Mary Mallon & Typhoid Revisited

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:29Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:43Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Holly, a while back, you and I talked about the possibility of revisiting very old episodes of the show from back when episodes were only like 13 or 15 or 10 minutes long.

• 2:58Holly Frey?

  Yeah, which we have done before.

• 3:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, that's how we wound up with a three-parter on Charles Sumner last winter.

• 3:06Holly Frey?

  Yeah, and we did Zenobia of Palmyra as well.

• 3:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, we did do that.

• 3:10Holly Frey?

  Was one that got covered.

• 3:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, so things that, number one, totally different approach to the show when they were made, much shorter episodes than we do now. And then also, most of them are not even in listeners' players anymore. So if you wanted to go listen to the 10-minute episode on whatever, there are very limited options to do so.

• 3:32Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  So we're doing that today. We are revisiting Mary Mallon, who became known as Typhoid Mary in the early 20th century. She was originally the subject of a 13-minute episode of our show back in 2009.

• 3:48Holly Frey?

  Mary Mallon was born in Cookston County, Tyrone, Ireland, on September 23, 1869. She immigrated to the United States in 1883 or 1884, where she probably started out living with an aunt and uncle. She would have been in her mid-teens at that point, and as far as we know, she came to the United States alone. She did various types of domestic work and eventually became a cook, working mostly for well-off families in jobs that she got through an employment agency or that she found through advertisements.

• 4:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1906, Charles Henry Warren hired her for the summer at a house he was renting on Oyster Bay in Long Island. She started working in early August, and about three weeks later, people who were either staying or working at the house started to get sick. By early September, six of the 11 people connected to the household had developed typhoid. That included three family members and three staff. Two people had to be hospitalized.

• 4:54Holly Frey?

  Typhoid is caused by the bacteria Salmonella typhi, which is spread through human fecal matter. And it causes symptoms like high fever, constipation, nausea, headaches, joint pain, and sometimes a rash across the abdomen. It can also progress to include intestinal perforations, myocarditis, meningitis, pneumonia, convulsions, and shock. In places that don't have reliable sewers or wastewater treatment, water used for drinking or irrigation can become contaminated, and that leads to major outbreaks. Typhoid can also spread when sick people or healthy carriers prepare food for other

• 5:38Holly Frey?

  people, especially if they have not washed their hands thoroughly.

• 5:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Today, typhoid continues to be a major issue in some parts of the world. According to the World Health Organization, there are between 11 and 20 million typhoid infections every year, and between 128,000 and 161,000 of those cases are fatal. In the US today, the vast majority of typhoid cases are in people who have just traveled internationally, so they contracted it somewhere else. But in the early 20th century, outbreaks were pretty common in the US, and they tended to happen in the summer. When they were connected to events like weddings and family gatherings, they really made headlines.

• 6:24Holly Frey?

  In 1906, doctors knew what caused typhoid. The bacillus was isolated in 1880. They knew the bacteria were shed in bodily waste and that latrines and cesspits could contaminate water sources. Typhoid was also associated with contaminated milk, sewer gas, and general unsanitary conditions. But since antibiotics had not been invented, there wasn't an effective treatment for it yet. Of the 3,467 cases reported in New York in 1906, there were 639 deaths. That's a fatality rate of more than 18%. Those are just the reported cases, so that is also likely an undercount.

• 7:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Investigators looked into the outbreak at the house at Oyster Bay, but they did not find a cause for it. George Thompson, who owned the house, was worried that he would not be able to find good tenants if people were afraid there was a source of typhoid lurking around, so he hired sanitation engineer George Soper of the New York City Department of Health to look into it further.

• 7:34Holly Frey?

  Soper's training was as a civil engineer, which had evolved into sanitary engineering after the Galveston hurricane of 1900. He was in charge of sanitary reconstruction work in Galveston. By the time Thompson hired him to investigate the Oyster Bay outbreak, Soper had worked on a few other typhoid outbreaks. One of those was in Ithaca, New York, in 1903, and had involved an estimated 1,000 illnesses and more than 80 deaths, including 29 students from Cornell University. A big part of this outbreak was a lack of sanitary procedures at the Ithaca Water Works, and Mallon didn't have anything to do with it.

• 8:15Holly Frey?

  But sometimes people attribute that outbreak to her, possibly because of Soper's work on both of the outbreaks.

• 8:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  When Soper arrived at Oyster Bay to investigate, he expected to find that previous investigators had missed something obvious. They'd made some kind of oversight. But it seemed like they had been thorough, given how people understood typhoid to spread at the time. He checked the family's sources for milk and cream, the condition of the property's well, and how far it was from the privy that the servants used, the condition of the indoor water closet that the family used, and the condition of the manure vault at the stable. This family likes to eat clams and at first he thought that might be the culprit. Sometimes clams were harvested from places that could be contaminated with raw sewage.

• 9:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  But if that was the case, that would have affected other households as well.

• 9:13Holly Frey?

  Soper concluded that someone must have come to the house and brought typhoid with them. After eliminating all of the other candidates, the only possibility was Mallon, who was no longer working there by the time he came to this conclusion. But at first, Soper thought this was actually unlikely. Typhoid bacteria can't survive the high temperatures involved in cooking. And in most households, the cook might serve food to the staff, but they didn't typically plate or serve the food to the family. It turned out that one of the dishes on the Sunday menu was ice cream with fresh peaches cut into it, something that had no cooking step to kill the bacteria. And that seemed like the most likely cause of infection.

• 9:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mary Mallon had left this household a few weeks after the outbreak, and Soper started trying to track her down. He also contacted the employment agency that Thompson had used to hire her to find out where else she had worked. He wound up with a partial work history going back to 1900, and he started interviewing those families. Seven of the eight families that he spoke with said that people in their household had gotten typhoid and that those infections had started after Mallon had started working there.

• 10:31Holly Frey?

  Soper wrote a paper about all of this, and he presented that to the Biological Society of Washington DC in April of 1907. He also published it in the Journal of the American Medical Association that June. By that point, Mallon had been found and she was taken into custody. And we're going to get into all of that in just a moment. And it had been confirmed that even though she did not seem sick, she did have typhoid bacteria in her stool. Soper described her as a quote, "chronic typhoid germ distributor."

• 11:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Today, it is estimated that between 1% and 6% of people who develop typhoid become chronic carriers of the bacteria. But this 1907 paper was the first ever English language description of a chronic carrier. The idea had previously appeared in German language medical writing, but that was also very recent. The oldest use I could find of the German word that was coined for this was also from 1907. In other words, healthy typhoid carriers were a brand new idea in the European medical tradition.

• 11:44Holly Frey?

  We're going to get into what happened after Soper tracked Mary Malin down after we pause for a sponsor break.

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• 16:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  When George Soper tracked down Mary Mallon, she was working for a family that lived on Park Avenue in New York. Their laundress was in the hospital with typhoid and their daughter was dying of it. Soper seems to have genuinely thought that if he went to Mallon and explained to her that her cooking was making people sick, she would welcome this information and immediately do whatever it was that he asked of her to try to resolve the situation. Maybe she even suspected this of herself already. It does not seem to have dawned on him that what he would be doing was showing up at her workplace unannounced, where she was doing a job that she'd been doing for more than a decade,

• 17:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  and telling her something that was not part of the public understanding of disease at all. And on top of that, would probably come off as insulting and accusatory. She chased him out of the house with a carving fork.

• 17:43Holly Frey?

  Soper learned that Mallon was staying at a boarding house with a man named A. Breihoff. Soper went there where he found Mallon understandably still angry. She was probably also feeling betrayed since Breihoff, who is variously described as her friend, her best friend, sometimes her boyfriend, was actually the person that let Soper in. Mallon argued that she was healthy, that she had never had typhoid, that no one she had ever worked for had ever accused her of making them sick, and that there was no more typhoid in the places she had worked than there was anywhere else. As we said, outbreaks in New York were common, although they were more associated with poorer, more crowded neighborhoods

• 18:27Holly Frey?

  than the well-off families she typically worked for.

• 18:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Soper told Dr. Herman M. Biggs, medical officer of the New York City Department of Health, that he thought Mallon was spreading typhoid. Biggs enlisted the help of Dr. Sarah Josephine Baker. The first time Baker tried to talk to Mallon, Mallon slammed the door in her face. The next day, Baker returned with police and Mallon fled the house and hid. She was ultimately found in an exterior closet of a neighboring home.

• 19:00Holly Frey?

  In Baker's words, quote, "She fought and struggled and cursed. I tried to explain to her that I only wanted the specimens and that then she could go back home. She again refused, and I told the policeman to pick her up and put her in the ambulance. This we did, and the ride down to the hospital was quite a wild one." During that ride, Baker reportedly sat on top of Mallon to hold her down.

• 19:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  They took Mallon to Willard Parker Hospital, which was a communicable disease hospital, and placed her in an isolation ward. In Soper's words, quote, "It was not an attractive or particularly comfortable room, and there was no reason why a strong, active woman of 40, who felt herself to be in perfect health, should be." Contented with it, and Mary Mallon was not.

• 19:51Holly Frey?

  The staff at the hospital collected stool and urine samples from Mallon and her stool samples, as we mentioned earlier, contained Salmonella typhi bacteria. She was transferred to North Brother Island, home to Riverside Hospital, which was primarily being used to house and treat tuberculosis patients. Mallon was housed in a bungalow that had originally been built for the superintendent of nurses to live in.

• 20:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  At this point, health authorities in New York were empowered to confine people against their will if they were deemed to be public health threats. But this was mostly done in active cases of smallpox or tuberculosis, not people who were by all outward appearances healthy and not for an indefinite period of time. So Mallon was, at this point, unique in two ways. She was the only known chronic typhoid carrier in the United States and the only apparently healthy person being held indefinitely due to public health concerns.

• 20:56Holly Frey?

  So we should take a moment here to address some widely repeated characterizations of Mary Mallon that just do not seem to be true. She was definitely angry and combative, but descriptions of her personal hygiene are contradictory, and it's also hard to take them at face value since the people writing them were often trying to characterize her as a public health threat. Sometimes there is an assumption that she knew she was giving people typhoid and that she callously kept working, always leaving for new jobs right after an outbreak started. Again, the idea that a healthy person could give someone typhoid was an incredibly new medical development, so it's really not something that a layperson was likely to have even

• 21:41Holly Frey?

  thought of.

• 21:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Aside from that, the timeline between when Mallon arrived and when an outbreak started was all over the place, anywhere between a few days and more than a month, or in one household that we know of, never. She did leave a few days after one of the outbreaks started, but in other outbreaks, she kept working for weeks or months after it was over. In at least one case, she helped take care of the sick. New York Dr. Coleman Drayton gave her a $50 bonus on top of her regular pay for her help caring for members of his household. At the same time, it would have been reasonable for her or for anybody else on the staff to find a different job in the face of a contagious and sometimes deadly illness that

• 22:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  was spreading in their workplace.

• 22:31Holly Frey?

  And then there is the idea that Mallon didn't understand that she was a typhoid carrier because she wasn't very smart. Soper described her as unusually intelligent. She also seems to have been savvy in her efforts to be released from North Brother Island. Medical staff, as we said, collected stool and urine samples from her at first three times a week and then weekly. They collected 162 samples between 1907 and 1909, 119 of which were positive for typhoid. In 1908, Mallon started sending a stool sample to Breihoff whenever the hospital collected

• 23:12Holly Frey?

  one, and Breihoff sent them to Ferguson Laboratories for independent testing. Ferguson Laboratories tested 10 of her samples and reported that all 10 of those were negative for typhoid. Eight of those samples were from weeks when the sample tested at North Brother Island was also negative.

• 23:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  These independent lab tests became evidence when Mallon took the matter to court in 1909. She was represented by attorney George Francis O'Neill, who filed a writ of habeas corpus on her behalf. At the hearing, O'Neill made the very straightforward and, in my opinion, correct argument that Mallon was being imprisoned without due process and had not been offered legal counsel. But even though none of the tests run at Ferguson Laboratories showed evidence of typhoid bacteria in Mallon's stool, the New York health authorities had all of those other positive tests that had been run at North Brother Island.

• 24:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Judge Mitchell Erlinger ultimately dismissed the case, and Mallon had to stay in isolation.

• 24:20Holly Frey?

  During these court proceedings, newspapers started reporting on Mallon using her real name. Earlier reports had either not used a name, or they had used the pseudonym Mary Liverson, and they started calling her by the nickname she's been known for years, Typhoid Mary. The New York World quoted her as saying, quote, "Before God and in the eyes of decent men, my name is Mary Mallon. I was christened and baptized Mary Mallon. I lived a decent, upright life under the name of Mary Mallon until I was seized." She went on to say that she had been locked up in a pest house and rechristened Typhoid Mary, quote, "The name by which the world has ever since known me."

• 25:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of this reporting was sympathetic to Mallon, and so was the public response. The New York American interviewed her and quoted her as saying, quote, "I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime, and I am treated like an outcast, a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized." She also asked, quote, "Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only a dog for a companion?" The New York American was owned by William Randolph Hearst, and there is speculation that Hearst or his sympathetic readers paid for O'Neill to represent Mallon in court.

• 25:44Holly Frey?

  Mallon also had some support from members of the medical and public health community. When Soper first reported on her case in April of 1907, Milton L. Rosnoe of the U.S. Public Health Service responded, quote, "It is not necessary to imprison the bacillus carrier. It is sufficient to restrict the activities of such an individual." In 1910, public health pioneer Charles V. Chapin published a book called Sources and Modes of Infection, in which he discussed healthy disease carriers. He was critical of how Mallon was being treated, writing, quote, "What result is secured by keeping her in confinement, other than the placing of discredit on public health work?

• 26:29Holly Frey?

  It is difficult to see."

• 26:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  By this point, doctors also understood that Mallon was not unique. In 1909, W. P. Mason of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute published an article in the journal Science that concluded that about 4% of people continued to shed bacteria after recovering from typhoid. He wrote, quote, "There are, at the present moment, probably 560 such persons in the state of New York, representing 4% of the 14,000 cases of typhoid fever occurring during the past year. We cannot keep in detention all these people. Then why single out and imprison one?"

• 27:11Holly Frey?

  We also have Mallon's thoughts from a letter that she wrote to William H. Park, head of the New York Department of Health's Bacteriology Lab in June of 1909. She wrote, quote, "There was never any effort by the board authority to do anything for me except to cast me on the island and keep me a prisoner without being sick nor needing medical treatment." After describing being forced to give stool samples and blood cultures, she wrote that when she first arrived, she was so nervous and grief-stricken that her eyes started to twitch and her eyelid became paralyzed. An eye specialist who visited the island multiple times a week was never asked to examine her.

• 27:55Holly Frey?

  She wrote, quote, "I did not even get a cover for my eye. I had to hold my hand on it whilst going about and at night tie a bandage on it."

• 28:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  She also described being treated with urotopene, which has been used since the late 19th century to treat things like urinary tract infections. She was treated with it for months, and she wrote, quote, "If I should have continued, it would certainly have killed me, for it was very severe. Everyone knows, who is acquainted in any kind of medicine, that it's used for kidney trouble. Kidney trouble is underlined."

• 28:31Holly Frey?

  And she said multiple people at the hospital had tried to, in her words, inveigle her into having her gallbladder removed. It was thought that typhoid bacteria lived in the gallbladder, so gallbladder removal would cure chronic carriers. But this surgery had obvious risks, especially in the pre-antibiotic era. In her autobiography, S. Josephine Baker wrote that Mallon thought this surgery was a pretext for hospital staff to kill her, and Mallon stated that she had refused it because there was nothing wrong with her gallbladder. It also quickly became clear that this procedure, of course, did not work.

• 29:12Holly Frey?

  By 1921, five known typhoid carriers had their gallbladders removed, and none of them were cured afterward.

• 29:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  To return to Mallon's letter, she concluded, quote, "I have been, in fact, a peep show for everybody. Even the interns had to come see me and ask about the facts already known to the whole wide world. The tuberculosis men would say, there she is, the kidnapped woman. Dr. Park has had me illustrated in Chicago. I wonder how the said Dr. William H. Park would like to be insulted and put in the journal and call him or his wife Typhoid William Park."

• 29:51Holly Frey?

  We will talk about how Mallon was finally released from North Brother Island after a sponsor break.

• 30:00Holly Frey?

  Today's episode is brought to you by YouTube Premium. YouTube Premium takes something you already love, YouTube, and makes it even better. The content, the creators, the feeling of finding exactly what you're into for every mood and moment of your day. Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube. A YouTube Premium subscription gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, including but not limited to ad-free, uninterrupted videos. It's great for me. Sometimes my daughter comes up and is like, Dad, I-

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  Want to watch octopuses using camouflage right now. And so it's great to just go straight to the octopus ad free. You've got ad free uninterrupted videos. You've got background play. You have offline downloads. That's the good one right there. Download it ahead of time. Take it with you on your flight, underground bunker, wherever you're going without wifi. Also, you've got smart downloads. These work automatically to download videos by your favorite creators. So even if you forget to download ahead of time, premium has you covered. So if you like YouTube, you'll love premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply. Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness. I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  Ask your doctor about Zepbound trisepotide, the first and only FDA approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid

• 31:59Speaker 06

  cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type two. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 32:40Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 33:22Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 34:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mary Mallon is usually characterized as being held in absolute isolation on North Brother Island. But she was eventually given some freedom to move around. By her own account, she helped care for children who had been hospitalized and didn't have family there to look after them or to keep them company. Mallon liked children. Accounts from her earlier employment said that she liked looking after and playing with the children in the households where she worked. She was also allowed to have visitors and she made friends with some of the staff. This should not distract from the fact that she was being held against her will, though.

• 35:25Holly Frey?

  In 1910, the new head of the New York City Health Department, Ernst J. Letterly, planned to release Mallon from the island. She signed a sworn statement that she would change occupations and would take measures to protect anyone that she came in contact with from infection. She also had to periodically check in with the health department.

• 35:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  We don't really know how thoroughly anything about her situation was explained to her, but the assumption was that Mallon would find other work that did not involve cooking. But most of those other domestic service jobs were a lot more physically demanding, and they paid less money than cooking did, especially since Mallon was a good enough cook to be able to get high wages and good positions. There was no social safety net at all, and it doesn't seem like anybody other than Mallon really thought about what it would take for her to support herself if she could not cook anymore.

• 36:22Holly Frey?

  When she said that she was having trouble finding work, Letterly apparently arranged for her to work as a laundress, which would not have been an appealing job in 1910. The electric washing machine was brand new, first patented in the United States in 1904, and not in widespread use yet. In those first electric machines, the only thing that was powered was turning the drum. Fully automatic machines like we have today were still decades away. So doing laundry was an intensely manual job that involved a lot of hard work, hot water, and harsh chemicals. In 1911, still having trouble earning a living, Mallon unsuccessfully tried to sue the city for damages.

• 37:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  At some point after this, Abe Bryhoff died. It's possible that this was a factor in Mallon going back to cooking around 1914. She might have been able to get by when she had somebody to live with, but she couldn't when she was on her own.

• 37:23Holly Frey?

  There were only a couple of employment agencies in New York City that worked with domestic workers, and they, of course, knew who she was. She couldn't use the name Mary Mallon since it had been all over the newspapers, along with the moniker Typhoid Mary. So when she applied to work as a cook at Sloan Maternity Hospital in Manhattan in 1915, she used the name Mary Brown.

• 37:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Three months later, a typhoid outbreak started at the hospital. At least 25 people got sick and two people died. Dr. Edward B. Cragan, the head obstetrician and gynecologist, called George Soper to investigate. Reportedly, and for reasons that are unclear, staff at the hospital had started calling Mallon Typhoid Mary. She was not at the hospital the day Soper came to investigate, but he heard about this nickname and then was offered something that she had written to see if he recognized her handwriting, and he did. A health official who went to take her in recognized her by her walk, which was described as very distinctive and masculine.

• 38:33Holly Frey?

  According to an article in the New York Times, this time, when authorities went to try to capture Mallon, they were denied entry into the house where she was staying, and they had to gain access to her room through a window using a ladder. Public support for her really vanished as newspapers reported on her return to cooking and the typhoid outbreak at the hospital. She was returned to North Brother Island, and this time, people described her as seeming resigned about it and not fighting back. She described herself as having faced continual intrusive questions in the years since being released. So it's possible she just thought that people would leave her alone there.

• 39:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Outside of the island, though, she was criticized and ridiculed. Newspapers had been calling her Typhoid Mary for years, and by 1920, they were also using the term Typhoid Mary in stories about disease outbreaks that had nothing to do with her, and in some cases, weren't even outbreaks of typhoid. And other typhoid carriers took pains to describe themselves as not like her. This included New York bakery owner Alphonse Cotille, who had immigrated from Belgium after he was taken to court after returning to food preparation and defiance of health authorities in 1924. He described himself as not a typhoid Mary.

• 39:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  And in court about this, he received a suspended sentence after a judge said that he could not be imprisoned for his health.

• 40:08Holly Frey?

  At least two other typhoid carriers temporarily spent some time at North Brother Island during Mallon's second incarceration there. One of those was dairy worker Tony LaBella, who was connected to more than 80 cases and two deaths in New York. After agreeing to change jobs, he moved to New Jersey and went back to dairy work. And in 1922, he was connected to 35 cases of typhoid and three deaths there.

• 40:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then there was confectioner Frederick Mersch, who sold ice cream. More than 110 infections and several deaths were traced back to him in 1915. He agreed to get a job as a plumber, but then went back to food service work and caused another outbreak in 1928, with that second outbreak involving more than 80 cases and two deaths. Accounts of Mersch's time on the island are a little odd. It seems like he might have gone there so he could work at the hospital and earn enough money to support his family while not cooking. Other staff did not seem to realize that he, like Mallon, was a chronic typhoid carrier

• 41:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  who had caused multiple outbreaks and that he was actually being detained. He did eventually return home.

• 41:26Holly Frey?

  While at North Brother Island for the second time, Mallon kept herself busy by reading and writing letters. She regularly corresponded with friends and she got letters from around the world, from people who were curious about her or who were themselves chronic typhoid carriers. She also made crafts, including beadwork, that she sold to earn some money for herself. There are also accounts saying that she baked for people, which seems kind of wild considering her status as a typhoid carrier, which was the entire reason she was on the island. Perhaps her customers felt safe because they were hospital workers who had been vaccinated and because the food was cooked. This part is really not clear.

• 42:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, there are some, I'm like, was she really cooking? Or is there a misunderstanding somewhere? I don't know.

• 42:17Holly Frey?

  Did they think cooking and baking were different somehow?

• 42:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Starting in June of 1918, Mallon was allowed to leave the island without supervision. She'd go to visit friends, sometimes for extended periods, and she wasn't really questioned about where she'd gone or what she'd done while she was away. Also, in 1918, she started working at the hospital on the island, and that is work for which she was paid. She did cleaning, domestic-type work, and then was eventually designated as a hospital helper, and then eventually as a nurse. In 1925, Dr. Alexandra Plavka trained Mallon to work at the hospital laboratory, where she cleaned up, washed lab vessels, and ran tests.

• 43:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Plavka's successor apparently did not trust Mallon to run the tests and would rerun them all herself or himself. I don't remember that person's gender, but let Mallon continue to do this work because it seemed important to her.

• 43:20Holly Frey?

  Mallon did not arrive for work one morning in December of 1932, and someone went to check on her, and they found her on the floor. She'd had a massive stroke. After this, she was unable to walk, and she spent the next six years being cared for at Riverside Hospital. She died there on November 11, 1938, at the age of 69. She was buried at St. Raymond Cemetery in the Bronx.

• 43:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Authorities ran advertisements looking for Mallon's relatives for two months, even though she had told people that she didn't have any family. Nine people attended her funeral, including Plavka and her daughter, and Mallon's friend, Mary Limpy, and some of her family. Mallon left Plavka $200 in her will and left all of her possessions to Limpy. She also left some charitable donations and other bequests, and she paid for her own grave marker, which reads, "Mary Mallon, died November 11, 1938. Jesus mercy."

• 44:23Holly Frey?

  According to some accounts, an autopsy was performed on Mallon's body, and it revealed that she had gallstones that were full of typhoid bacteria, suggesting that she might have been cured if she'd agreed to have that surgery. Boy, do I have thoughts about this to talk about on Friday. But there is no record of an autopsy, and soapers later writing about her specifically says that no autopsy was conducted.

• 44:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, it sort of comes across as something that was spread to justify her being held for her whole life, even though it was already established that she was a chronic carrier. We didn't also need a possibly fake autopsy story.

• 45:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  By the time Mallon died, the city of New York was monitoring at least 400 chronic typhoid carriers, none of whom were being isolated or quarantined. But typhoid was becoming less and less common in the city. Water chlorination, introduced in 1909, made a big difference in typhoid rates, as did the vaccines that were first used in 1911. Antibiotics that were effective against typhoid were developed in 1948, and today, chronic typhoid can usually be cured with a longer course of antibiotics.

• 45:39Holly Frey?

  There are many possible reasons for why Mallon was treated differently from other typhoid carriers of her era, including other carriers who also went back to working with food and caused additional outbreaks, some of them larger and deadlier than anything that was ever traced to Mallon. Immigrants from Ireland at this time were perceived as unclean and untrustworthy. Some health officials described Mallon as dirty or untidy, although Dr. Sarah Josephine Baker said the opposite, describing Mallon as a, quote, "clean, neat, obviously self-respecting Irishwoman." Mallon was also angry, even violently so, in her earliest encounters with health officials and police.

• 46:24Holly Frey?

  Baker once wrote of her, quote, "It was her own bad behavior that inevitably led to her doom. The hospital authorities treated her as kindly as possible, but she never learned to listen to reason." It also seems like health officials put more effort into training typhoid carriers to do other types of work if they were men, especially men with families, who were expected to be the breadwinners.

• 46:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  The typhoid Mary moniker continues to be used today, of course, especially in situations where someone is perceived as carelessly or callously spreading disease. And Mallon's story has continued to be relevant, as health authorities have tried to figure out how to balance personal freedoms and constitutional protections with public health, including things like isolation and quarantine protocols in the early years of the global HIV pandemic, the early COVID-19 pandemic, and outbreaks of diseases like Ebola today.

• 47:26Holly Frey?

  Do you have listener mail to top off this episode?

• 47:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from Greg, and Greg wrote, "Holly and Tracy, at the conclusion of your recent Unearthed podcast, you discussed how the current administration is trying to push a whitewashed version of history at our national parks, monuments, historical sites, and museums. It got me thinking about the complicated history of Shenandoah National Park, which you covered on a podcast about a year ago. I lived in Virginia before retiring from the federal government in 2025, as many of us did that year, and moving to South Carolina. And for decades in Virginia, I was a scout leader. Frequently, I would take my scouts hiking in Shenandoah National Park, and one of our

• 48:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  favorite hikes was the loop known as Little Devil Stairs. Part of that trail follows the Kaiser Run Fire Road, and there it passes a cemetery used by the families who once lived in that part of what became the Shenandoah National Park. I would always have my scouts stop there at the cemetery, and we'd have a talk about how and why the park was created. Why do you think there's a cemetery located here? What happened to the people who lived here? I've attached a photo of a plaque found in that cemetery. On it is a poem, "Why the Mountains Are Blue" by Wayne Baldwin. I would have my scouts read it and then discuss their thoughts. Invariably, my scouts would express surprise at the history of the park.

• 48:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Of course, they had never heard of the history of it in school and express empathy for the uprooted families. They would draw parallels to Native Americans, they'd raise questions about other stories in American history, and wonder how much of them were mythological. Quote, "Get curious, ask hard questions, see how the interpretations have changed over time." And they talk about how much they loved Shenandoah National Park and how grateful they were for the opportunity to enjoy its beauty. I think Baldwin's poem captures exactly why we should never whitewash history. No matter how noble the outcome, real people paid a very real price for what we have come to enjoy today. We should not forget about them, nor what happened to them.

• 49:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's fashionable patriotism to thank soldiers for their service, yet we don't recognize the sacrifices of so many others, like those whose homes were taken for the creation of this beautiful park. American history should not be framed like a Disney theme park where everything is pristine while all the garbage is kept hidden behind the scenes. It is in the understanding of these complicated stories that we are able to move closer toward the ideals set forth in our nation's founding documents. I also wanted to add that I was delighted to see your show on the Color Blue at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC several years ago. It was a lot of fun to be part of the audience. Thank you for bringing your show on the road. Hopefully, you'll come to Charleston sometime soon. Greg."

• 50:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thank you so much, Greg, for this email, which is lovely, and also for this picture. I did not know about this plaque and the poem, "Why the Mountains Are Blue." It is basically, I cannot read the poem. I do not know its copyright status, whether we would be infringing on things to read it, but if you Google "Why the Mountains Are Blue" by Wayne Baldwin, or use any other search engine of your choice, you'll be able to find it and read it. And it is basically about remembering the sacrifice that was made to be able to create Shenandoah National Park. So, thank you so much for this email and this picture, Greg.

• 51:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  If you would like to write to us, we are at [email protected]. And if you would like to look at the show notes for this episode, which are honestly longer than normal, that is at our website, which is at [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

• 51:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 51:45Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 52:52Speaker 06

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• 53:36Speaker 06

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• 54:22Speaker 00

  Hola a todos. Soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron tenía veintitantos años y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas. Y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones, la elección para mí fue obvia. Boom! Eso es KISSIMTA. Obtenga más información sobre KISSIMTA o fotumab en kissimta.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.