Laura Wright 
Her name became an insult.
Someone who spreads illness carelessly can still be called a Typhoid Mary, more than a century after the real Mary died.
The expression carries an accusation with it.
Reckless.
Dangerous.
Indifferent to the suffering of others.
But Mary Mallon was not a metaphor.
She was an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook in New York, appeared perfectly healthy, and became one of the first people in America identified as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.
People around her became desperately ill.
Some died.
Mary remained healthy.
And when authorities finally understood what was happening, they faced a question medicine and the law were poorly prepared to answer.
What do you do with a healthy person whose body can unknowingly kill other people?
Their eventual answer was extraordinary.
They imprisoned her on an island.
Mary Mallon
Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in 1869 and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, probably in 1883 or 1884.
Like many immigrant women, she entered domestic service.
Eventually, Mary discovered that she possessed a valuable skill.
She could cook.
That offered better wages than many of the alternatives available to a working-class immigrant woman.
Mary found employment in the kitchens of affluent New York families.
Then something strange began happening.
People became sick.
The Disease That Followed the Cook
Typhoid fever was a serious threat in early twentieth-century America.
The disease is caused by Salmonella Typhi bacteria and is generally transmitted through contaminated food or water.
At the time, however, scientists were only beginning to understand something particularly troubling.
A person didn’t necessarily have to look sick to spread the disease.
Mary Mallon demonstrated that problem dramatically.
She moved from household to household.
Typhoid followed.
Yet Mary herself remained healthy.
From her perspective, the conclusion that she was responsible must have seemed absurd.
How could she be giving people a disease she didn’t have?
Oyster Bay
The case that finally brought investigators to Mary occurred in 1906.
Mary was working as a cook for the family of wealthy banker Charles Henry Warren, who had rented a house in Oyster Bay on Long Island.
Between August 27 and September 3, six of the eleven people in the household developed typhoid fever.
That was particularly alarming.
Typhoid was often associated with poor sanitation.
This was a wealthy household in a fashionable summer community.
The property owner wanted to know why his house had suddenly produced an outbreak.
A sanitary engineer named George Soper was brought in to investigate.
Eventually, Soper began looking at the cook.
George Soper Finds Mary
Soper reconstructed Mary’s employment history.
A disturbing pattern emerged.
She had previously worked for several families in which typhoid outbreaks subsequently occurred. In his investigation, Soper associated Mary with 22 illnesses and at least one death before authorities initially detained her.
He became convinced that Mary was a healthy carrier.
Mary was considerably less convinced.
Soper approached her and requested samples of her urine, feces and blood.
One can imagine how that conversation went.
A strange man effectively appeared in Mary’s workplace and told a perfectly healthy woman that she was spreading a deadly disease, then requested bodily specimens.
Mary refused.
Emphatically.
Mary Fights Back
Health authorities eventually became involved.
Dr. Sara Josephine Baker arrived with police officers to take Mary into custody.
Mary fled.
For several hours she avoided them before finally being apprehended and forced to undergo testing.
Tests detected the bacteria responsible for typhoid.
Mary Mallon had become one of America’s earliest recognized healthy carriers of the disease.
And that created an unprecedented problem.
Mary hadn’t committed a crime.
She wasn’t deliberately poisoning anyone.
She wasn’t even sick.
But allowing her to continue preparing food could expose more people to typhoid.
So New York authorities removed her from society.
North Brother Island
Mary was sent to North Brother Island in New York’s East River.
There she lived in a cottage on the grounds of Riverside Hospital.
Her first quarantine lasted from 1907 until 1910.
Mary objected bitterly.
From her perspective, the government had imprisoned a healthy woman indefinitely without a criminal conviction.
And there was another complication.
Not every test performed on Mary returned positive.
During one period of confinement, 120 of 163 stool specimens reportedly tested positive, meaning dozens did not.
Mary seized upon negative results as evidence that the authorities were wrong.
The doctors saw the positive results as evidence that she remained dangerous.
Both sides became increasingly entrenched.
Mary Goes to Court
In 1909, Mary sought release through the courts.
She lost.
The authorities maintained that protecting the public justified her confinement.
Then New York received a new health commissioner.
A compromise was reached.
Mary would be released.
But there was a condition.
She could never work as a cook again.
In February 1910, after approximately three years on North Brother Island, Mary Mallon was free.
Unfortunately, the compromise didn’t last.
A Cook Earned More
The problem was painfully practical.
Mary needed to support herself.
Domestic cooking was skilled work and paid better than alternatives such as laundry work.
The government had prohibited Mary from doing the job at which she could earn the most money.
Eventually, she disappeared from the authorities’ supervision.
Then she returned to the kitchen.
This time, she used another name.
Mary Brown.
Sloane Maternity Hospital
In 1915, a typhoid outbreak struck Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan.
Twenty-five people became infected.
Two died.
Investigators discovered that the institution’s cook was a woman calling herself Mary Brown.
She was actually Mary Mallon.
This changed the ethical equation considerably.
During the first outbreaks, Mary hadn’t known she was a carrier.
After 1910, she did.
She had specifically agreed not to return to cooking.
She did it anyway.
Whatever sympathy one has for her economic circumstances, the danger was no longer theoretical.
Mary had been warned.
People became sick again.
Two people died.
Authorities returned her to North Brother Island.
This time, there would be no second release.
Twenty-Three More Years
Mary remained on North Brother Island for the rest of her life.
She spent another 23 years there, bringing her total period of forced isolation to approximately 26 years.
Her life wasn’t entirely confined to a locked hospital room.
She had her own cottage and was eventually allowed to work in the hospital laboratory, washing bottles, keeping records and preparing materials.
But she was not free to leave permanently.
In 1932, Mary suffered a stroke.
She remained partially paralyzed afterward.
She died in 1938, at approximately 69 years old.
By then, her name had ceased to belong entirely to her.
She was Typhoid Mary.
But Mary Wasn’t the Only Carrier
This is where the story becomes considerably more uncomfortable.
As medical knowledge improved, authorities discovered that Mary Mallon was far from unique.
There were hundreds of healthy typhoid carriers.
By the time Mary died, more than 400 had reportedly been identified in New York.
None was confined for as long as she was.
That raises an obvious question.
Why Mary?
Tony Labella
One particularly striking comparison was Tony Labella, another healthy carrier.
Labella was associated with considerably more cases than Mary.
One historical account credits him with an initial 87 infections and two deaths, followed by another 35 infections and three deaths after he failed to comply with health restrictions.
That’s approximately 122 cases and five deaths.
Yet Labella wasn’t sentenced to decades of isolation on North Brother Island.
Authorities helped him find employment that didn’t involve food.
Alphonse Cotils
Another carrier, Alphonse Cotils, owned a bakery.
That created an obvious public-health problem.
He wasn’t merely working around food.
Food was his livelihood.
When Cotils violated restrictions placed upon him, the matter eventually reached court.
But in 1924, a judge concluded that he could not simply be imprisoned because of his health.
Mary Mallon had already been confined for years.
Was Mary Treated Unfairly?
There isn’t a simple answer.
Mary presented authorities with a genuine danger.
After her first release, she knowingly violated the condition intended to protect others and returned to cooking under an assumed name.
That decision resulted in another serious outbreak.
The government therefore had legitimate reason to prevent her from handling food.
But preventing Mary from cooking and imprisoning Mary for the remainder of her life are not necessarily the same thing.
Other carriers were managed differently.
Some received assistance finding employment.
Some remained free under restrictions.
At least one carrier associated with more infections and deaths than Mary wasn’t subjected to her extraordinary decades-long confinement.
That disparity has never entirely stopped troubling historians.
Villain or Victim?
Mary Mallon doesn’t fit comfortably into either category.
Making her a villain ignores the extraordinary situation she initially faced.
She felt healthy because she was healthy.
The concept of an asymptomatic carrier was new.
Doctors told her that her body contained organisms capable of killing people even though she had never suffered the disease herself.
Then the government took her away and confined her on an island.
Her distrust wasn’t incomprehensible.
But making Mary purely a victim ignores what happened after 1910.
She knew what authorities believed.
She knew outbreaks had been connected with her cooking.
She promised not to prepare food professionally.
Then she changed her name and returned to exactly that occupation.
More people became ill.
Two died.
Mary was both a woman treated extraordinarily harshly by public-health authorities and a carrier who eventually disregarded a known danger to other people.
History is inconvenient that way.
The Woman Behind “Typhoid Mary”
Perhaps the greatest injustice occurred after Mary’s death.
Her name became shorthand for a person who recklessly harms everyone around them.
That isn’t quite who Mary Mallon was.
She wasn’t wandering through New York deliberately infecting people.
She was an immigrant domestic worker caught at the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of infectious disease.
Scientists were discovering that a healthy-looking person could carry dangerous bacteria.
Public-health officials were discovering how difficult it was to protect society without violating individual liberty.
And Mary was discovering that the government could imprison someone who hadn’t committed a crime.
Everyone was learning.
Mary paid the highest price.
Typhoid Mary
At least dozens of infections were ultimately linked to Mary Mallon, although the exact lifetime total remains disputed. Contemporary and later estimates range considerably, which is why claims that she infected hundreds or thousands should be treated cautiously.
But perhaps numbers aren’t the most important part of her story.
Mary Mallon became famous because she occupied an uncomfortable place between two rights.
Her right to liberty.
And everyone else’s right not to contract a potentially fatal disease from the person preparing their dinner.
New York chose public safety.
Then it applied that choice to Mary more severely than it did to many people discovered afterward.
More than a century later, there still isn’t an entirely comfortable answer.
Mary shouldn’t have returned to cooking after she knew the danger.
But should that decision have cost her the final 23 years of her freedom?
That question is why Mary Mallon’s story remains more interesting than the insult made from her name.
Typhoid Mary was dangerous.
She was stubborn.
She was frightened.
She made decisions that harmed other people.
She was also treated in a way that authorities later decided wasn’t appropriate for hundreds of other people with essentially the same medical condition.
She wasn’t simply a monster.
She wasn’t simply a martyr.
She was Mary Mallon.
And somewhere along the way, history forgot the difference.
About the Author
I have always been fascinated by Typhoid Mary most all my life. This is partly because I am prone to catch things and just recently found out I am what is called IgA deficient. I have to carefully avoid people who cough or have any kind of ailment. The thing about Typhoid Mary is that she appeared to be healthy. IMO there are many carriers of illnesses who think they are fine and spread their germs around. I had to work with a woman who was a carrier of strep throat. She did show some symptoms but absolutely refused to go to the doctor even as some co-workers and I tried to get her to go. Some of these people do work in restaurants too. Thanks for adding on the others as I had never heard of them before. FASCINATING!
I’m inclined to agree. There’s so much we still don’t understand about the human body. I think her life is very sad, but I guess I understand why they had to lock her up. Although, they should’ve done the same to everyone working in the food industry. Thanks and I’m glad you liked it.