The Tragic Tale of Typhoid Mary

Join Kelli as she goes over the history surrounding Typhoid Mary. We'll go beyond the typhoid-laden peaches and fresh ice cream! When we take a step back and look at her whole story in context, we get a different view of what it must have been like to be "Typhoid Mary," a strong, no-nonsense, Irish immigrant making a living as a cook in NYC and surrounding areas. 

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Chapters

• 0:28 Intro
• 3:43 Historical Context
• 7:06 Scientific Context
• 11:10 The Peach Ice Cream
• 17:53 Mary Mallon Imprisoned
• 34:39 Temporarily Free
• 41:14 Conclusion
• 43:22 Outro

Transcript

The Tale of Typhoid Mary
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.

I took an extended break away from the podcast, and it feels good to be back! I’ve decided to simplify things a bit and just stick to making pod episodes, not whole videos. I’m taking a note from philosopher Lao Tzu in his writings on Daoism - things are often stronger and more powerful in their simplest, most unaltered state. So a podcast that’s… just a podcast. And my episodes may not come out every other week anymore, but I’ll do my best. Quality over quantity, right?

In today’s story, I want to go back to my wheelhouse and talk about disease. Let’s talk about Typhoid Mary.

Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant who found work as a cook in and around New York City in the early 20th century - that’s the 1900s. Though by all accounts she kept a clean kitchen and was a strong and healthy woman, she was a carrier of typhoid, a bacterial infection caused by the Salmonella Typhi bacterium. 

But Mary Mallon, though her gallbladder was riddled with typhoid bacteria, was asymptomatic. In fact, she was a healthy carrier - she could spread the bacteria despite not being sickened by it herself. And for at least the first half of her life, she didn’t even know she had it.

A lot of people know about the story of Typhoid Mary, and they joke about her deadly peach ice cream. A handful of you who follow me on Instagram managed to guess the subject of this episode just from me mentioning I was writing one on food and disease. And that just goes to show you that Mary Mallon, more insidiously known as Typhoid Mary, is a household name. 

But in today’s episode, I don’t want to just rehash the story of how Mary Mallon didn’t wash her hands and spread typhoid fever to a bunch of her employers, killing at least one of them. I mean, we’ll start there of course, and we’ll talk about Typhoid and how it impacts you, all that usual context we do here at the APHOUT podcast. 

But if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, the historical context - which you know I love to do! - the tragic tale of Typhoid Mary is about the changing medical world in the late 19th, early 20th century, the battle between public health and personal freedom, Irish immigration to New York and the xenophobia that came with it, and even the subversion of the expected and traditional gender roles. And in fact, we can draw some similarities between Mary Mallon and other slighted women throughout history, and honestly the first example that comes to mind are the first three accused women in Salem - Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne.

Typhoid Mary is more than a story about peach ice cream and germs. And in today’s episode, I want to explore how her story fits into the early 20th century and a world on the cusp of change.

We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started!
Historical Context
First, as we normally do here on the APHOUT podcast, we’ll start with some historical context. How does Mary Mallon come to be a cook in New York, and why typhoid and not, say, influenza? Malaria? Cholera? Scarlet or Yellow Fever?

We’ll start with a brief history.

The Irish Potato Famine was at its peak between 1845-1849, and the worst of it was the winter of 1846-1847. Come to think of it, the winter of 1846 was rough for a lot of people… that’s the same year the Donner Party got stranded in the Sierra Nevadas and the same year the Franklin Expedition got stuck in pack ice. And for all three things - the Potato Famine, the Donner Party, and the Franklin Expedition - some of those in desperation resorted to cannibalism for survival.

I’ve done episodes on all three of those things, so go listen to them if you haven’t already!

Now as a result of the Irish Potato Famine, and a combination of other factors, we saw a massive wave of immigration to the United States in search of a better life and more opportunities. I mean, the Irish certainly weren’t going to move en masse to Great Britain - they were the enemy, and the real architects of the famine. And the Brits had just an awful bias against the Irish people. So, many of them came to America instead. The initial surge happened between 1845 to 1855 because of the famine, but a second wave of immigration lasted into the mid-20th century, that’s the mid-1900s. Mary Mallon was one of them; she came to the US alone in 1883, lived with an Aunt and Uncle until they died, and got a job working as a cook for wealthier families.

More than 80% of Irish-born women working in America were domestic servants by 1906. Depending on their position and employer, most earned roughly between $16 a month. Was that a lot? No. No it was not. And I’m just talking about female Irish domestic workers here.

A 1906 document by John A. Ryan titled Concrete Estimate of a Living Wage put out an estimate that families - husband, wife, children - needed at least $1000 a year. From the male’s salary or wages, of course. Most married women were just in the home, raising the children.

So for immigrant women like Mary Mallon, who was unmarried, without children, and starting over in a new country, $16 a month would not be nearly enough to survive, let alone get ahead. Domestic servants would typically live in the home where they worked, at least for the richer families, so at least room and board would be covered. But some positions paid more than others. And Mary Mallon made significantly more than the average as a cook. She earned approximately $50 a month working for affluent families.

But unfortunately for Mary, there were two things working against her - there was a typhoid outbreak happening in New York City in 1906, and she was a healthy carrier and didn’t know it.

So let’s learn a little bit more about typhoid before we get into the quintessential story of Mary Mallon and the peach ice cream.
Scientific Context
As I briefly mentioned in the intro, typhoid fever is a bacterial infection caused by the Salmonella Typhi bacterium. And just a quick note - this is different from the bacteria that causes Salmonella, or salmonellosis, the food poisoning you can get from eating raw or undercooked poultry, eggs, unpasteurized milk… it’s not pleasant.

But unlike salmonellosis, which is usually just limited to your gastrointestinal system, Salmonella Typhi bacteria can get into the bloodstream, spleen, liver, and even bone marrow. And in that way, typhoid fever is way more deadly.

Symptoms of typhoid fever include a high fever - sometimes as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 40 celsius; fatigue, headaches, nausea, abdominal pain, and either constipation or diarrhea. But for those of you who have listened to my other disease-focused episodes, you know that those are common symptoms of bacterial and viral infections - some of those things are your body's way of trying to fight off the germs. Typhoid fever can also cause a rash, which differentiates it from other more common bacterial infections. But because typhoid fever can spread through the blood to other organs, it’s especially deadly. 

If the bacteria do too much damage to the intestines, they can cause severe bleeding (which of course you’d notice as bloody, loose stool) or even perforate the bowels, which will lead to sepsis. If the infection spreads to the lungs, it can cause inflammation, which could lead to pneumonia. And if it travels to the membranes and fluid surrounding the brain, it could cause meningitis. To be fair, that’s a pretty rare complication, but it’s possible. My point is that unlike the other forms of Salmonella bacteria, Salmonella Typhi is especially heinous and deadly.

So how does it spread?

Well, this is where it gets a little gross. Salmonella Typhi bacteria shed in feces and urine. So you have to have had contact with an infected person’s feces or urine. And this typically happens when the infected has poor hygiene practices and doesn’t wash their hands properly after using the toilet, and then handles food. Or perhaps a water source is infected by contaminated feces or urine, and someone drinks from that water source.

In the modern day, we have antibiotics. Bacterial infection? Antibiotics. In Mary Mallon’s day, at least when she was first spreading typhoid fever around, antibiotics didn’t exist yet. But in 2025, if you have access to antibiotics and medical care, that should fix you right up. And remember to take the entire prescribed course so the bacteria don’t learn how to overcome it and become resistant to treatment! And those with typhoid fever in the modern era, while waiting for antibiotics to rid the body of Salmonella Typhi bacteria, are advised to wash their hands regularly and not prepare food for others.

And all of that is well and good. But unfortunately for some of her employers and their families, Mary Mallon was asymptomatic. She was a healthy carrier. And in a world before antibiotics and in the early stages of germ theory, hygiene practices in the kitchen weren’t as rigorous as they are today. And after Mary Mallon used the toilet, those pesky invisible typhoid fever germs were all over her hands.
The Peach Ice Cream
Most stories about Mary Mallon begin with her time cooking for the Warrens at a home they rented in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in the summer of 1906. Mrs. Warren needed a new cook after dismissing her old one, so she contacted a servant’s agency in Manhattan. They sent her Mary, a hard-working woman with good references. She was relatively tall for the time - 5’6”, broad, and strong - took pride in her appearance, and kept a clean kitchen. 

There was Mr. and Mrs. Warren, their four children (2 boys and 2 girls), and their five servants, including maids, a laundress, and a gardener. Mary would feed all 11 of them, every day. One of Mary Mallon’s specialities was homemade ice cream. And so, shortly after arriving at Oyster Bay, on a lovely summer day by the shore, Mary made ice cream for the Warren family and the other workers in the house. And in the heat of summer, a local orchard sold the most delicious juicy peaches. So Mary cut some up and folded them into the ice cream to make it especially tasty.

A couple of weeks later, 9 year old Margaret Warren fell ill. She was fatigued, had a headache, a fever that spiked to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and diarrhea. Soon enough, she was passing loose, bloody stool with a foul odor, and the maids in the home couldn’t bring her fever down. There wasn’t much to be done, other than to treat her symptoms and just wait, hoping for the best. Again, antibiotics weren’t around yet, and any other treatments - virtually just snake oil remedies - wouldn’t cure a bacterial infection.

Within a week of Margaret’s illness, others in the house got sick too. Mrs. Warren, her other daughter, two of the maids, and the gardener started coming down with the same symptoms. The Warrens left the Oyster Bay rental home and headed back to the Upper East Side in New York City where they lived, and luckily all survived. Mary Mallon did not come with them, and got a job elsewhere. Nobody else in the Warren family got sick when they returned home.

The Warrens suspected the drinking water. After all, the idea of germs in drinking water was a relatively new thing in the world of disease. Dr. John Snow in 1854 managed to trace a cholera outbreak in London to the contaminated public water pump on Broad Street, and though it took a while to convince scientists and public health officials, it led to a greater acceptance of germ theory over miasma theory - the idea that microscopic germs are what cause diseases, not foul air, or… the poor. I’ve done an episode on the London Cholera outbreak as well, so check that out if you’re interested.

Germ theory was more widely accepted by the scientific and public health communities by the beginning of the 20th century, but there were still lingering biases against certain communities for being hotbeds of disease. But still, families like the Warrens would have known that contaminated water can make you sick, so they assumed that’s what happened to them.

You know who wasn’t happy about any of this? The actual owners of the Oyster Bay house. To put it in 2025 terms - imagine you’re booking a house on Air BnB, okay? You’re booking a beach house for a long weekend maybe, and you’re looking through the reviews. Let’s say you find this big, beautiful house that you and a bunch of your friends or family members are going to rent and split the cost. But the reviews talk about how dirty it is, how there are bugs, or how there is mold all over the place and it got people sick. You’re not going to book that house, right?

Well the Thompson family owned the Oyster Bay home and they rented it out in the summer. They certainly wouldn’t want the reputation of having a typhoid-infected house. So what might have caused it?

WE know that it was Mary Mallon, a healthy carrier who cut up some fresh peaches and unknowingly transmitted it to her employers, their kids, and the other staff members. But they didn’t know that, right? So what were the other possibilities?

Well, by 1906, as I mentioned previously, germ theory was more or less accepted. Wealthy families like the Thompsons and Warrens would have been “in the know” so to speak, so they would have understood that germs could have spread through contaminated water or food sources. But their water tested clear.

Okay, how about food? This was the era of milkmen delivering milk to iceboxes in the morning - we’re talking pre-fridge America. Was the milk tainted, perhaps? Well, no. And as far as fresh fruit and veggies are concerned, they were clean too. Besides, nobody else in Oyster Bay was sick, so it wasn’t likely to be a food or water source shared by the community.

Maybe the Warrens brought it in with them? Mrs. Thompson likely didn’t think so. As one author wrote, quote,
Typhoid was not a common disease in wealthy Oyster Bay. It was associated with filth and with people who had careless toilet and hygiene habits. These things didn’t describe the Warrens, who surely had clean habits.

End quote.

This was beyond Mrs. Thompson’s investigative skills. The local health board declared it a mystery and moved on, since nobody else got sick. But Mrs. Thompson wanted answers. And so she was introduced to a Dr. George A. Soper.

Though he earned his doctoral degree from the University of Columbia’s School of Mines, he was a sanitary engineer who worked for the US Army Sanitary Corps. And he was passionate about epidemiology, and in particular, typhoid. And so, he came to the Oyster Bay home and did his own investigations. He also found no contamination in food and water. He even tested the outdoor cesspools and privies, and there was no evidence of infection there either. Soper ruled out the house. If it wasn’t the food, the water, the property, or anything in the community… then it had to come from a person. And it wasn’t long until he honed in on Mary Mallon.
Mary Mallon Imprisoned
I’ll cut out a lot of the chasing here, but Soper eventually catches up with Mary at her new place of employment - the home of a Mr. Walter Bowne on Park Ave in Manhattan. And by the time Soper found her, several family members were sick with typhoid. In fact, one was dying from it - 25 year old Effie. His plan? Talk to Mary, tell her his suspicions of being a healthy carrier, collect some blood, fecal, and urine samples to prove it, and then get her some help. I mean, I don’t know what help he thought he could give, as there weren’t antibiotics or medicines to definitively treat it… but he figured she at least needed to KNOW she was unintentionally making people very, very sick.

When Soper confronts Mary, he expects her to be calm, quiet, and submissive. After all, that’s how he thought women should act, especially domestic servants and cooks. Especially immigrant domestic servants and cooks. But Mary Mallon wasn’t a submissive woman - she was tall for the time, she was strong, and she was powerful. And she spat and cursed like a sailor. I like to imagine her as a Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen. She’d survived a lot by travelling to America on her own, living alone. She was battle-hardened. And George Soper was about to meet his match.

Here’s what he said of that initial meeting. I think it’s best to quote the main source here. As always, read between the lines for bias, right? Also, it’s important to note that he wrote this source more than 30 years after he first tracked her down. Quote:
I first saw Mary Mallon 32 years ago, that is, in 1907. She was then about 40 years of age and at the height of her physical and mental faculties. She was five feet 6 inches tall, a blonde with clear blue eyes, a healthy color and a somewhat determined mouth and jaw. Mary had a good figure and might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy.

*Okay hold on, quick interjection - what is this, a bad romance novel? If he starts coming up with weird metaphors for the way her body jiggles, I’m ending this episode.* **clears throat**

Those who knew her best… said Mary walked more like a man than a woman and that her mind had a distinctly masculine character, also.

I had my first talk with Mary in the kitchen… I suppose it was an unusual kind of interview, particularly when the place is taken into consideration. I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and I wanted specimens of her urine, feces, and blood. It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. I passed rapidly down the long narrow hall, through the tall iron gate, out through the area and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape.

I confessed to myself that I had made a bad start. Apparently Mary did not understand that I wanted to help her… Just exactly how she did it I didn’t know. I wanted to find out. No doubt her hands played a part in it. They became soiled when she visited the toiler, but whether from her urine or feces I had no way of knowing.

End quote.

So when I first read about this…confrontation? Showdown? between Mary Mallon and George Soper, I assumed he was exaggerating. I thought that perhaps he was just a little too rough and accusatory, and he made up the story about her lunging at him with a fork. But there were some corroborating stories from other sources later on in successive attempts at getting her to comply, from both male and female scientists, so I think perhaps Mary really was prone to lash out. I mean, fair enough. If someone walked up to you at your place of business and said “you’re making people sick, give me your poop so I can test it” I think you’d be pretty thrown-off as well.

After some back and forth between George Soper and the NYC Board of Health, Soper decided to find out where she went at night. Perhaps confronting her outside her place of employment would yield better results.

You can’t see my face right now, but believe me, I’m rolling my eyes.

Soper was convinced she was, quote, “a menace to public health,” And she came at him with a fork! The cheek. So now this was personal. He followed her to the squalid apartment of a Mr. August Breihof. Mary often brought him dinner and stayed the night. Soper disapproved.

The general expectation of women was that they should be chaste until they married, and then they were subservient housewives who reared children. Mary was… not this. She never married. She never had kids. She tried to stab Soper with a fork. And now, Soper learns she was sleeping over at a man’s house out of wedlock?! I mean, how dare she! And fine. I suppose the way Mary was living life was not what middle and upper classes deemed the standard at the time. It’s 1907 at this point. But Soper 100% let his judgment and bias cloud his actions.

Anyway. Want to guess how well this meeting went? Soper brought along a friend, for protection I suppose. So these two men are about to accost Mary Mallon outside the apartment of her man friend. Who, by the way, knew what Soper was planning - Soper boozed him up at a local bar and got his permission to wait at his apartment. But anyway. As you might guess… it didn’t go well.

Soper tried, once again, to convince Mary that he needed her blood, feces, and urine to confirm his theory that she was a healthy carrier. In fact, she’d be the first healthy carrier identified in the US, and Soper wanted that fame. He wanted to be the one who discovered her, so he could write books and papers and go on speaking tours. He’d be FAMOUS! So he NEEDED Mary’s, well, waste. And SHE was getting in his way.

Let’s read Soper’s own words again. I like to get my history straight from the source when possible. Quote:
I made an arrangement with Mary’s friend to meet her in [the apartment]... Mary was angry at the unexpected sight of me, and although I recited some well considered speeches committed to memory in advance to make sure she understood what I meant, and that I meant her no harm, I could do nothing with 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 then anywhere else. There was typhoid everywhere. Nobody had ever accused her of causing any cases or had occasion to do so. Such a thing had never been heard of. She was in perfect health and there was no sign or symptom of any disease about her. And she would not allow anybody to accuse her. Again I saw I was making no headway, so [we] left, followed by a volley of imprecations from the head of the stairs.

End quote.

I mean, I guess she didn’t try to stab him this time.

By this point, Soper is growing more sure of his conviction that Mary Mallon is a danger to society and needed to be taken off the streets. I mean, not only is she transmitting typhoid, but she is MEAN! And subverts the normal social expectations of women! How dare she, right? And so, Soper goes to the NYC Health Department and convinces them that she needs to be taken in by force and have the aforementioned samples taken without her consent. Let me quote again from Soper’s article, quote,

I called Mary a living culture tube and a chronic typhoid germ producer. I said she was a proved menace to the community. It was impossible to deal with her in a reasonable and peaceful way, and if the Dept meant to examine her, it must be prepared to use force and plenty of it. 

The Dept acted favorably on my recommendation. It would get the specimens peacefully, if possible, but if this was not possible it would get them anyway.

End quote.

Wow. A living culture tube and a chronic typhoid germ producer. That’s the most dehumanizing description about a person I’ve heard… this week.

A Dr. S. Josephine Baker was sent in with some cops to collect the samples. Dr. Baker also struggled with Mary Mallon, but with the police’s help - and I’ve read it took four cops - Mary was pulled off the street, shoved into an ambulance, and brought to the Willard Parker Hospital. Dr. Baker later said that it was, quote, like being in a cage with an angry lion.

The Willard Parker Hospital operated between 1885 and 1955. It was meant for studying and treating communicable diseases, like typhoid. I read a contemporary Times article about why it closed in 1955, and apparently it was because it did its job, and communicable diseases were going away. Thanks to antibiotics. It has since been demolished and is now an apartment complex on East 16th Street on the East River in NYC.

So you might be wondering… was any of that legal? It sure doesn’t SOUND legal to just… take someone off the streets without a warrant or probable cause. You know, violating people’s freedoms and rights. Remember, they didn’t have definitive proof yet that she carried typhoid bacteria. To most, she’s just a healthy looking woman and a good cook. Well, Soper was adamant that she was a public menace, a danger to herself and others. And they justified her abduction off the street using Provision 1169 of the Great NY Charter. Here’s what the text of that provision says. Quote:

It shall be the duty of said board of health to aid the enforcement of, and so far as practical, to enforce all laws of this state, application in said district, to the preservation of human life, or to the care, promotion, or protection of health; and said board may exercise the authority given by said laws to enable it to discharge the duty hereby imposed… the board of health shall use all reasonable means for ascertaining the existence and cause of disease or peril to life or health, and for averting the same, throughout the city.

End quote.

And though Mary Mallon had committed no crime, she was kidnapped, forced into a hospital, and cut off from the world. And when she inevitably used the toilet in her isolation cell, doctors came in and collected her urine and feces. They also took a blood sample without consent or a court order.

So did they find typhoid in Mary’s samples?

The urine was clean. But the fecal sample had what they called a “pure culture” of salmonella typhi, which meant that the typhoid was most likely hanging out in her gallbladder.

At some point in her life, whether she had symptoms or not, Mary contracted typhoid. Maybe it was back in Ireland. Maybe living in cramped apartments in the dirty NY tenements. Who knows. But at some point, she got infected.

In 3% of cases, the victim recovers and harbors typhoid for a few more months. Then it goes away.

But in less than 1% of those who get typhoid, it just… stays. It becomes a stalemate between the immune system and the bacteria, and salmonella typhi just hangs around, shedding in the person’s urine and feces. The host may never get sick again or show any symptoms, but they’ve got it in them and they are contagious. A healthy carrier. And that was Mary Mallon.

Soper, just to lord it over her, shows up at her hospital isolation room slash prison cell. Here’s what he wrote about that visit. Quote.
In view of her actions when arrested, she was regarded as a dangerous and unreliable person who might try to escape if given the chance. It was not an attractive or particularly comfortable room and there was no reason why a strong, active woman of forty who felt herself to be in perfect health should be contented with it. And Mary Mallon was not.

“Mary,” I said, “I’ve come to talk to you and see if between us we cannot get you out of here. You would not be where you are now if you had not been so obstinate… You say you have never caused a case of typhoid, but I know you have done so… I will tell you how you do it. When you go to the toilet, the germs which grow in your body get upon your fingers, and when you handle food in cooking they get on the food. People who eat this food swallow the germs and get sick. If you would wash your hands after leaving the toilet and before cooking, there might be no trouble. You don’t keep your hands clean enough.”

End quote.

To a woman like Mary Mallon - strong-willed, proud, and spitting mad - being told she wasn’t clean enough when she prided herself on that very thing didn’t go over well. Mary was then told that gallbladder surgery might cure her of the typhoid bacteria, but that was even more extreme. Mary thought that these people who have been harassing her, who kidnapped her, locked her away in an all-white isolation room, and took her blood, stool, and urine without consent, now want to perform surgery on her? Surely, they wanted her gone. They wanted to kill her.

It wasn’t a completely baseless fear. We know that’s not what the state was trying to do - they just wanted to stop the typhoid epidemic. But Mary thought, why does she need to be locked away and cut into for that to happen?

The news of Mary’s imprisonment at the hospital leaked to the press. A yellow journalism-style newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst, the New York American, reported on her story. She wasn’t named, but the story was now out there. Forget HIPAA and privacy - that didn’t exist in 1907. But in publishing this story, the city felt like it had to act. So they sent Mary to the Riverside Hospital quarantine facility on the North Brother Island in the East River. Mary was sent to live permanently in quarantine on an island, with no means of escape.

The Riverside Hospital at North Brother Island is closed now. It’s become a protected breeding ground for birds, particularly herons and egrets, though birdwatchers have also seen a variety of gulls and geese. But when it was in use as a quarantine island, Mary Mallon was given a small bungalow and a little dog to keep her company. Nurses and orderlies feared her and feared getting sick, so Mary had few friends. In her own words, quote, 
“Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only a dog for a companion?” 

End quote.

They tested her urine and feces regularly. Sometimes she’d be positive, sometimes negative. This made her an intermittent carrier - there was no telling when she would shed viruses, so she was unpredictable.

Could she have been freed in these early years? Maybe. Mary told a reporter for the New York World that, quote,
I have been told that all I had to do was to apply to [the health department] and promise to leave the State and live under another name and I could have my freedom. But this I will not do. I will either be cleared or die where I now am.

End quote.

She also could have gotten that gallbladder surgery, but she didn’t trust doctors. And even though antiseptics were around by this point - go listen to my episode on the Victorian Houses of Death for more information on that - antibiotics weren’t so there was a good chance she’d either die in surgery or from post-op infections. And it may not even work; she might have typhoid in other areas of her gastrointestinal system. So she never had that surgery. 

But things were about to change for Mary, because her full name and photo was about to be published to the world.
Temporarily Free
In June of 1909, the New York American published the following headline:
“Typhoid Mary” Most Harmless and Yet the Most Dangerous Woman in America. The Extraordinary Predicament of Mary Mallon, a Prisoner on New York’s Quarantine Hospital Island, Not Because She Is Sick, but Because She Breeds Typhoid Fever Germs and Scatters Them Wherever She Goes.

What a headline.

She was… furious. She was now outed as this plague carrying woman. Her reputation ruined. But the tone of the article was actually in her favor; the people opposed her dubious imprisonment. So much so that an attorney named George Francis O’Neill offered to represent her.

She went before the NY Supreme Court. They were impressed by her clean appearance and good health. And in preparing for court, Mary learned a few things.

Most importantly, she learned that other healthy carriers had been identified. A handful of men, some of whom had infected and killed more than Mary had. And all of them were free. Mary’s case was predicated on the idea that these healthy carriers were loose in the city - if the law couldn’t be applied equally to all healthy carriers, then why single her out?

It’s a fair argument. And one might hope in the US in 2025 she’d be freed from false imprisonment. And we would also hope those who captured her and locked her away would be charged with something.

But Mary’s case was dismissed. The Court said her detention was not illegal. She would stay in the custody of the Board of Health of the City of NY, quarantined and alone on North Brother Island. Their main argument was that they had to protect the community against disease.

The other healthy carriers could stay free, though.

Infuriating. Was it easier because she was already imprisoned? Was it because she was a woman? An immigrant? Was it because she subverted the traditional gender norms? Was it because she was difficult? We’ll never really have the answer to that, but clearly there was some discrimination here.

It’s a story as old as time, isn’t it? Of the many, many examples I can pull from, let’s think back to the first three women accused of witchcraft at Salem. Maybe it’s because it’s almost fall, and I’m currently drinking a pumpkin spice latte. So naturally my mind wanders to the witch trials.

Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne were targeted, in part, for being outsiders. They weren’t like the other good, pious, chaste Puritan women of the Salem community. Sarah Good was an impoverished widow, forced to beg the community for handouts. The others looked at her as an angry, ungrateful woman, but in reality, she was just a woman living on the fringes of a strict Puritanical society. Sarah Osborne was practically bedridden but had previously been scandalized when she married an indentured servant. And Tituba was a servant likely from Barbados.

People looked down on Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and as women who could potentially be witches because they were different. Outsiders, for a variety of reasons. They fit the typical descriptions of witches. They certainly weren’t seen as devout Puritan women, free from sin.

And so they were targeted for being different. For subverting gender and societal norms for how Puritan women should look and act. And the same thing happened here to Mary Mallon. She was angry, and rightfully so after being imprisoned, her very solid case refused in Court. To feel better, she wrote some very angry letters to George Soper, to S. Josephine Baker, and to the others she felt wronged her.

Public sentiment was in her favor. And eventually, surprisingly, in 1910, Mary was allowed to leave. The new commissioner of public health, probably swayed by public opinion, allowed her to leave the island. As long as she agreed not to cook, promised to take hygienic precautions to protect those she came into contact with, and reported monthly to the health dept.

And so Mary left. She did her monthly check-ins for a while. The news about Typhoid Mary died down, and it quickly shifted to other crises. Mary slowly faded from the public eye. She stopped going to her monthly check ins, but nobody really noticed.

Fast forward to January and February, 1915. 25 typhoid cases reported from the Sloane Hospital for Women in Manhattan - women and children were getting sick while they were already at the hospital for something else.

Resident typhoid expert George A Soper is called in to investigate.

And guess who he discovered working as the new cook. Mary freaking Mallon. A long story shortened and simplified - she was brought back to the quarantine hospital on North Brother Island. If she had any good will and public support before, she had lost it now. She knew she was a typhoid carrier. She was bright enough. She knew. She may not have accepted it, but she knew. And she also knew that by cooking, she could kill. But she got a job in the kitchen anyway. And not just any kitchen - a HOSPITAL. For WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

Mary never explained why she broke her terms and resumed work as a cook - under a different name. Perhaps it was just pay. She earned a lot more money as a cook than as a laundress. But she messed up, got more people sick, and was re-arrested and sent back to the island. And she would never leave North Brother Island again.

Sure, she made a life for herself there. She had a few friends. She had canine companions. She read the newspapers a lot and fumed as more and more male healthy carriers were identified - and were allowed to live freely. She got a job working for the quarantine hospital on the island, even interning as a lab assistant, learning about the fundamentals of lab work.

September 1932, Mary didn’t show up to work. She was 63. She was later found on the floor of her dark bungalow, having suffered a stroke. It was so severe that she was bedridden and hospitalized.

She died of pneumonia six years later, still bedridden, on November 11th, 1938.
Conclusion
The tale of Mary Mallon isn’t just the story of a woman who unknowingly spread typhoid because she prepared food and didn’t properly wash her hands. There’s a lot more to it than that. Sure, better hygiene would have helped. But this was a time when germ theory had only just been accepted by the masses, and working class women like Mary Mallon may not have known proper handwashing procedures. And because she was a strong-willed, proud woman, she wasn’t one to be told by doctors that she was dirty, that she was unhealthy, and that she was the reason people were sick and dying.

Her obstinance led to a rough and dubious arrest, which ended with her isolation in quarantine. She sat idly, reading about men who had the same issue she had, but allowed to live free.

George Soper and the others toured the country, speaking about Mary in conferences and workshops, calling her a “living culture tube and a “chronic typhoid germ producer.” She was turned into a monster - a living, breathing, harbinger of death. She was singled out. And even to this day, her name has a negative connotation.

Now of course I can’t agree with all of her decisions. Going back into the kitchen after years of isolation, knowing she was the reason people got sick, is unconscionable. But I cannot blame her for being angry and upset the first go around. Just because she’s a strong-willed woman, just because she resisted the men and women who wanted to collect her blood, urine, and fecal samples without consent, does that mean we should lock her up and throw away the key? She was a single, immigrant woman trying to survive in New York City. She distrusted scientists and doctors. And although other healthy carriers existed, she was the first found - and for that, she was vilified. And as a result, she was forced into quarantine, demonized by the scientific community, covered in newspapers, and made into the scapegoat for the entire typhoid outbreak in NY in the early 20th century.

And that is the tragic tale of Typhoid Mary.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things - it’s good to be back! My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and check out some of the other ones if you want more!
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