It was an ordinary day. Just picked up my free copy of "The Fishwrapper." The publication is printed by Little Mountain Printing and is given, free of charge, to all shoppers whom may care to read them, at my local Stauffer's Supermarket. The lead story headline read, "The Story of the Innocent Killer." Had me guessing all the way home, until I had the chance to sit down and read the lead story. Story I had heard about many times, but never read for myself. Thought I would share it with you today, since I'm almost sure that you may have heard the story before, but not the same version of the story. Story title read.....
"The Story of the Innocent Killer," by Madelyn Carlisle.
She was America's strangest prisoner. For though she spent twenty-six years in forced home isolation, she was never accused of any crime, never given a trial by jury, never sentenced by a judge. Yet, her name struck terror in the hearts of millions of New Yorkers. Not her real name, which was Mary Mallon, but the dreaded one by which she came to be known -- Typhoid Mary. Perhaps Mary Mallon might have lived her life in obscurity and deadly freedom, if sanitation engineer George Soper hadn't undertaken one of history's greatest feats of medical detection. Young Soper, a lean, serious-faced scientist, had a burning hatred of typhoid fever, a course that killed thousands annually in the early years of this century. In January, 1906, he was called to a house on Oyster Bay, Long Island. The summer before, typhoid had stricken six of the occupants. Yet no one else in the community had been affected. Mr. Soper's patient investigation revealed that the typhoid had not come from anything in the house, nor from any food, water, or milk that had been brought in. No one in the household had been exposed to any known case of typhoid. The baffled Soper was forced to admit that none of the ways in which typhoid was thought to be transmitted could count for the outbreak. As he puzzled over the mystery, he recalled a controversial lecture given by the great German scientist, Robert Koch, who had startled his colleagues by announcing that typhoid bacilli could be carried by persons who did not themselves have the disease. A carrier! Soper eagerly ran down the list of people who had occupied the house. A name and date in his penciled notes stopped him: Mary Mallon. Cook. Hired August 4, Not taken ill. He asked her employer, who had survived the epidemic, what she knew about Mary Mallon. Well, she was a large woman, very healthy looking, and quite competent. She had been hired through a New York employment agency for domestics. The agency gave Soper a list of names and addresses where Mary Mallon had worked. Carefully he copied it, and the next day set out for the first place, a family in Mamaroneck who had employed Mary Mallon for a short time in 1900. Yes, the lady of the house did remember a cook by that name. She hadn't stayed long because a houseguest had come down with typhoid. With growing excitement, Soper hurried to the office of a lawyer named Drayton. Drayton well remembered the terrible summer of 1902. There had been an outbreak of typhoid in his summer home at Dark Harbor, Maine. Everybody in the house had been stricken except he himself, who was immune due to a previous illness, and the cook. "Don't know what I'd have done without her." Drayton said. "She worked side by side with me, nursing the sick." In gratitude he had gotten her a fifty dollar bonus. He would gladly have hired her in New York, but she had found other employment. As he paid a dozen more visits, the record grew in horror. Wherever Mary Mallon had worked, people got sick. The facts were incontestable. Where was Mary Mallon now? The trail stopped at a home in Tuxedo where, true to form, typhoid had struck. Finally, through a letter to a former employer, he picked up the trail again. Two weeks earlier, Mary Mallon had gone to work at a home on Park Avenue in New York. Soper hurried there, intending to give a grim warning. He was too late. A child already lay dying of typhoid. Soper went straight to the kitchen where a woman was bending over the stove. "Mary Mallon?" For one moment, his faith in his conviction wavered. It seemed preposterous that this healthy-looking woman possessed the ghastly power to carry death. Then he remembered the mourning mother upstairs and started talking. Mary Mallon went rigid with fright. It was like a nightmare, the things he was saying. Typhoid! Hadn't there been typhoid wherever she went? Think back, Mary Mallon, think back. Her big red hands went to her throat. You carry typhoid. "No." It couldn't be. You work hard all your life, from a poverty-stricken childhood on. You like to cook. You do a good job. Your employers recommend you. And now, this stranger is telling you this terrible thing. When you cook, you kill. Remember the house in Oyster Bay, the house in Park Harbor. "No, I didn't make them sick. I helped them. I nursed them. I have done nothing wrong." Think of this house; of the girl who is dying. The words went on and on, telling her this dark and awful thing that could not be. Wild-eyed, Mary Mallon seized a great carving fork and lunged. George Soper ran. When he went to talk to her again, the result was the same. She flew into a rage and drove him away. Soper had to make a decision. Up to this time he had been on his own in this search for living proof of Dr. Koch's theories. Now it was plain he needed outside help. New York Health Department authorities listened to his stange story, first with skepticism, then with shocked conviction. "All right," the Commissioner said. "What do you propose to do about Mary Mallon?" Super shrugged. "What can we do? If she won't listen to reason, we'll have to lock her up. She's a walking culture tube." "But it's unprecedented!" the Commissioner protested. In the end, however, he reached the same conclusion. So one morning policemen came to the house on Park Avenue. A Health Department doctor rang the bell. Looking out a window, Mary saw the policemen and knew why they were there. She ran down a long, dark hall and out into the little backyard where a high wooden fence faced here. Frantically, her strong arms pulled her up and over. She dropped in a pile of snow on the other side. She climbed another fence, saw a small shed, jerked open the door and sprang inside. She stood panting there in the darkness, her heart pounding. Later, she heard the crunch of footsteps on the snow. Her calico dress, caught in the door, had revealed her hiding place. Tests proved that Mary Mallon was exactly what Soper said she was -- a waking culture tube. The typhoid bacilli, swarming on her hands, contaminated whatever she touched. After that, for Mary, it was a succession of doctors asking questions, watching her, writing notes, talking, studying her. Reporters came to get her life story. Mary Mallon, the obscure cook, was suddenly famous, and the subject of controversy. Did the Health Department have the right to hold her a prisoner against her will? Indigent readers wrote letters to newspapers. Lawyers discussed the matter in ponderous legal terms. Medical men searched for precedent in the quarantine rules. Among Mary's visitors was a lawyer named George Francis O'Neill, as indignant at her imprisonment as Mary herself. "It's not legal," he reassured her. "I'll get you out. I'll carry it to the Supreme Court." Through one court after another, O'Neill argued the case. "Unconstitutional!" he cried. "Imprisonment without due process!" Finally, the New York Supreme Court ruled. The good of society must come first. Through the case was strange and the action regrettable, it was right that a public menace be imprisoned. Doctors now believed that the gallbladder was the home of the typhoid germ. If Mary Mallon would submit to an operation to have hers removed, it would probably put a stop to her tragic affliction. Doctors argued with her, but it was of no use. After that they moved her to Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the East River. A bungalow once occupied by a superintendent was turned over to Mary. She lived there, alone. She talked to no one, not even the nurse who brought her food, still refusing to believe that she was a carrier of death. Later, in a changed administration of the Health Department, she found allies, who felt that she should not be kept prisoner. If they released her, would she promise she would report regularly and never again cook for other people? Mary promised, and left North Brother Island, bitterly insisting that all the awful happenings were coincidence. Her resentment was not against nature, which had given her a strange affliction, but against the doctors who had found it out. Months went by and her feeling that she had been unjustly dealt with was at the boiling point the day she usually rerouted to Health Department authorities. She started toward the office, and then suddenly turned around and hurried back to her room. Hastily she threw her clothes into a cheap suitcase. A few hours later, she signed her name as Marie Breshof in a dingy downtown hotel. Under that name she got work as a cleaning woman. At first, she was terribly afraid that the authorities were going to find her. She trembled whenever she saw a policeman. She moved several times, changing her name each time. Then she began to feel that she had escaped. However, life was not dealing kindly with her. She hurt her hand, and when an infection set in, she was afraid to go to a doctor. She lay in her room for days, tortured by pain. At some point, she began to blame her troubles on the fact that she was doing uncongenial work, not the cooking she liked. Restaurant jobs were easy to get. She felt that her chances of detection were small now. And she still believed the doctors were wrong. So one day she got a job as second cook in a restaurant. After several weeks, there were no reports of typhoid among fellow workers or the diners. Nevertheless, she quit and changed her name again. After that she got a succession of cooking jobs, never staying in one place very long. For five years, she lived this strange, haunting existence. Then it happened. At a Broadway restaurant where she had worked for two weeks, typhoid struck. Mary fled, but there were headlines. A cook was suspected of being a carrier. From the descriptions of her, it might be the long-missing Typhoid Mary. The city was terrified. Mary Mallon walked the streets, jobless, afraid to apply at any restaurant. Then she saw a help wanted advertisement that gave her an idea. There was one place they would never look for her! A few weeks later, a telephone call came to George Soper from Dr. Edward Cragin, attending obstetrician and gynecologist at the Sloane Hospital for Women. "We have an ourbreak of typhoid," he said. "Twenty-five cases. Very serious." "Typhoid Mary?" Soper asked. "We have a woman working in the kitchen here who might, just might be Mary Mallon. You knew her well. Could you identify her?" "Easily," Soper said. Mary Mallon did not resist when they came for her this time. Back at her little house on North Brother Island, she lived a quiet, uncommunicative existence. As time passed, she turned to the faith that had never had strong ties for her before. A new calm came to her. And from then on, she seemed resigned. Life flowed by Mary Mallon, one of the most famous figures in the annals of medicine. And as the years went on, doctors learned much of typhoid. They found how to deal with carriers, not by imprisoning them, but by careful registration and guidance so that they might live with their odd affliction. Almost all danger can be avoided if carriers are forbidden to handle food, deal with children, and nurse the sick, and if they are required to report regularly for medical examination. With carriers under control, typhoid outbreaks have decreased, and this in turn has made the task of spotting new carriers far easier. The memory of Mary Mallon is not easily forgotten. In time, Mary was permitted to take all-daytrips unescorted. But, she no longer hoped for freedom. The rest of her life would be a penance for the known fifty-one people--no one really knows how many--to whom she had brought sickness and death to three of them. Mary Mallon died in 1938. She was, said George Super, "a character apart...strangely chosen to bear the burden of a great lesson to the world."
I'm sorry for the rather lengthy story today...but, I enjoyed it so much when I first read it that I just had to share it with you. Perhaps you had heard the story before. Typhoid is as scary today as it must have been back then. What an awful disease. Here's hoping there are no other Typhoid Mary's around any more! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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