The Many Mary Mallons
This is a story about a sanitary engineer who made a career tracking and preventing epidemics -- especially epidemics which stubbornly refused to be tracked and prevented. This is also a story about checking and verifying sources, which features:
Things that were cut from this story because it is already very long include:
But most of all, this is a story about how libraries are awesome.
A bit over half a year ago, I fell into a minor research rabbit hole learning about the various islands that surround Manhattan. There are a lot of these, ranging from the tiny Mill Rock and Belmont Island, which you might have seen just barely jutting out of the East River, to Hoffman and Swinburne Island on the opposite side of the city, neither of which are named for the people you just thought of, but both of which were artificially constructed for the purpose of quarantining immigrants who were thought to be carrying contagious diseases.
The most intriguing of these various islands to me was North Brother Island, which first became relevant to the history books in 1885 when a hospital was built on it, for the purposes of quarantining smallpox, and later tuberculosis. If you’ve heard of the hospital on North Brother island, it is probably because Mary Mallon died there. When I first read about it, this was the bit of trivia that caught my eye. An abandoned hospital on a forbidden island where the most famous carrier of Typhoid Fever was quarantined and later died. Nope, that place totally isn’t haunted.
I was reminded of North Brother Island and its former use as a quarantine center for perhaps obvious reasons, and thought recently that I might want to reopen that rabbit hole and learn a bit more. This turned out to be difficult, however, and even cursory research into Mary Mallon’s life turned up a lot of inconsistent information. Mary Mallon’s life, it turns out, was not exceptionally well-documented, especially the bits of it which occurred prior to March 19, 1907. The best accounts of her life were compiled after the fact, and the three documents I thought to be the most reliable sources were by George A. Soper. The first, published in the June 15, 1907 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the second, in the July 1919 issue of the medical journal The Military Surgeon, and the third in the October 1939 issue of the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, about a year after her death. George Soper made no claim to be a biographer, and his writings only account for the parts of Mary Mallon’s life that were relevant to his work. Per his own accounts, Mary Mallon was reluctant to reveal any personal information that was not already on the public record. Still, they form the most complete and seemingly reliable biography of her that I’ve been able to find -- most second-hand sources get their information from Soper, and thanks to all three of those journals keeping accessible online records, I’ve decided to take my information straight from the sanitary engineer. Even so, Mary Mallon also seems to have made a deliberate effort to make it particularly difficult to find her, and Soper’s accounts do have some holes in them. As much as possible, I have tried to assemble this story from primary sources from the time.
General consensus is that Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in the 1860s, and immigrated to the United States at some point in 1880s. Though the details of her immigration are, for the purposes of this story, lost to history.
In 1900, she was working as a cook for a family in Mamaroneck, New York. For those wondering, that’s like two towns North of New Rochelle. A visitor to the house developed typhoid fever on September 4, 1900. It was assumed that he’d contracted it elsewhere, and Mary stopped work there not long after. She had been with the family for three years before this incident.
For eleven months spanning 1901 and 1902, Mary was a cook for a family in New York City. A laundress in the household came down with typhoid fever in December of 1901, and was admitted to Roosevelt Hospital. This is not to be confused with Riverside Hospital, which opened on North Brother Island in 1885, prior to which its function as a smallpox hospital had been served by the Renwick Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island, then called Blackwell’s Island.
In 1902, Mary started working at the summer house of lawyer Coleman Drayton in Maine. Two weeks after she arrived, on June 17th, a member of the household came down with typhoid fever, with another case following a week later. Before long, all but two members of the household had the illness. The only ones who did not fall sick were Drayton himself -- who was immune after having already had the disease previously -- and Mary the cook. Mary assisted Drayton in nursing the household back to help, and ever the grateful employer, he gave her a $50 bonus -- roughly $1,500 today.
Two doctors were called in to investigate the outbreak at the Drayton household, but no primary cause could be determined.
In 1904, Mary worked for the family of Henry Gilsey for nine months. When the summer season came around, the family spent the summer at Sands Point, and Mary and the servants followed them. Exactly one week after their arrival, the laundress fell sick with typhoid. Followed by “the gardener, the butler’s wife, and finally the butler’s wife’s sister.” The cases were confined to the servants’ house. The family thought that it must be something wrong with the house, and called in a doctor to investigate. The doctor decided that the first to show symptoms must be the culprit. The laundress must have picked up the disease elsewhere, though he could not quite figure out where.
The next family Mary worked for spent the summer in Oyster Bay. In the summer of 1906, six of the eleven in the household fell sick with typhoid fever. Two were hospitalized. No clear cause for the outbreak could be determined. Typhoid as a disease was usually brought on by some contamination or poor sanitation in the treatment of water or milk. It rarely affected the rich, and was all but unheard of in Oyster Bay, where no other household, generally getting their supplies from the same sources, got sick. Typhoid was not commonly known to pass directly from person to person. Once again, an expert was called in to investigate. This time, it was a sanitary engineer, who comes across very positively in this story, probably because I’m using his own first-hand accounts as my main sources.
George Soper had become known as a bit of an epidemic expert over the previous few years, especially in the area of typhoid fever. In 1904, he was called in to identify the source of an outbreak that had occurred the previous year in Ithaca. Upwards of 1,300 people were infected (roughly 10% of the local population at the time), and 82 died. Cornell University was the epicenter of the outbreak, and the hospitals were quickly overwhelmed as cases doubled each week. Soper was careful to note in his study that though the epidemic only officially lasted from January to April of 1903, the disease had almost certainly come to the campus several months before, and cases continued to pop up for at least a year afterwards.
In his study, Soper identified the Ithaca Water Company as the likely source of the outbreak, “but it was evident,” he writes, “that the disease was being transmitted from person to person through carelessness and ignorance in nursing the sick.” He noted that two Cornell professors had previously reported to the board of health “that the water supply was polluted; and that the results of their analyses had been suppressed and kept from the public press by the board for fear of alarming the people… The result was that more time was spent in trying to fix the blame for the epidemic than in bringing it to an end.”
Soper became responsible for quashing several epidemics on behalf of the City and State of New York, and he attributes his success to the fact that he ignored the common knowledge at the time of how typhoid was transmitted through water, and instead modeled it as though it were a disease which could be directly communicated from person to person -- which, it turns out, it could be.
So with these credentials, he was called upon to investigate the outbreak at Oyster Bay. Though he was not the first investigator brought in. The first ones thought that, typhoid being known to be a water-borne illness, it would make sense to check the local water supply. Five water samples were taken from the house, tested, and found to be safe. Six more were taken from the local well to see if contamination could be seeping in through ground water, and again they came back clean. Still, the common knowledge prevailed, and it was assumed that somehow, someway, typhoid must have infected the water supply. When Soper was brought in, he first checked the work of the initial investigators, and found no mistakes in their methodology. He next ascertained that no one with typhoid had visited the house all summer, nor had anyone in the house visited away from Oyster Bay in the weeks preceding the outbreak, and therefore that the infection could not have been brought in from an outside source. He began to suspect the local soft clams for which Oyster Bay is famous, but quickly dismissed this theory, as no other household in the area seemed to be affected. He examined the history of the house, and learned that one case of typhoid had occurred there in 1901, but all traces of it were eliminated, and the house had been regularly occupied since with no recurrence until that outbreak.
Finally, Soper investigated if any changes had occurred within the household in the weeks preceding the outbreak. And it turned out that three weeks before the first case, the family had hired a new cook, who had come strongly recommended from her employment agency. This was Mary Mallon. She left three weeks after the outbreak, and her whereabouts were now unknown. She did not show any signs of disease.
Through independent investigation, Soper pieced together the timeline reconstructed above. He managed to confirm that Mary Mallon had worked for eight households over the previous ten years, and seven of them had come down with typhoid. The eighth household comprised only three older individuals who were likely to have caught the disease before and thus become immune.
Not long after leaving Oyster Bay, Mary took a job a little further out from the city in Tuxedo Park. She was with a family there for about a month. Two weeks after her arrival, a laundress was hospitalized with typhoid fever, and two weeks later, Mary left.
Soper finally tracked her down working for a family in New York City. In his 1939 account, Soper places the family in a house two doors from the church on the West side of 60th and Park. This detail is not present in either the 1919 account nor the publication of his findings in 1907. (In this earliest account, Soper is much more respectful of the privacy of all the people involved -- the only names used are those of the various investigating doctors.) At any rate, the church, built in 1883, is still there. The house has been replaced with a large apartment building.
By the time George Soper caught up with Mary on Park Avenue, another outbreak had already occurred, once again, within weeks of Mary’s arrival. A chambermaid fell sick on January 23, 1907, and was hospitalized on January 29. The daughter of the house’s owner fell sick on February 8 and died fifteen days later -- the first recorded death in all these outbreaks.
Soper interviewed Mary Mallon at this house and suggested to her that she might be the source of the outbreaks that seemed to follow her around. She was not very pleased with this insinuation, and, in the 1939 account (which is much more narrative than the 1919 and 1907 accounts), advanced at him brandishing a carving fork. The 1919 account puts it somewhat more amusingly, if also more vaguely: “My interview was short. It started in the kitchen and ended almost immediately at the basement door… My point of view was not acceptable, and the claims of science and humanity were unavailing.”
In the 1939 account, Soper admits that he “had made a bad start,” and did not adequately explain what his theory actually was -- or, more accurately, that he did not quite have a fully formed theory. He was convinced that Mary was somehow causing the outbreaks, convinced that she was not doing so deliberately, and had only to figure out how.
The obvious answer was that Mary was somehow infecting the food she cooked, but most of the time, the cook in a household would not come into contact with the food after it had been heated to pathogen-killing temperatures. The actual serving would be done by a butler. This would account for only the servants falling ill in the case at Sands Point, as the chef would be much more likely to come in direct contact with the post-cooking food of the servants.. Soper would later confirm that one of the cases had come about after Mary had served a desert of ice cream with cut-up fresh peaches.
At any rate, the encounter in the Park Avenue kitchen was the first of three interviews Soper had with Mary Mallon. For the second he was better prepared. He tracked her down to a tenement on 33rd and 3rd where she sometimes stayed with a friend and a dog, and brought with him a doctor for academic support.
This interview was no more productive, but was more revealing as to Mary’s side of the story: From her vantage point, typhoid was simply a common disease that popped up everywhere, from which most people ultimately recovered. She had no reason to suppose otherwise. She counted herself as lucky that she never got sick herself, and, being so lucky, could not only not be the cause of the disease, but, on the contrary, was singularly suited to take care of people who had caught it, as she had done in the 1902 outbreak. As far as being an asymptomatic carrier was concerned, such a thing was never heard of. (This was not true. Robert Koch had already figured out about carriers in Germany years prior, but the news apparently hadn’t made it to America.)
In the 1919 account, Soper says this of Mary: “[Her] position was like that of the lawyer who, on being told by the judge that the facts were all against his client, said that he proposed to deny the facts.” In the 1939 account, he is much kinder to her: “She denied she knew anything about typhoid. She had never had it nor produced it. There had been no more typhoid where she was than anywhere else. There was typhoid fever everywhere. Nobody had ever accused her of causing any cases or had any occasion to do so. Such a thing had never been heard of.”
Making no headway with Mary herself, and knowing that if she took another job, she’d be difficult to track down again until the next outbreak was already underway, Soper went to the New York City Health Department. Dr. Sara Josephine Baker went to try to get samples from Mary, but was just as unsuccessful as Soper had been.
Mary Mallon was arrested on March 19, 1907. Samples were unwillingly taken from her at regular intervals for six months following the arrest, and Mary was found to be an intermittent carrier -- the presence of bacteria in her stool would wax and wane, sometimes not being present at all before coming back weeks later.
It was after her arrest that Soper conducted his third interview with Mary Mallon. This time he (according to himself) took great care to explain exactly how bacteria do what they do, and how they spread from person to person. He asked about her history with typhoid fever. Whether she had ever come down with it at all, and how many outbreaks she had been present for. Mary was not forthcoming. He suggested that she might be released if she agreed to have her gallbladder removed, as that was believed to be the site of the infection. She was not too keen on that idea either. Shortly after, Mary was moved to quarantine on North Brother Island, where she lived in a house by herself, save for the company of a dog. (No word on whether this was the same dog who lived in the tenement on 33rd street.)
At this point, Soper published his findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He removed her name, but he needn’t have bothered. The newspapers were already running wild with the story of the cook whom they had dubbed “Typhoid Mary.” (Though the papers did give her last name as Ilverson.)
Dr. Walter Bensal claimed in a Washington Herald article (April 2, 1907) that Mary Mallon had become immune after she fell ill and recovered from a bout of typhoid fever six years previously. Note that by six years before this point (even allowing for a six-month margin of error) at least the first case that George Soper later uncovered had already occured. At any rate, no other authority seems to claim whether or not Mary had ever shown symptoms of the typhoid fever she harbored, whether six years previously or not.
Two years after her arrest (now 1909), Mary sued the city. Her lawyer made the case that she had been arrested and imprisoned without due process -- she had never even been accused of any actual crime, much less been fairly tried. The case was dismissed, with Justice Mitchell Erlanger saying they simply could not take the risk of releasing her.
In 1910, Mary was released from quarantine, gallbladder intact, on the condition that she super duper pinky promise to stop working as a cook, so as to avoid infecting anyone else.
At this point, Mary Mallon dropped off the map for five years.
So imagine my surprise when I see in 1913, in the middle of that period where nobody knows what happened to Typhoid Mary, an advertisement for a play, The Silver Wedding, about to open on Broadway, in which Mary Mallon is set to appear. In fact, she is a replacement for Florence Malone, about whom no more is said.
Now, I don’t suppose for a moment that this is the same Mary Mallon as the one who had been released from quarantine three years earlier. Clearly, this was a different woman with the same name who happened to be an actress. I searched the New York birth and death records from around the time period for the name “Mary Mallon” and found lots of Mary Mallons (Marys Mallon?) wandering around the city over the first few decades of the 20th century. A quick search on Facebook shows that the name is still at least somewhat common, and so this coincidence, though mildly amusing to stumble upon in the wild, devoid of context, is entirely meaningless.
Still, a mildly amusing coincidence it was, and I thought it would make for a cute little sidebar, in which I vaguely implied that during the five years during which Mary Mallon went off the map using various assumed names to avoid detection, she also brazenly played a leading role in a Broadway play under her own name, before revealing the gag. It struck me as an amusing notion that, perhaps Mary Mallon was Florence Malone’s cook, and when Florence contracted typhoid fever forcing her to drop out of the play, the only person who could replace her was her cook with whom she had read lines. That sounds like a charming plot for a musical comedy, right? Judy Garland as Mary Mallon, Gene Kelly as George Soper?
Well, I wanted to get some more information about this second Mary Mallon before I added that into the story, so I decided to start by looking for more articles about The Silver Wedding. Perhaps if other publications or reviews mentioned her, they might also mention something about her, perhaps just an additional credit I could use to start piecing together her resume. But the moment I look for more information about The Silver Wedding, all I can find are reviews from which Ms. Mallon’s name is conspicuously absent. In fact, every review which lists a full cast is missing her name, but does include the name Cecile Breton, who was not in the initial cast list I’d found from before the show had opened. I had two listings from The Sun in which Mary Mallon was mentioned as part of the cast, but then an article in The Theatre in which she was not. In addition, Harry McAuliffe, who was in the earlier listings, was not in the reviews, and no additional cast member was listed to make up for the number. So not only do the papers not agree on who was in the cast, they don’t agree on how many were in the cast!
For a brief moment, I thought I might have stumbled into some sort of copyright trap. Maybe back in the day theater reviews made up fake cast members in minor roles so as to catch plagiarists? But a bit more searching turned up independent records of actresses by the names Mary Mallon and Cecile Breton being active around this time. I even found a photograph of Cecile Breton from when she was appearing in Brewster’s Millions in 1907, around the time the cook Mary Mallon was first arrested. (Also in 1907, the other Mary Mallon was starring in The College Widow in Illinois.) The New York Public Library had photographs from the original production of “The Silver Wedding,” but not in a very high quality, unlabeled, and besides all that, I wouldn’t recognize Mary Mallon if I saw a photograph of her anyway.
In the hopes of getting my hands on a primary source from within the production itself, I reached out to people at Playbill, the NYPL, and the Internet Broadway Database (IBDB). I don’t know what method IBDB uses for compiling their data or if they’re reliable in any way, but the cast they list for the original production of The Silver Wedding has Cecile Breton, no Mary Mallon, and no Harry McAuliffe, so I figured at the very least I could ask where they got their information and maybe that would lead me to more sources.
Playbill informed me that their archives don’t go back that far. The NYPL said that they probably do have a Playbill from the original production in their archives, but access will obviously be somewhat limited for the foreseeable future. A few days later, I heard back from IBDB telling me nothing I didn’t already know. The NYPL did provide me with some additional newspaper clippings, the most valuable of which I found to be from issues of the New York Times, two days apart, the earlier (August 10, 1913) listing Mallon and McAuliffe in the cast, and the later (August 12, 1913), listing Breton in lieu of either. Evidently something had happened in a relatively short time frame that caused Breton to replace Mallon, and McAuliffe’s character to be cut. At any rate, that’s the best explanation I can come up with without something like correspondence directly from the people involved.
It does appear that Mary Mallon did perform in the pre-Broadway tryout in New Jersey.
In searching for more information about this elusive actress, I discovered in the real estate trades that around this time she seemed to be buying up several buildings on West 28th Street. Or, at least, someone named Mary Mallon was. I also found a Mary Mallon who had incorporated a hat company in 1896 along with her husband Edward. -- At least, an Edward and Mary Mallon incorporated a hat company, and an Edward and Mary Mallon who were involved in the hat trade were listed as married in the 1900 census. However, this Edward Mallon was born in 1858, and died in 1939. There was another Edward Mallon who was born in 1856 and died in 1910, and was also married to a Mary Mallon -- and they both lived in Yonkers. And neither of these Mary Mallons have birth and death years consistent with the “Mary Mallon of Yonkers” who died in a shooting in a pharmacy on April 3, 1923, in which Daniel Healey, the pharmacist, was also shot, and coughed up the bullet just in time for it to be admitted as evidence in the trial. This Daniel Healey, at least, does seem to be the same Daniel Healey who graduated the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy in 1899. In February of 1903, a Mary Mallon caught on fire in a tenement on 28th street, which could plausibly have been owned by Real Estate Mary Mallon (who had started buying buildings in this area by this point), but probably wasn’t. In any event, I think I can confidently say that none of these Mary Mallons (Typhoid Mary, Stage Mary, Real Estate Mary, Hat Mary, Pharmacy-Shooting Mary, and Spontaneously-Combusting Mary) are the same as the racehorse by the name Mary Mallon who was also active at this time.
(Note: I will admit to having taken a liberty here -- Mary Mallon did not “catch on fire” in the tenement on 28th street. There was a fire, people caught on it, but Mary Mallon was actually the only person involved in that fire who didn’t catch -- no word on whether she asymptomatically spread the fire to others, but it seems unlikely.)
In short, things got really messy, really fast, and I now know an uncomfortable amount about a bunch of people named Mary Mallon who lived a century ago, and have no clue how many of them were the same people. I have compiled roughly fifteen years of credits for some actress named Mary Mallon between 1905 and 1920, but maybe there were two of them. Or three. The fact that none of the credits I’ve found overlap yet is promising.
I was down this rabbit hole for about a month before I remembered what I was originally there for. I don’t know if anything was accomplished in this diversion. Ultimately, I think what it proves is that there are a lot of people in New York, and a bunch of them have the same name, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise therefore that the only Mary Mallon most people care about was able to disappear so thoroughly after being released from quarantine.
Meanwhile, George Soper had not left the job of investigating typhoid outbreaks, and he was called upon in 1915 to investigate a particularly bad one. Over twenty cases had emerged in two months in the Sloane Hospital for Women. Twenty-five cases according to the New York Tribune (March 29, 1915), of which two were fatal. The hospital’s new cook was named Mary, and the staff had begun to jokingly refer to her as “Typhoid Mary,” alluding to the figure in the headlines of nearly a decade ago. Soper was not so amused by the joke, and was shown a letter in the cook’s handwriting, which he recognized as the hand of Mary Mallon -- and not the actress/homeowner/proprietress-of-hats/shooting-victim-to-be/fire-survivor/racehorse.
It turned out Mary still didn’t believe she was carrying any disease, and apparently she was really devoted to that live-in-cook life, because she went right back to it, under various assumed names. This would be bad enough on its own, but she could no longer find work with individual families (as the major employment agencies did not want to represent her), and so instead went to work for hotels and restaurants. It is impossible to say how many cases of typhoid fever she was responsible for during this period.
Mary Mallon was promptly tracked down, arrested, and, on March 27, 1915, brought back to North Brother Island. This time she was not released.
The New York Health Department suddenly got a lot more wary of asymptomatic carriers of disease. In the remainder of 1915, five additional carriers of typhoid were found, and in the first six months of 1916, twenty-two more joined them. (New York Tribune, August 28, 1916) In January of 1918, a symptomless carrier of meningitis was found. Everyone, even his nurse, was instructed to stay fifteen feet away from him while he was being treated. The case was expected to be treatable, but I could find no followup in the newspaper.
In March of 1919, one of the Mary Mallons made some money at the racetrack (perhaps on her namesake horse?), and another Mary Mallon continued to deal in real estate, this time with the middle initial ‘A’. A third Mary Mallon was blissfully unaware of the fact that in a little over four years, she’d be shot dead in a pharmacy. In July, George Soper’s second account of the story, and first full narrative, appeared in The Military Surgeon.
At the end of this account, Soper notes a change in Mary’s behavior as compared to her first arrest, as well as a change in the public’s perception of her -- a noticeable change over the course of the many newspaper clippings I read. From 1915 to 1919, Mary Mallon had made no further attempts to gain her freedom, and indeed, she would not for the rest of her life. Her former claim to have been wrongfully imprisoned now seemed feeble, as after she was released the first time, she immediately broke the one condition of her release, and knowingly endangered countless more people. “She had been treated fairly,” writes Soper. “She had been given her liberty and was out on parole. She had abused her privilege; she had broken her parole. She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly.” Your interpretation may vary.
Mary Mallon was demonstrably responsible for ten outbreaks of typhoid fever, fifty-one individual cases, and three deaths. The actual numbers are likely higher. In the 1919 account, Soper draws myriad morals from the case. Many about the ways in which disease spreads, but one in particular about human behavior: “The story of Typhoid Mary indicates how difficult it is to teach infected people to guard against infecting others. Mary had ample opportunity to know the danger which she constituted toward those whose food she prepared. She knew from being told, and she knew by experience… That she could have avoided spreading infection by obeying her instructions admits of no doubt. She knew that when she cooked she killed people, and yet she deliberately sought employment as a cook in a hospital. Why did she do this?”
This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
Two months later (May of 1919), George Soper published an article in Science, about the influenza pandemic which had recently killed a lot of people, to massively understate the case. If I were to quote highlights to you, I think I’d just reprint the whole thing here. I think it is incredibly interesting reading, in large part because Soper focuses less on the specific case of the 1918 pandemic, and more on the general case of why respiratory illnesses as a broad class, from the mildest colds to the worst flus, are difficult to control, and what we can do about them. Little has changed in terms of advice given, but the point most plainly stressed by Soper is that the people with the most power to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses are the people who already have them. He of course adds a note about asymptomatic carriers, concluding that “It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that of all the things which were done to stop the spread of influenza, nothing seems to have had any material effect upon it.”
“This may all seem very discouraging,” he continues, “but it need not depress anybody. The control of typhoid once seemed an impossible task. To rightly measure a difficulty is often the first step toward overcoming it.”
As far as I can find, George Soper did not write about Mary Mallon again until 1939, shortly after her death. At this point, he gave an account of the remainder of her life on North Brother Island. She was employed in the hospital laboratory, and paid for her work. After some time, she was permitted to go to the mainland and be a normal person in a crowd, so long as she returned at the end of the day, and didn’t handle anybody’s food while she was there. In 1932, she was paralyzed by a stroke, and subsequently cared for in the hospital. She died on November 11, 1938.
There seems to be some question as to whether an autopsy was performed. According to Soper, her wish to have her gallbladder remain intact was respected, and “there was no autopsy.” No more is said.
But plenty of sources do claim an autopsy was performed, and that they found typhoid bacteria still active in Mary’s gallbladder. I couldn’t find a primary source for this though, and, in fact, the most prominent source I could find claiming that an autopsy had been performed was a paper published in Annals of Gastroenterology in 2013, which claimed that “a post mortem revealed that she shed Salmonella typhi bacteria from her gallstones… Some other researchers insisted that there was no autopsy and that this was another urban legend, whispered by the Health Center of Oyster Bay, in order to calm ethical reactions.”
Quite a bold claim of conspiracy.
Curiously, the only source listed for this claim is George Soper’s own 1939 paper, which claims no autopsy, and makes no mention of urban legends. Also, the 2013 paper misspells Soper’s name as Sober. Virtually every other source I’ve looked at has cited one of these two papers, more or less parroting the same statements. Either an autopsy was performed and it found some sort of bacteria, or it wasn’t and didn’t. I have no idea where the “Health Center of Oyster Bay” came from. One source claims that the findings of the autopsy were published shortly after her death, but does not provide a citation. I could not find any such autopsy report, or, indeed any second-hand source that directly cites such a report. Only third-hand sources citing the 2013 paper. I can’t even find any indication of an organization called the “Health Center of Oyster Bay” ever existing. Anything that references such an organization is simply quoting the aforementioned 2013 paper.
About two weeks ago, I emailed the journal in which the paper was published, asking for clarification. I have not heard back. I would like to assume sloppiness combined with an unfortunate instance of citogenesis.
I did find one source which claimed an autopsy had occurred that predated 2013. An article on the website The Straight Dope. Not exactly a reputable academic journal, but the article was dated to 2000, and using the Wayback Machine, I confirmed that it claimed an autopsy had been performed on Mary Mallon at least as early as 2008, which proves that someone somewhere prior to 2013 had made this claim. The article was edited in 2018, to say that the previous version of the article was wrong, and no autopsy was performed. A publication acknowledging its mistakes is always a good sign, and I emailed The Straight Dope asking if they could help me by telling me what source they had that initially claimed an autopsy had been performed, and what source they found later to correct it. I received an email back essentially saying that if the sources aren’t listed in the article itself, they’re lost to history.
I also reached out to the NYPL again, and, ever helpful, they got back to me with lots of sources, though nothing that really talked about whether an autopsy was performed. They did, however, track down for me Mary Mallon’s death certificate, which has a noticeably blank section where information about an autopsy would have been written. The death certificate also lists her birthday as September 23, 1869.
The researcher at the NYPL who got back to me expressed their opinion that, if the death certificate did not fill in the autopsy section, and no contemporary obituaries mention a post-mortem, and George Soper, who was directly involved in the case, says there was no autopsy, then there was probably no autopsy. I’m inclined to agree. It is still somewhat gnawing at me though that I do not know when, how, or why, the rumor that there was one got started.
So I get to the end of the story of Mary Mallon (the cook), and… I don’t know if anything new was learned here. But I found it a compelling experience to dig through all these old newspapers and learn about the many Mary Mallon. A reminder that the household idiom and frightening moniker “Typhoid Mary” did originally refer to a real person who had real motivations and undertook real actions that, through no malice of her own, harmed other real people. And now I have a story to tell whenever I pass that church on 60th and Park. (Which, admittedly, isn’t often, but maybe I could divert myself that way the next time I go to the dentist.)
This, by the way, is a real-life instance (for the people who are not Mary Mallon) of the classic trolley problem. Do you take action, violate Mary's civil rights and imprison her without due process? Or do you remain passive and let her continue to infect and endanger countless others? There aren’t really any good options here. This became a no-win situation the moment typhoid bacteria decided to lodge itself in Mary's gut. Microbes don’t care about your petty ethical thought experiments.
The moral, if there is one, is one I think we have all learned very well by now, and is phrased wonderfully by George Soper in his 1919 paper on influenza:
Much thanks to the researchers at the NYPL and the archives provided by the NYPL, Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and assorted medical journals, for indulging this far-too-deep rabbit hole. Libraries are truly awesome, and the people who work there make them so.
I’ve decided to pull the plug at this point and resurface, even though I still don’t know what happened with the Excelsior Hat Company. Continuing to try to find out probably wouldn’t be good for my mental health.
- A 1903 typhoid fever outbreak at Cornell University and a conspiracy to cover up its cause.
- An abandoned hospital on a deserted island, where human entry is now forbidden.
- A mysterious casting change to a 1913 Broadway play.
- A conspiracy to falsify the results of an autopsy which never happened.
Things that were cut from this story because it is already very long include:
- A 1912 preacher's calls to ban certain kinds of dancing.
- A 1908 study about the air quality of subway systems around the world that uses the brightness of meteors to estimate the height of the atmosphere.
- A speech inexplicably given by Alexander Graham Bell to the Biological Society
- A 1917 musical that probably made the aforementioned preacher very angry.
But most of all, this is a story about how libraries are awesome.
A bit over half a year ago, I fell into a minor research rabbit hole learning about the various islands that surround Manhattan. There are a lot of these, ranging from the tiny Mill Rock and Belmont Island, which you might have seen just barely jutting out of the East River, to Hoffman and Swinburne Island on the opposite side of the city, neither of which are named for the people you just thought of, but both of which were artificially constructed for the purpose of quarantining immigrants who were thought to be carrying contagious diseases.
The most intriguing of these various islands to me was North Brother Island, which first became relevant to the history books in 1885 when a hospital was built on it, for the purposes of quarantining smallpox, and later tuberculosis. If you’ve heard of the hospital on North Brother island, it is probably because Mary Mallon died there. When I first read about it, this was the bit of trivia that caught my eye. An abandoned hospital on a forbidden island where the most famous carrier of Typhoid Fever was quarantined and later died. Nope, that place totally isn’t haunted.
I was reminded of North Brother Island and its former use as a quarantine center for perhaps obvious reasons, and thought recently that I might want to reopen that rabbit hole and learn a bit more. This turned out to be difficult, however, and even cursory research into Mary Mallon’s life turned up a lot of inconsistent information. Mary Mallon’s life, it turns out, was not exceptionally well-documented, especially the bits of it which occurred prior to March 19, 1907. The best accounts of her life were compiled after the fact, and the three documents I thought to be the most reliable sources were by George A. Soper. The first, published in the June 15, 1907 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the second, in the July 1919 issue of the medical journal The Military Surgeon, and the third in the October 1939 issue of the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, about a year after her death. George Soper made no claim to be a biographer, and his writings only account for the parts of Mary Mallon’s life that were relevant to his work. Per his own accounts, Mary Mallon was reluctant to reveal any personal information that was not already on the public record. Still, they form the most complete and seemingly reliable biography of her that I’ve been able to find -- most second-hand sources get their information from Soper, and thanks to all three of those journals keeping accessible online records, I’ve decided to take my information straight from the sanitary engineer. Even so, Mary Mallon also seems to have made a deliberate effort to make it particularly difficult to find her, and Soper’s accounts do have some holes in them. As much as possible, I have tried to assemble this story from primary sources from the time.
General consensus is that Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in the 1860s, and immigrated to the United States at some point in 1880s. Though the details of her immigration are, for the purposes of this story, lost to history.
In 1900, she was working as a cook for a family in Mamaroneck, New York. For those wondering, that’s like two towns North of New Rochelle. A visitor to the house developed typhoid fever on September 4, 1900. It was assumed that he’d contracted it elsewhere, and Mary stopped work there not long after. She had been with the family for three years before this incident.
For eleven months spanning 1901 and 1902, Mary was a cook for a family in New York City. A laundress in the household came down with typhoid fever in December of 1901, and was admitted to Roosevelt Hospital. This is not to be confused with Riverside Hospital, which opened on North Brother Island in 1885, prior to which its function as a smallpox hospital had been served by the Renwick Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island, then called Blackwell’s Island.
In 1902, Mary started working at the summer house of lawyer Coleman Drayton in Maine. Two weeks after she arrived, on June 17th, a member of the household came down with typhoid fever, with another case following a week later. Before long, all but two members of the household had the illness. The only ones who did not fall sick were Drayton himself -- who was immune after having already had the disease previously -- and Mary the cook. Mary assisted Drayton in nursing the household back to help, and ever the grateful employer, he gave her a $50 bonus -- roughly $1,500 today.
Two doctors were called in to investigate the outbreak at the Drayton household, but no primary cause could be determined.
In 1904, Mary worked for the family of Henry Gilsey for nine months. When the summer season came around, the family spent the summer at Sands Point, and Mary and the servants followed them. Exactly one week after their arrival, the laundress fell sick with typhoid. Followed by “the gardener, the butler’s wife, and finally the butler’s wife’s sister.” The cases were confined to the servants’ house. The family thought that it must be something wrong with the house, and called in a doctor to investigate. The doctor decided that the first to show symptoms must be the culprit. The laundress must have picked up the disease elsewhere, though he could not quite figure out where.
The next family Mary worked for spent the summer in Oyster Bay. In the summer of 1906, six of the eleven in the household fell sick with typhoid fever. Two were hospitalized. No clear cause for the outbreak could be determined. Typhoid as a disease was usually brought on by some contamination or poor sanitation in the treatment of water or milk. It rarely affected the rich, and was all but unheard of in Oyster Bay, where no other household, generally getting their supplies from the same sources, got sick. Typhoid was not commonly known to pass directly from person to person. Once again, an expert was called in to investigate. This time, it was a sanitary engineer, who comes across very positively in this story, probably because I’m using his own first-hand accounts as my main sources.
George Soper had become known as a bit of an epidemic expert over the previous few years, especially in the area of typhoid fever. In 1904, he was called in to identify the source of an outbreak that had occurred the previous year in Ithaca. Upwards of 1,300 people were infected (roughly 10% of the local population at the time), and 82 died. Cornell University was the epicenter of the outbreak, and the hospitals were quickly overwhelmed as cases doubled each week. Soper was careful to note in his study that though the epidemic only officially lasted from January to April of 1903, the disease had almost certainly come to the campus several months before, and cases continued to pop up for at least a year afterwards.
Soper, George A., “The Epidemic of Typhoid Fever at Ithaca, N.Y.” Journal of the New England Water Works Association, vol. 18, no. 4, September 1904, p. 433
In his study, Soper identified the Ithaca Water Company as the likely source of the outbreak, “but it was evident,” he writes, “that the disease was being transmitted from person to person through carelessness and ignorance in nursing the sick.” He noted that two Cornell professors had previously reported to the board of health “that the water supply was polluted; and that the results of their analyses had been suppressed and kept from the public press by the board for fear of alarming the people… The result was that more time was spent in trying to fix the blame for the epidemic than in bringing it to an end.”
Soper became responsible for quashing several epidemics on behalf of the City and State of New York, and he attributes his success to the fact that he ignored the common knowledge at the time of how typhoid was transmitted through water, and instead modeled it as though it were a disease which could be directly communicated from person to person -- which, it turns out, it could be.
So with these credentials, he was called upon to investigate the outbreak at Oyster Bay. Though he was not the first investigator brought in. The first ones thought that, typhoid being known to be a water-borne illness, it would make sense to check the local water supply. Five water samples were taken from the house, tested, and found to be safe. Six more were taken from the local well to see if contamination could be seeping in through ground water, and again they came back clean. Still, the common knowledge prevailed, and it was assumed that somehow, someway, typhoid must have infected the water supply. When Soper was brought in, he first checked the work of the initial investigators, and found no mistakes in their methodology. He next ascertained that no one with typhoid had visited the house all summer, nor had anyone in the house visited away from Oyster Bay in the weeks preceding the outbreak, and therefore that the infection could not have been brought in from an outside source. He began to suspect the local soft clams for which Oyster Bay is famous, but quickly dismissed this theory, as no other household in the area seemed to be affected. He examined the history of the house, and learned that one case of typhoid had occurred there in 1901, but all traces of it were eliminated, and the house had been regularly occupied since with no recurrence until that outbreak.
Finally, Soper investigated if any changes had occurred within the household in the weeks preceding the outbreak. And it turned out that three weeks before the first case, the family had hired a new cook, who had come strongly recommended from her employment agency. This was Mary Mallon. She left three weeks after the outbreak, and her whereabouts were now unknown. She did not show any signs of disease.
Through independent investigation, Soper pieced together the timeline reconstructed above. He managed to confirm that Mary Mallon had worked for eight households over the previous ten years, and seven of them had come down with typhoid. The eighth household comprised only three older individuals who were likely to have caught the disease before and thus become immune.
Not long after leaving Oyster Bay, Mary took a job a little further out from the city in Tuxedo Park. She was with a family there for about a month. Two weeks after her arrival, a laundress was hospitalized with typhoid fever, and two weeks later, Mary left.
Soper finally tracked her down working for a family in New York City. In his 1939 account, Soper places the family in a house two doors from the church on the West side of 60th and Park. This detail is not present in either the 1919 account nor the publication of his findings in 1907. (In this earliest account, Soper is much more respectful of the privacy of all the people involved -- the only names used are those of the various investigating doctors.) At any rate, the church, built in 1883, is still there. The house has been replaced with a large apartment building.
By the time George Soper caught up with Mary on Park Avenue, another outbreak had already occurred, once again, within weeks of Mary’s arrival. A chambermaid fell sick on January 23, 1907, and was hospitalized on January 29. The daughter of the house’s owner fell sick on February 8 and died fifteen days later -- the first recorded death in all these outbreaks.
Soper interviewed Mary Mallon at this house and suggested to her that she might be the source of the outbreaks that seemed to follow her around. She was not very pleased with this insinuation, and, in the 1939 account (which is much more narrative than the 1919 and 1907 accounts), advanced at him brandishing a carving fork. The 1919 account puts it somewhat more amusingly, if also more vaguely: “My interview was short. It started in the kitchen and ended almost immediately at the basement door… My point of view was not acceptable, and the claims of science and humanity were unavailing.”
In the 1939 account, Soper admits that he “had made a bad start,” and did not adequately explain what his theory actually was -- or, more accurately, that he did not quite have a fully formed theory. He was convinced that Mary was somehow causing the outbreaks, convinced that she was not doing so deliberately, and had only to figure out how.
The obvious answer was that Mary was somehow infecting the food she cooked, but most of the time, the cook in a household would not come into contact with the food after it had been heated to pathogen-killing temperatures. The actual serving would be done by a butler. This would account for only the servants falling ill in the case at Sands Point, as the chef would be much more likely to come in direct contact with the post-cooking food of the servants.. Soper would later confirm that one of the cases had come about after Mary had served a desert of ice cream with cut-up fresh peaches.
At any rate, the encounter in the Park Avenue kitchen was the first of three interviews Soper had with Mary Mallon. For the second he was better prepared. He tracked her down to a tenement on 33rd and 3rd where she sometimes stayed with a friend and a dog, and brought with him a doctor for academic support.
This interview was no more productive, but was more revealing as to Mary’s side of the story: From her vantage point, typhoid was simply a common disease that popped up everywhere, from which most people ultimately recovered. She had no reason to suppose otherwise. She counted herself as lucky that she never got sick herself, and, being so lucky, could not only not be the cause of the disease, but, on the contrary, was singularly suited to take care of people who had caught it, as she had done in the 1902 outbreak. As far as being an asymptomatic carrier was concerned, such a thing was never heard of. (This was not true. Robert Koch had already figured out about carriers in Germany years prior, but the news apparently hadn’t made it to America.)
In the 1919 account, Soper says this of Mary: “[Her] position was like that of the lawyer who, on being told by the judge that the facts were all against his client, said that he proposed to deny the facts.” In the 1939 account, he is much kinder to her: “She denied she knew anything about typhoid. She had never had it nor produced it. There had been no more typhoid where she was than anywhere else. There was typhoid fever everywhere. Nobody had ever accused her of causing any cases or had any occasion to do so. Such a thing had never been heard of.”
Making no headway with Mary herself, and knowing that if she took another job, she’d be difficult to track down again until the next outbreak was already underway, Soper went to the New York City Health Department. Dr. Sara Josephine Baker went to try to get samples from Mary, but was just as unsuccessful as Soper had been.
Mary Mallon was arrested on March 19, 1907. Samples were unwillingly taken from her at regular intervals for six months following the arrest, and Mary was found to be an intermittent carrier -- the presence of bacteria in her stool would wax and wane, sometimes not being present at all before coming back weeks later.
It was after her arrest that Soper conducted his third interview with Mary Mallon. This time he (according to himself) took great care to explain exactly how bacteria do what they do, and how they spread from person to person. He asked about her history with typhoid fever. Whether she had ever come down with it at all, and how many outbreaks she had been present for. Mary was not forthcoming. He suggested that she might be released if she agreed to have her gallbladder removed, as that was believed to be the site of the infection. She was not too keen on that idea either. Shortly after, Mary was moved to quarantine on North Brother Island, where she lived in a house by herself, save for the company of a dog. (No word on whether this was the same dog who lived in the tenement on 33rd street.)
At this point, Soper published his findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He removed her name, but he needn’t have bothered. The newspapers were already running wild with the story of the cook whom they had dubbed “Typhoid Mary.” (Though the papers did give her last name as Ilverson.)
Dr. Walter Bensal claimed in a Washington Herald article (April 2, 1907) that Mary Mallon had become immune after she fell ill and recovered from a bout of typhoid fever six years previously. Note that by six years before this point (even allowing for a six-month margin of error) at least the first case that George Soper later uncovered had already occured. At any rate, no other authority seems to claim whether or not Mary had ever shown symptoms of the typhoid fever she harbored, whether six years previously or not.
Two years after her arrest (now 1909), Mary sued the city. Her lawyer made the case that she had been arrested and imprisoned without due process -- she had never even been accused of any actual crime, much less been fairly tried. The case was dismissed, with Justice Mitchell Erlanger saying they simply could not take the risk of releasing her.
In 1910, Mary was released from quarantine, gallbladder intact, on the condition that she super duper pinky promise to stop working as a cook, so as to avoid infecting anyone else.
At this point, Mary Mallon dropped off the map for five years.
So imagine my surprise when I see in 1913, in the middle of that period where nobody knows what happened to Typhoid Mary, an advertisement for a play, The Silver Wedding, about to open on Broadway, in which Mary Mallon is set to appear. In fact, she is a replacement for Florence Malone, about whom no more is said.
Now, I don’t suppose for a moment that this is the same Mary Mallon as the one who had been released from quarantine three years earlier. Clearly, this was a different woman with the same name who happened to be an actress. I searched the New York birth and death records from around the time period for the name “Mary Mallon” and found lots of Mary Mallons (Marys Mallon?) wandering around the city over the first few decades of the 20th century. A quick search on Facebook shows that the name is still at least somewhat common, and so this coincidence, though mildly amusing to stumble upon in the wild, devoid of context, is entirely meaningless.
Still, a mildly amusing coincidence it was, and I thought it would make for a cute little sidebar, in which I vaguely implied that during the five years during which Mary Mallon went off the map using various assumed names to avoid detection, she also brazenly played a leading role in a Broadway play under her own name, before revealing the gag. It struck me as an amusing notion that, perhaps Mary Mallon was Florence Malone’s cook, and when Florence contracted typhoid fever forcing her to drop out of the play, the only person who could replace her was her cook with whom she had read lines. That sounds like a charming plot for a musical comedy, right? Judy Garland as Mary Mallon, Gene Kelly as George Soper?
Well, I wanted to get some more information about this second Mary Mallon before I added that into the story, so I decided to start by looking for more articles about The Silver Wedding. Perhaps if other publications or reviews mentioned her, they might also mention something about her, perhaps just an additional credit I could use to start piecing together her resume. But the moment I look for more information about The Silver Wedding, all I can find are reviews from which Ms. Mallon’s name is conspicuously absent. In fact, every review which lists a full cast is missing her name, but does include the name Cecile Breton, who was not in the initial cast list I’d found from before the show had opened. I had two listings from The Sun in which Mary Mallon was mentioned as part of the cast, but then an article in The Theatre in which she was not. In addition, Harry McAuliffe, who was in the earlier listings, was not in the reviews, and no additional cast member was listed to make up for the number. So not only do the papers not agree on who was in the cast, they don’t agree on how many were in the cast!
For a brief moment, I thought I might have stumbled into some sort of copyright trap. Maybe back in the day theater reviews made up fake cast members in minor roles so as to catch plagiarists? But a bit more searching turned up independent records of actresses by the names Mary Mallon and Cecile Breton being active around this time. I even found a photograph of Cecile Breton from when she was appearing in Brewster’s Millions in 1907, around the time the cook Mary Mallon was first arrested. (Also in 1907, the other Mary Mallon was starring in The College Widow in Illinois.) The New York Public Library had photographs from the original production of “The Silver Wedding,” but not in a very high quality, unlabeled, and besides all that, I wouldn’t recognize Mary Mallon if I saw a photograph of her anyway.
In the hopes of getting my hands on a primary source from within the production itself, I reached out to people at Playbill, the NYPL, and the Internet Broadway Database (IBDB). I don’t know what method IBDB uses for compiling their data or if they’re reliable in any way, but the cast they list for the original production of The Silver Wedding has Cecile Breton, no Mary Mallon, and no Harry McAuliffe, so I figured at the very least I could ask where they got their information and maybe that would lead me to more sources.
Playbill informed me that their archives don’t go back that far. The NYPL said that they probably do have a Playbill from the original production in their archives, but access will obviously be somewhat limited for the foreseeable future. A few days later, I heard back from IBDB telling me nothing I didn’t already know. The NYPL did provide me with some additional newspaper clippings, the most valuable of which I found to be from issues of the New York Times, two days apart, the earlier (August 10, 1913) listing Mallon and McAuliffe in the cast, and the later (August 12, 1913), listing Breton in lieu of either. Evidently something had happened in a relatively short time frame that caused Breton to replace Mallon, and McAuliffe’s character to be cut. At any rate, that’s the best explanation I can come up with without something like correspondence directly from the people involved.
It does appear that Mary Mallon did perform in the pre-Broadway tryout in New Jersey.
In searching for more information about this elusive actress, I discovered in the real estate trades that around this time she seemed to be buying up several buildings on West 28th Street. Or, at least, someone named Mary Mallon was. I also found a Mary Mallon who had incorporated a hat company in 1896 along with her husband Edward. -- At least, an Edward and Mary Mallon incorporated a hat company, and an Edward and Mary Mallon who were involved in the hat trade were listed as married in the 1900 census. However, this Edward Mallon was born in 1858, and died in 1939. There was another Edward Mallon who was born in 1856 and died in 1910, and was also married to a Mary Mallon -- and they both lived in Yonkers. And neither of these Mary Mallons have birth and death years consistent with the “Mary Mallon of Yonkers” who died in a shooting in a pharmacy on April 3, 1923, in which Daniel Healey, the pharmacist, was also shot, and coughed up the bullet just in time for it to be admitted as evidence in the trial. This Daniel Healey, at least, does seem to be the same Daniel Healey who graduated the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy in 1899. In February of 1903, a Mary Mallon caught on fire in a tenement on 28th street, which could plausibly have been owned by Real Estate Mary Mallon (who had started buying buildings in this area by this point), but probably wasn’t. In any event, I think I can confidently say that none of these Mary Mallons (Typhoid Mary, Stage Mary, Real Estate Mary, Hat Mary, Pharmacy-Shooting Mary, and Spontaneously-Combusting Mary) are the same as the racehorse by the name Mary Mallon who was also active at this time.
(Note: I will admit to having taken a liberty here -- Mary Mallon did not “catch on fire” in the tenement on 28th street. There was a fire, people caught on it, but Mary Mallon was actually the only person involved in that fire who didn’t catch -- no word on whether she asymptomatically spread the fire to others, but it seems unlikely.)
In short, things got really messy, really fast, and I now know an uncomfortable amount about a bunch of people named Mary Mallon who lived a century ago, and have no clue how many of them were the same people. I have compiled roughly fifteen years of credits for some actress named Mary Mallon between 1905 and 1920, but maybe there were two of them. Or three. The fact that none of the credits I’ve found overlap yet is promising.
I was down this rabbit hole for about a month before I remembered what I was originally there for. I don’t know if anything was accomplished in this diversion. Ultimately, I think what it proves is that there are a lot of people in New York, and a bunch of them have the same name, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise therefore that the only Mary Mallon most people care about was able to disappear so thoroughly after being released from quarantine.
Meanwhile, George Soper had not left the job of investigating typhoid outbreaks, and he was called upon in 1915 to investigate a particularly bad one. Over twenty cases had emerged in two months in the Sloane Hospital for Women. Twenty-five cases according to the New York Tribune (March 29, 1915), of which two were fatal. The hospital’s new cook was named Mary, and the staff had begun to jokingly refer to her as “Typhoid Mary,” alluding to the figure in the headlines of nearly a decade ago. Soper was not so amused by the joke, and was shown a letter in the cook’s handwriting, which he recognized as the hand of Mary Mallon -- and not the actress/homeowner/proprietress-of-hats/shooting-victim-to-be/fire-survivor/racehorse.
It turned out Mary still didn’t believe she was carrying any disease, and apparently she was really devoted to that live-in-cook life, because she went right back to it, under various assumed names. This would be bad enough on its own, but she could no longer find work with individual families (as the major employment agencies did not want to represent her), and so instead went to work for hotels and restaurants. It is impossible to say how many cases of typhoid fever she was responsible for during this period.
Mary Mallon was promptly tracked down, arrested, and, on March 27, 1915, brought back to North Brother Island. This time she was not released.
The New York Health Department suddenly got a lot more wary of asymptomatic carriers of disease. In the remainder of 1915, five additional carriers of typhoid were found, and in the first six months of 1916, twenty-two more joined them. (New York Tribune, August 28, 1916) In January of 1918, a symptomless carrier of meningitis was found. Everyone, even his nurse, was instructed to stay fifteen feet away from him while he was being treated. The case was expected to be treatable, but I could find no followup in the newspaper.
In March of 1919, one of the Mary Mallons made some money at the racetrack (perhaps on her namesake horse?), and another Mary Mallon continued to deal in real estate, this time with the middle initial ‘A’. A third Mary Mallon was blissfully unaware of the fact that in a little over four years, she’d be shot dead in a pharmacy. In July, George Soper’s second account of the story, and first full narrative, appeared in The Military Surgeon.
At the end of this account, Soper notes a change in Mary’s behavior as compared to her first arrest, as well as a change in the public’s perception of her -- a noticeable change over the course of the many newspaper clippings I read. From 1915 to 1919, Mary Mallon had made no further attempts to gain her freedom, and indeed, she would not for the rest of her life. Her former claim to have been wrongfully imprisoned now seemed feeble, as after she was released the first time, she immediately broke the one condition of her release, and knowingly endangered countless more people. “She had been treated fairly,” writes Soper. “She had been given her liberty and was out on parole. She had abused her privilege; she had broken her parole. She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly.” Your interpretation may vary.
Mary Mallon was demonstrably responsible for ten outbreaks of typhoid fever, fifty-one individual cases, and three deaths. The actual numbers are likely higher. In the 1919 account, Soper draws myriad morals from the case. Many about the ways in which disease spreads, but one in particular about human behavior: “The story of Typhoid Mary indicates how difficult it is to teach infected people to guard against infecting others. Mary had ample opportunity to know the danger which she constituted toward those whose food she prepared. She knew from being told, and she knew by experience… That she could have avoided spreading infection by obeying her instructions admits of no doubt. She knew that when she cooked she killed people, and yet she deliberately sought employment as a cook in a hospital. Why did she do this?”
This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
Two months later (May of 1919), George Soper published an article in Science, about the influenza pandemic which had recently killed a lot of people, to massively understate the case. If I were to quote highlights to you, I think I’d just reprint the whole thing here. I think it is incredibly interesting reading, in large part because Soper focuses less on the specific case of the 1918 pandemic, and more on the general case of why respiratory illnesses as a broad class, from the mildest colds to the worst flus, are difficult to control, and what we can do about them. Little has changed in terms of advice given, but the point most plainly stressed by Soper is that the people with the most power to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses are the people who already have them. He of course adds a note about asymptomatic carriers, concluding that “It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that of all the things which were done to stop the spread of influenza, nothing seems to have had any material effect upon it.”
“This may all seem very discouraging,” he continues, “but it need not depress anybody. The control of typhoid once seemed an impossible task. To rightly measure a difficulty is often the first step toward overcoming it.”
As far as I can find, George Soper did not write about Mary Mallon again until 1939, shortly after her death. At this point, he gave an account of the remainder of her life on North Brother Island. She was employed in the hospital laboratory, and paid for her work. After some time, she was permitted to go to the mainland and be a normal person in a crowd, so long as she returned at the end of the day, and didn’t handle anybody’s food while she was there. In 1932, she was paralyzed by a stroke, and subsequently cared for in the hospital. She died on November 11, 1938.
There seems to be some question as to whether an autopsy was performed. According to Soper, her wish to have her gallbladder remain intact was respected, and “there was no autopsy.” No more is said.
But plenty of sources do claim an autopsy was performed, and that they found typhoid bacteria still active in Mary’s gallbladder. I couldn’t find a primary source for this though, and, in fact, the most prominent source I could find claiming that an autopsy had been performed was a paper published in Annals of Gastroenterology in 2013, which claimed that “a post mortem revealed that she shed Salmonella typhi bacteria from her gallstones… Some other researchers insisted that there was no autopsy and that this was another urban legend, whispered by the Health Center of Oyster Bay, in order to calm ethical reactions.”
Quite a bold claim of conspiracy.
Curiously, the only source listed for this claim is George Soper’s own 1939 paper, which claims no autopsy, and makes no mention of urban legends. Also, the 2013 paper misspells Soper’s name as Sober. Virtually every other source I’ve looked at has cited one of these two papers, more or less parroting the same statements. Either an autopsy was performed and it found some sort of bacteria, or it wasn’t and didn’t. I have no idea where the “Health Center of Oyster Bay” came from. One source claims that the findings of the autopsy were published shortly after her death, but does not provide a citation. I could not find any such autopsy report, or, indeed any second-hand source that directly cites such a report. Only third-hand sources citing the 2013 paper. I can’t even find any indication of an organization called the “Health Center of Oyster Bay” ever existing. Anything that references such an organization is simply quoting the aforementioned 2013 paper.
About two weeks ago, I emailed the journal in which the paper was published, asking for clarification. I have not heard back. I would like to assume sloppiness combined with an unfortunate instance of citogenesis.
I did find one source which claimed an autopsy had occurred that predated 2013. An article on the website The Straight Dope. Not exactly a reputable academic journal, but the article was dated to 2000, and using the Wayback Machine, I confirmed that it claimed an autopsy had been performed on Mary Mallon at least as early as 2008, which proves that someone somewhere prior to 2013 had made this claim. The article was edited in 2018, to say that the previous version of the article was wrong, and no autopsy was performed. A publication acknowledging its mistakes is always a good sign, and I emailed The Straight Dope asking if they could help me by telling me what source they had that initially claimed an autopsy had been performed, and what source they found later to correct it. I received an email back essentially saying that if the sources aren’t listed in the article itself, they’re lost to history.
I also reached out to the NYPL again, and, ever helpful, they got back to me with lots of sources, though nothing that really talked about whether an autopsy was performed. They did, however, track down for me Mary Mallon’s death certificate, which has a noticeably blank section where information about an autopsy would have been written. The death certificate also lists her birthday as September 23, 1869.
The researcher at the NYPL who got back to me expressed their opinion that, if the death certificate did not fill in the autopsy section, and no contemporary obituaries mention a post-mortem, and George Soper, who was directly involved in the case, says there was no autopsy, then there was probably no autopsy. I’m inclined to agree. It is still somewhat gnawing at me though that I do not know when, how, or why, the rumor that there was one got started.
So I get to the end of the story of Mary Mallon (the cook), and… I don’t know if anything new was learned here. But I found it a compelling experience to dig through all these old newspapers and learn about the many Mary Mallon. A reminder that the household idiom and frightening moniker “Typhoid Mary” did originally refer to a real person who had real motivations and undertook real actions that, through no malice of her own, harmed other real people. And now I have a story to tell whenever I pass that church on 60th and Park. (Which, admittedly, isn’t often, but maybe I could divert myself that way the next time I go to the dentist.)
This, by the way, is a real-life instance (for the people who are not Mary Mallon) of the classic trolley problem. Do you take action, violate Mary's civil rights and imprison her without due process? Or do you remain passive and let her continue to infect and endanger countless others? There aren’t really any good options here. This became a no-win situation the moment typhoid bacteria decided to lodge itself in Mary's gut. Microbes don’t care about your petty ethical thought experiments.
The moral, if there is one, is one I think we have all learned very well by now, and is phrased wonderfully by George Soper in his 1919 paper on influenza:
“It is an epidemiological point of great interest that the kind of preventive measures which must be taken in order to control the respiratory infections devolve upon the persons who are already infected, while those who are liable to contract the disease can do little to protect themselves. The burden is placed where it is not likely to be well carried.”North Brother Island has been abandoned now for over fifty years. The remains of the hospital are still there, but the island has been designated as a bird sanctuary, and access is tightly restricted to those with compelling academic reasons to visit, as well as completely forbidden for six months of the year to avoid interfering with the birds’ mating season.
Much thanks to the researchers at the NYPL and the archives provided by the NYPL, Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and assorted medical journals, for indulging this far-too-deep rabbit hole. Libraries are truly awesome, and the people who work there make them so.
I’ve decided to pull the plug at this point and resurface, even though I still don’t know what happened with the Excelsior Hat Company. Continuing to try to find out probably wouldn’t be good for my mental health.
***
Bibliography:
- Soper, George A., “The Work Of A Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor.” Journal Of The American Medical Association, vol. 48, no. 24, June 1907, pp. 2019-2022
- Soper, George A., “Typhoid Mary.” The Military Surgeon, vol. 45, no. 1, July 1919, pp. 1-15
- Soper, George A., “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 15, October 1939, pp. 698-712
- Soper, George A., “The Epidemic of Typhoid Fever at Ithaca, N.Y.” Journal of the New England Water Works Association, vol. 18, no. 4, September 1904, pp. 431-461
- “Typhoid Mary In Court”, The Sun, vol. 76, no. 303, June 30, 1909, p. 3
- “Typhoid Immune Gives Fever To 38”, The Washington Herald, no. 177, April 2, 1907, p. 1
- “Typhoid Mary Asks Her Freedom”, The New York Tribune, vol. 69, no. 22,872, June 30, 1909, p. 2
- “Has New York Many Walking Pesthouses?” The New York Tribune, vol. 69, no. 22,876, July 4, 1909, p. 5
- “Typhoid Mary Stays,” The New York Tribune, vol. 69, no. 22,889 July 18, 1909, p. 4
- “Typhoid Mary Reappears,” The New York Tribune, vol. 74, no. 24,970, March 29, 1915, p. 8
- “Poultry ‘Trust’ Hit, While B. R. T. Plans Car Ordinance Test -- Typhoid Mary Isolated”, The New York Tribune, vol. 74, no. 24,972, March 31, 1915, p. 3
- “Typhoid Mary Has Very Potent Germs”, The Sun, vol. 82, no. 214, April 2, 1915, p. 7
- “The Carrier Problem”, The New York Tribune, vol. 76, no. 25,488, August 28, 1916, p. 5
- “Meningitis at Camp Traced to Lone Soldier”, The New York Tribune, vol. 77, no. 25,989, January 11, 1918 p. 7
- Marineli, Filio et al. “Mary Mallon (1869-1938) and the history of typhoid fever.” Annals of Gastroenterology, vol. 26,2 (2013), pp. 132-134.
- Altman, Lawrence K. “Making The Right Call, Even In Death”, The New York Times, July 1, 2013
Nicely done. A tangential question: You refer to Riverside Hospital. This was the name of the institution on North Brother Island, which was built to take the place of the smallpox hospital on Blackwell's island. Am I correct in saying that the smallpox hospital on Blackwell's Island was not called Riverside Hospital. I have always known it as the Smallpox Hospital or the Renwick Smallpox Hospital.
ReplyDeleteNatan Zamansky You are correct. I sacrificed clarity and accuracy for trying to make a quick aside flow more nicely, coupled with the fact that that was not the section of the rabbit hole I was most particularly focused on, and I have gone back and fixed that paragraph. The hospital on Blackwell's Island was the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, and it was not literally transferred to North Brother Island as Riverside Hospital, but rather stopped being used for smallpox, and so the smallpox quarantine site moved to Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island. The function of the hospital (as well as patients within it) moved locations, the actual institution did not.
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