In 1907, George Soper located the cause of a typhoid outbreak in New York City: a cook named Mary Mallon. Mary didn’t know it, but each and every meal she cooked carried a small chance for her clients to come down with the disease. Finding out the truth could cost Mary her job…and her freedom. Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What triggered the investigation into Mary Mallon?
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.
Chapter 2: Who was George Soper and what was his role?
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.
Chapter 3: What happened during Mary Mallon's confrontation with health officials?
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.
Chapter 4: How was Mary Mallon captured and isolated?
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 to her work. Breaking the detente, 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 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. 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.
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Chapter 5: What conditions did Mary face on North Brother Island?
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's 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.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the gallbladder in Mary's case?
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.
Chapter 7: How did public perception influence Mary Mallon's fate?
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 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.
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