her hands and swinging her feet at them.

It wasn't until Josephine Baker sat herself directly on top of the still wildly belligerent cook that Mary Mallon finally subdued.

In their own opinion, George Soper and S.

Josephine Baker were bringing justice to the world.

They were helping keep New York safe.

But justice was not on the menu for Mary Mallon, only persecution.

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After a five-hour manhunt, 38-year-old Mary Mallon was captured and transported to Willard Parker Hospital in New York City.

While it might seem extreme to arrest someone for being an unknown carrier of a disease, in 1907, it was definitely an available option.

In order to stop them from spreading illness, carriers were routinely separated from all they knew.

They were plucked from their jobs and homes, taken from their families and friends, disbarred from streets, shops, and society, and relocated to remote isolation hospitals.

Their consent was not required.

As far as public health officials were concerned, it was a case of one group's needs outweighing the other.

Mary's need for social contact, stability, and overall happiness was outweighed by the public's need for safety.

Most quarantined individuals were viewed as unworthy of human compassion.

They were seen only as the disease they carried.

That was certainly how Mary's accusers saw her.

Once at the hospital, they got their samples of her blood and feces.

When they came back positive for the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, George Soper was vindicated.

Mary Mallon was exactly what he accused her of being.

She was

typhoid Mary.

Before she had time to process what was going on, Mary was led onto a ferry in the East River, its lone passenger besides the captain.

The small boat moved steadily through the water towards its destination, a place Mary had never seen before, but was aware of because of a recent shipwreck.

North Brother Island was reasonably famous after over a thousand passengers drowned off its coast.

Needless to say, her associations with the island were not positive.

But as she traveled on that ferry, she stared determinedly at the small island.

She felt neither hope nor defeat.

The facility on North Brother Island primarily serviced tuberculosis patients.

To avoid exposure from those patients, Mary was to be housed alone in a one-room cottage on the grounds.

The room was quite small, about 20 by 20 feet in dimension, with a bathroom and small kitchen attached on the back of the building.

The closest building nearby was a chapel, and both structures stood at some distance from the hospital and its other captives.

A solitary elm tree was stationed by the front door like a sentinel.

From the start, Mary did not take well to her isolation.

A few days into her confinement, Mary's left eye began to twitch.

She asked for a doctor, but none would see her, and the condition persisted.

For months after, that left eye was a continual bother, to the point where she covered it with her hand by day and bandaged it by night.

But to her mounting frustration, no doctor on the island gave her the time of day.

Eventually, though, her eye, quote, got better in spite of the medical staff.

The involuntary twitching of Mary's eye was probably a psychosomatic response to what she called her grief at being imprisoned, but she got no real answers about it.

The doctors who did see her were only concerned with testing her for typhoid.

All they cared about was collecting their samples.

Mary felt totally dehumanized, reduced to nothing but the waste she produced.

For well over two years, Mary is said to have lived a simple, lonely life in that small, one-room cottage.

For company, she was given a small fox terrier, whom she came to love.

How much Mary was able to interact with other inhabitants of North Brother Island, including sharing meals with them, is unclear.

Some reports indicate that she moved freely about the island and that she might have even actually been cooking for some of the hospital staff.

But by most accounts, Mary Mallon was often entirely alone.

In handwritten letters and interviews with reporters, Mary describes a sense of rejection and stigmatization at the hands of the island's employees.

Just as she had been neglected by the doctors regarding her eye, even the nurse who brought her her daily meals wasn't interested in interacting.

In Mary's account, the nurse would approach her small door, shove Mary's meal hurriedly beneath it, and then quickly run away.

It was overall a lonely little life.

And Mary wasn't having it at all.

In April 1908, Mary's friend and former housemate named A.

Brehoff was trying his best to support her efforts for freedom.

Over time, Brehoff got one doctor to admit that Mary's captivity was inconveniently expensive.

This seemed to imply that there might be some financial advantage to the Board of Health to let her go.

But the doctor who gave that opinion was powerless before the Board's authority and dubious about his capacity for, or even interest in, convincing them otherwise.

However, the next doctor that Brehoff consulted had a brand new bargaining chip in the case of Mary Mallon.

Sitting down with Brehoff, he explained a rather recent scientific discovery.

It appeared that the human gallbladder had a thing or two to do with typhoid typhoid fever.

Most of the bacteria associated with the disease could be found there.

So, if Briehoff could get Mary to consent to having her gallbladder removed entirely, she would stand a much better chance of arguing successfully for her release.

The doctor promised the services of the best surgeon in town.

Breehoff passed this on to Mary with some degree of hopefulness.

Here might be a way out, he suggested.

Without a moment's pause, Mary shot it down.

Not only did she not trust any doctors, but she still fundamentally believed that she did not carry typhoid fever, so she saw the procedure as useless and dangerous.

At the time, surgeries like this one carried a significant risk to the patient.

Mary was so distrustful of the doctors on Brother Island that she half expected them to knock her out with ether and take out her gallbladder anyway, even if she said no.

As reports of Mary's fate reached newspapers, some sided with the patient, some with public health.

A few newspapers sensationalized her story out of proportion, and some skipped over some of the most basic facts to twist the narrative.

Some called her by the name her mother had given her, others only as typhoid Mary.

But even the brief recognition of her plight by the public didn't offer Mary comfort, nor did it nudge her towards acceptance of her situation.

If anything, her fame hardened her resolve to get out of isolation.

She told reporters that in her imprisonment, she'd been treated worse than an actual murderer who would have at least had their day in court.

Mary had been given no due process and no justice.

She bristled at the fact that George Soper's investigative reporting always left out a family in the Bronx she'd cooked for.

None of them had gotten sick, but they didn't matter because they weren't as wealthy as someone like the Warrens.

After a little over a year in confinement, Mary Mallon was determined to fight back.

She demanded her life back.

At first, Mary played it cool, pretending nothing unusual was going on.

Over the course of several days, she continued to dutifully provide the island's doctors with samples of her feces and urine.

But on these particular days, Mary hung on to what we'll call the leftovers.

She hid them from the doctors and with the help of her friend, Mr.

A.

Brehoff, she mailed the samples to a man named George Ferguson.

Ferguson was a professor at the New York School of Pharmacy, and he owned and operated his own scientific research laboratory.

Mary hoped that the tests done at Ferguson Ferguson might run contrary to what the doctors were claiming about her on North Brother Island.

More than hoped, she fully expected them to proclaim her innocence.

Mary still did not believe for one instant that she had anything to do with typhoid fever.

For over a week, she anxiously awaited their response, asking day after day for their letter.

She recognized the weight the word of a scientist could carry.

A scientist's word in support of her might be her only way out.

And then, finally, finally, the Ferguson Laboratory wrote back.

They had the results from her samples.

The letter said, in no uncertain terms, that the laboratory had found absolutely no trace of typhoid fever whatsoever.

Her pounding heart stopped for just one moment.

The news brought tears to her eyes.

She felt like a child almost giddy with glee.

Mary smiled to herself for the first time in what felt like months.

She was right.

She'd been right this whole time.

She was going to get out of this prison of sickness.

She had to.

In 1908, after a year in forced captivity, Mary Mallon finally had a glimmer of hope.

Another doctor, unassociated with the health department, tested her samples, and he found no trace of typhoid fever.

Unfortunately for Mary, the samples she had sent on her own to be tested were deemed compromised.

She hadn't collected and delivered them in a controlled way, and so the analyses from the Ferguson lab were dismissed out of hand as inconclusive.

Freedom was not going to be easy, but Mary Mallon would not be swayed.

She would not stop fighting for the freedom she felt was rightly hers.

A more passive person might have been resigned to her fate, but not Mary.

If science couldn't help her, then it was time to get the law involved.

By 1909, Mary was able to secure the services of a New York lawyer, George Francis O'Neill.

In June of that year, O'Neill filed a writ of habeas corpus.

It was Mary Mallon's right as an American citizen, O'Neill argued, to be brought to court in order for a judge to rule on her detainment.

Without this court proceeding, Mary's captivity was unconstitutional.

She was finally given her day in court in July 1909, but the judge was, unfortunately, unconvinced.

They ruled against Mary Mallon's bid for freedom.

So Mary was escorted out of the court, back onto the ferry, and back to her lonely cottage on North Brother Island.

But not even a year later, everything started to change.

In February 1910, a new health commissioner offered Mary another deal.

She could be freed, but there were strings attached.

First, Mary would have to sign an affidavit promising that she accepted the conditions of her release.

She agreed.

Second, she would have to be obsessively careful with her hygiene from now on, including consistently washing her hands.

She agreed.

Thirdly, Mary Mallon could never cook again.

This should have given Mary pause.

Cooking was Mary's livelihood.

Without it, how could she survive?

The commissioner offered no further education or training to help her find another job.

There was a half-hearted offer of working as a laundress, which wouldn't pay nearly as well.

But Mary agreed.

She signed the document.

And with that, Mary Mallon was free.

Then, as she often did, Mary disappeared.

For over five years, Mary Mallon vanished from the public eye.

She was nobody else's problem, and nobody else's problems were hers.

Her companion, Mr.

A.

Breehoff, had died, so she moved to Corona, Queens.

No one mentioned Typhoid Mary until...

In 1915, sanitation expert George Soper reportedly received an urgent call from the chief physician of Sloan Maternity Hospital in New York City.

The doctor was frantic.

Suddenly and out of nowhere, his staff were getting sick.

One by one, they were getting struck down, unable to work.

In total, 25 doctors, nurses, and other workers had fallen ill.

Even worse, two of them had died.

Suspicion had fallen on the hospital's cook, a middle-aged woman named Mary Brown.

In a mockery of her and a news story from the last five years, some hospital staff had started calling her Typhoid Mary.

Soper felt an ominous chill run up his spine.

Was it a coincidence?

Was Mary Brown just an innocent woman?

Or was she the alias of a criminal who'd been given a second chance and then wantonly abandoned the agreement she made?

Was Mary Mallon loose in the world, killing anew?

Soper needed more information.

He knew that he would recognize Mary Mallon's handwriting on site, so he asked for the hospital doctor to show him a sample.

If Soper recognized the handwriting as that of Mary Mallins, it would mean that Mary had broken her promise and started cooking again, already putting dozens of people in danger.

And most importantly, it would mean that the debate about Mary's culpability was settled.

Regardless of what anyone had argued before, including Mary herself, Mary Mallon was a criminal.

Pairing the handwriting sample with a physical description of Mary Brown, Soper became certain that she and Mary Malin were one and the same.

In March of 1915, Mary was seized from her home and returned to North Brother Island.

Health Commissioner S.S.

Goldwater stated that Mary would never endanger public health again.

She could not claim innocence, Soper declared, as she had willfully and deliberately taken desperate chances with human life.

By now, Mary was 45 years old when she was brought for a second time to North Brother Island.

There, she took up some of her old pursuits.

For example, she could usually be found writing letters.

Without her former companion, Mr.

A.

Brehoff, as a correspondent, she most often wrote to those who she blamed for her isolation, including Josephine Baker.

These letters were frequently menacing in tone, and some included outright threats of extreme violence.

One physician in particular, she promised to murder upon her next release.

But that release never came.

For the next 23 years, Mary remained in isolation on North Brother Island.

This time, though, Mary had some trappings of a normal life and some small freedoms.

By 1918, she had started domestic domestic work on the island and eventually took on work in a laboratory there.

She was good friends with the doctors who ran the lab and seemed to actually enjoy the work.

She also had her own side hustles making beaded chokers and, very occasionally, cooking cakes.

For fun, Mary was allowed to take shopping trips offshore as long as she remained cooperative, which she generally did.

She likely took great pleasure in these outings, often dressing up and returning with gifts for her friends on the island.

So, for 23 years, Mary worked, socialized, wrote, and kept herself amused on North Brother Island.

By others' accounts, she might have experienced some degree of happiness in her decades of isolation.

Then, on the morning of December 4th, 1932, 63-year-old Mary Mallon did not show up to her laboratory station as usual.

All her life, Mary had been a dependable worker, so it was with some concern that the head of the laboratory, a friend of Mary's, went to Mary's cottage to find her.

The scientist immediately noticed that the cottage was in disarray, with foul smells percolating in every corner.

She murmured slightly with disgust.

Her friend was clearly not caring well for the place.

Then she discovered what might have been her explanation.

Mary Mallon lay slumped over in the middle of her floor.

The scientist rushed Mary to Riverside Hospital where she was given a bed in the children's ward.

There, Mary Mallon spent the rest of her life.

She died on November 11, 1938 at 69 years old.

Throughout her slow decline, she remained in isolation on North Brother Island.

A handful of her friends, along with their families, attended her funeral in the Bronx.

Her estate paid for her headstone, whose epitaph can be read as a plea for mercy, something she received so little of during her life.

Mary Mallon's legacy amounts to more than typhoid fever.

It carries a need for mercy and for compassion, and it carries with it a very heavy question, why Mary Mallon?

In a 2019 research paper, philosophy professor Gabriel Andrade discusses an ethical quandary commonly known as the trolley problem and how it applies to the medical community.

Simply put, the trolley problem asks how we place value on life.

Should a trolley be allowed to run over two dozen people in order to save one person's life or vice versa?

Doctors and other professionals frequently find themselves in situations where knowing exactly what or whom to prioritize is not always clear.

Mary's story echoes the trolley problem.

From some perspectives, she can be seen as the one who was run over to save the many.

But Mary was not the only one in her situation, unique as it may seem.

During Mary's life, New York City health officials were dealing with thousands of healthy carriers of various deadly diseases.

Many men, including some working in the food industry, were recognized to be, just like Mary Mallon, carriers of typhoid fever.

But these men were treated quite differently.

If they were isolated at all, their sentences were shorter.

One of them, a baker, was allowed to continue his trade despite the officials' knowledge that his baking was transmitting typhoid to his customers.

The difference between Mary and the baker?

He had a family for whom he was the sole provider.

If he wasn't allowed to work, the ripple effect would be much greater.

But the case of an unmarried, childless woman was a different one entirely.

Dealing with these questions of public health and individual liberty are difficult and complicated.

Society is required to make hard choices.

In the case of Mary Mallon, society took the easy way out.

Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

We'll be back Monday with another episode.

For more information on Typhoid Mary Malin, among the many sources we used, we found Typhoid Mary, Captive to the Public's Health by Judith Levitt.

Extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written by Emily Duggan, edited by Joel Callan, Callan, fact-checked by Anya Bayerly, researched by Mickey Taylor and Chelsea Wood, and sound designed by Kelly Gary.

With production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, and Bruce Kitovich.

Our head of programming is Julian Boirot.

Our head of production is Nick Johnson.

And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.

I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.