March 11, 2009 • 12 mins
Historians agree that Typhoid Mary really existed -- but who was she, and how did she come to infect so many people? Tune in and learn more about Typhoid Mary in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
They their family. Hey, Jane, you're probably well aware that
(00:20):
there has been a bit of a bug going around
the office. I think one of the major disseminators of
said bug is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should
Know podcast, and I've been urging him to go work
from home, but he has been very brave and valiant
and insists upon staying put in his cube. The dismay
of ros because the dismay of the rest of a
Thank goodness for disinfected hand soap and remember to wash
(00:43):
my hands every time, exactly know, high fiving Josh around
the fast days. And we're very lucky because in this
modern age, we understand that sicknesses are caused by these
itty bitty little microbes and bacteria that we can't see
with our eyes, but are very dangerous and sometimes dead
to our bodies. But civilization hasn't always had the luxury
(01:03):
of this knowledge. We're talking about a story that happened
around the turn of the century into the twentieth century
in New York City. Although the idea um scientists were
starting to get familiar with the idea of microbes like
you're talking about, it took a little bit longer for
the lay community to start, you know, wrapping their head
around around this and the idea of sanitation in order
to ward off those books exactly. And so while scientists
(01:25):
were able to grasp this concept, they couldn't very well
explain it and share the information with the lay people,
Like Jane was saying, So today, when you cook chicken
and you've been handling a raw cutlet you probably know
to wash your hands afterward, the same way that if
you use the bathroom, you would wash your hands after
that too. And this wasn't common practice even in turn
(01:48):
of the century New York City. People just didn't understand
that the consequences of not taking precautionary measures could result
in death. And this was a bad time for that
to happen because the city was struggling with a lot
of different sicknesses at that time, typhoid fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria,
and whooping cob The Department of Health in New York
City had its hands full and Typhoid is an interesting
(02:10):
disease where like you're saying, if you don't wash your hands,
is easily spread even if you cook the foods. Like
if you if someone who who is infected with typhoid
and touches food, it might be okay after the food
is cooked, um, but if it's not cooked and the
person who prepared the food is unsanitary, uh, then it
could easily spread the disease. And that's because typhoid fever
(02:32):
the bacteria that cause it, they're essentially dispersed through contaminated
food and contaminated water. And the scary thing about typhoid
fever is that it's a systemic disease. And basically that
means that it affects your whole corporeal being, not just
one organ, not just one body part. Your whole body
is going to fill typhoid fever. So the bacteria that
(02:52):
causes typhoid fever and there's your body. When you ingest
this contaminated food or water, then it spreads from here
intestines to your lymph nodes, your liver, and your splin
and as it's traveling throughout your bloodstream, the bacteria multiply
and you're not really aware at first that you have
full fledged typhoid fever. It manifests gradually through a high fever,
(03:15):
through weakness and delirium and very very strong belts of diarrhea,
and unfortunately, right before the diarrhea comes, constipation comes. So
you may think you're getting better when you're able to
use the restroom, but you're not. It's only going to
get worse. And sometimes these little rose thoughts appear, and
they're about a quarter inch big red splotches that show
(03:35):
up on your stomach and your chest. And interestingly enough,
children suffer less from the effects of typhoid fever than
adults do. And if you guys are worried and looking
at your hands, I'm wondering the last time you wash them? Um, Well,
you should do it anyway, you know, just to be safe.
But I think that recent figures show that less than
four hundred cases are reported in the United States per year.
(03:58):
And you can always treat typhoid fever with antibiotics, um
fluids through an ivy and electrolyte, and after about two
to four weeks should be gone. You should be good,
not so much a problem anymore. But it certainly was
in New York City around this time, and uh, during
this time, New York City as a whole wit was
struggling with it. But there was this one community that
had managed to to not get infected with it, and
(04:20):
that was Oyster Bay in New York. But suddenly it
was popping up. And so this well to do family
brought in uh this man named Dr George a soaper,
and he is an epidemiologist and a sanitation engineer, and
he's very familiar with typhoid as a disease, and he
was basically just the man to figure out what was
going on in this uh nice speech community. So he
(04:43):
goes in and he starts asking this family, you know,
what are eating habits? What's going on here? He starts
investigating the food supply, is like, are the water supplies
that getting tainted with the sewage? And it wasn't. He
investigated the oysters, as we mentioned it was Oyster Bay community,
so people thought maybe it was the oysters, and he said, no,
they're cooked, and the people who didn't eat the oysters
(05:04):
still got the disease. So what's going on here? And
so he zero in on the white staff and he
knew that it often came from unsanitary people and the
white staff. And he found out that one cook had
left the family a couple of weeks before he got there,
and a couple of weeks happens to be about the
incubation period for typhoid, so um, even if people had
just gotten sick, it still could have caused or come
(05:25):
from her. This girl's named Mary Mallon. That he started
investigating this cook, and he knew that it was possible
for people to carry this disease without suffering from the symptoms.
And so Mary might have been just this kind of
person because the family had dismissed her as an idea
because she she didn't have typhoid, she wasn't showing any symptoms,
but souper new that was still possible. And we should
(05:48):
mention that Mary Mallon was a pretty tough cookie. She
was an Irish immigrant born in eighteen sixty nine in
Ireland and came to the United States as a teenager.
And she came by herself, and once she arrived in
New York City, she lived with some family members, and
once she was established in New York City, she became
a very in demand cook for some pretty affluent families,
(06:10):
and as Jane was mentioning, she sort of left this
slimy microbial trail wherever she went because the families that
she was cooking for, these well to do families, were
getting sick. And we know that in these communities there
was a little bit more attention taken to sanitary measures,
and certainly their their homes and their surrounding yards would
(06:32):
have been a little bit cleaner than the main streets
of New York City at this good point. So it's
very strange to think, well, why are these families getting sick?
When the fingers point to Mary Mallen, that's right. And
so unfortunately, Mary had a tendency to not leave forward
forward addresses for um the places that she left, and
so Sober was able to go back um to places
(06:53):
that she had left families that she had worked for
before this family, and sure enough he found that they
two had been suffering for tight forward outbreaks. And after
that he was pretty convinced he needs to track down
Mary and test her for the disease. So he finally did,
and he approached Mary in the kitchen of where she
was working out at the time, and he tried to
explain it to her. Look like you you may not
(07:16):
suffer from symptoms of the disease, but you may still
carry it, and I need to test you for it.
And apparently, as the story goes, she did not take
this news lightly and she chased him out of the
kitchen with a carving fork. And who knows what bedside
manner this epidemiologist had, but basically he was going to
have to check her yurine and feces for traces of
the disease. So, um, I think Jane mentioned to me
(07:38):
before he might not have put it in a very
gentlemanly or delicate way. So one can understand that Mary
tough cookie there she was was offended. And we should
mention too that as a prized cook, one of her
specialties was peaches and ice cream. And um, I don't
know about you guys, but we eat ice cream cold
and my family we don't cook it. And one of
(07:59):
the best ways to destroy any symptoms of microbes from
typhoid fever is kicking food with with heat. But if
Mary was serving this dish up to these families, then
there's no chance that the disease could have been eradicated
by proper treatment of food. That's right, so that was
a really likely call for her ice cream, and peachees
that that's a good point, and also um, soaper is
(08:20):
is Uh. He knows that Mary is probably the culprit here,
but he can't prove it until he can bring her in,
and she's being very uncooperative. So he goes to the
New York City Department of Health and ask for reinforcements,
and he brings up all's evidence, and sure enough, they
give him a female inspector to go check this out,
along with police backup in an ambulance. So they come
(08:42):
and uh, the female and spect knocks on the door
with the policeman. Uh. Mary is actually the one who
opens the door. So she looks and she knows that
they're here to pick her up, and she flees. She
has the call to just she's not going to give
up under any circumstances, and she flees. And it took
about three hours for them to actually track her down
in an outside closet um and even on the way
(09:04):
over to the hospital, apparently the female inspector had to
sit on her because she was being so unrouying, and
at this time there wasn't a really effective way to
deal with people who had the disease or who were
carriers of the disease. So New York came up with
a solution in the form of a quarantine island. And
Mary was sent to one of these places, uh North
Brother Island, and she was made to stay there, and
(09:27):
she was told after a few years that she could
go back to living among society if she promised, promised, promised, promised,
she would not cook anymore. And here's where the story
takes an interesting turn, and you really have to think
about this in an ethical sort of way. Here's a
woman who's been sent against her will to live in
(09:48):
a quarantine island, and she doesn't have the disease. She
may not fully understand why she's there, and even from
Mary's letters, we know that she was treated almost like
in an animal and a lab. She wrote, I have been,
in fact a peep show for everybody. People would come
medical interns, doctors, sanitation workers and just stare at her
(10:08):
and try to figure out what was going on with her.
And she felt like she was on display for no
good reason. And when she returned to mainstream society again,
remember she emigrated to the United States, from Ireland. She
may not have had many tools, many trades. She turned
back to the one thing that she knew to survive,
and that was cooking, even though she had been forced
(10:29):
to promise she wouldn't do it. And that's really what
I think outrages people about this, the story. And it's
interesting when she was on the island, or by the
time she got there, the press had got in ahold
of this, which added to what you were saying. She
became a peep show in the whole public, especially in
New York City, really focused on this story. And there's
this fascinating illustration you can look at you google typhoid
(10:50):
Mary and look at images. Uh there's a fascinating illustration
of her cracking skulls into a skillet and it tells
the story of typhoid Mary like as if she were
intention only giving all of her victims typhoid. And so, yeah,
you're right, she went back to cooking at least after
a couple of years. We're not sure exactly what happened
to her within between when she was let go and
(11:11):
when she started cooking again, but we know that there
was an outbreak in a particular hospital and Dr soaper,
the same guy was asked to go in and investigate it.
In sure enough, he saw his old nemesis Mary working
in the kitchen. And this time, though she did go
kind of without a flight, she knew that the juke
was up. She did. And this is where history really
cast a discerning eye on the typhoid Mary story. And
(11:34):
for as many people in the press who dubbed her
typhoid Mary and made her out to be a murderer,
there were just as many who who looked a skier
with the story and wondered where where were civil civil
liberties in this case? Why was no one defending Mary
who was trying to stick up for her? And I
think that people look back at her as either a
villain and this murderer, or else someone who was unfairly
(11:56):
scapegoated for a disease that was plaguing in New York City.
So really it's up to you how you want to
conceive of typhoid Mary or Mary Mallen. I guess it's
a nicer way to refer to her, that's right. And
it's particularly important to me to uh to remember that
she didn't have the symptoms. So even if she like
saw the trail following her. She could have somehow convinced
herself she didn't have it. She didn't believe the doctors.
(12:18):
You may have just wanted to survive and keep on
cooking for that would measure. If you want any great
recipes or information on diseases and more about typhoid Mary,
be sure to visit how stuff works dot com and
if you have suggestions for us for future topics or
any feedback you'd like to send, send us an email
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
(12:44):
more on this and thousands of other topics because at
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
They their family. Hey, Jane, you're probably well aware that
(00:20):
there has been a bit of a bug going around
the office. I think one of the major disseminators of
said bug is Josh Clark from the Stuff You Should
Know podcast, and I've been urging him to go work
from home, but he has been very brave and valiant
and insists upon staying put in his cube. The dismay
of ros because the dismay of the rest of a
Thank goodness for disinfected hand soap and remember to wash
(00:43):
my hands every time, exactly know, high fiving Josh around
the fast days. And we're very lucky because in this
modern age, we understand that sicknesses are caused by these
itty bitty little microbes and bacteria that we can't see
with our eyes, but are very dangerous and sometimes dead
to our bodies. But civilization hasn't always had the luxury
(01:03):
of this knowledge. We're talking about a story that happened
around the turn of the century into the twentieth century
in New York City. Although the idea um scientists were
starting to get familiar with the idea of microbes like
you're talking about, it took a little bit longer for
the lay community to start, you know, wrapping their head
around around this and the idea of sanitation in order
to ward off those books exactly. And so while scientists
(01:25):
were able to grasp this concept, they couldn't very well
explain it and share the information with the lay people,
Like Jane was saying, So today, when you cook chicken
and you've been handling a raw cutlet you probably know
to wash your hands afterward, the same way that if
you use the bathroom, you would wash your hands after
that too. And this wasn't common practice even in turn
(01:48):
of the century New York City. People just didn't understand
that the consequences of not taking precautionary measures could result
in death. And this was a bad time for that
to happen because the city was struggling with a lot
of different sicknesses at that time, typhoid fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria,
and whooping cob The Department of Health in New York
City had its hands full and Typhoid is an interesting
(02:10):
disease where like you're saying, if you don't wash your hands,
is easily spread even if you cook the foods. Like
if you if someone who who is infected with typhoid
and touches food, it might be okay after the food
is cooked, um, but if it's not cooked and the
person who prepared the food is unsanitary, uh, then it
could easily spread the disease. And that's because typhoid fever
(02:32):
the bacteria that cause it, they're essentially dispersed through contaminated
food and contaminated water. And the scary thing about typhoid
fever is that it's a systemic disease. And basically that
means that it affects your whole corporeal being, not just
one organ, not just one body part. Your whole body
is going to fill typhoid fever. So the bacteria that
(02:52):
causes typhoid fever and there's your body. When you ingest
this contaminated food or water, then it spreads from here
intestines to your lymph nodes, your liver, and your splin
and as it's traveling throughout your bloodstream, the bacteria multiply
and you're not really aware at first that you have
full fledged typhoid fever. It manifests gradually through a high fever,
(03:15):
through weakness and delirium and very very strong belts of diarrhea,
and unfortunately, right before the diarrhea comes, constipation comes. So
you may think you're getting better when you're able to
use the restroom, but you're not. It's only going to
get worse. And sometimes these little rose thoughts appear, and
they're about a quarter inch big red splotches that show
(03:35):
up on your stomach and your chest. And interestingly enough,
children suffer less from the effects of typhoid fever than
adults do. And if you guys are worried and looking
at your hands, I'm wondering the last time you wash them? Um, Well,
you should do it anyway, you know, just to be safe.
But I think that recent figures show that less than
four hundred cases are reported in the United States per year.
(03:58):
And you can always treat typhoid fever with antibiotics, um
fluids through an ivy and electrolyte, and after about two
to four weeks should be gone. You should be good,
not so much a problem anymore. But it certainly was
in New York City around this time, and uh, during
this time, New York City as a whole wit was
struggling with it. But there was this one community that
had managed to to not get infected with it, and
(04:20):
that was Oyster Bay in New York. But suddenly it
was popping up. And so this well to do family
brought in uh this man named Dr George a soaper,
and he is an epidemiologist and a sanitation engineer, and
he's very familiar with typhoid as a disease, and he
was basically just the man to figure out what was
going on in this uh nice speech community. So he
(04:43):
goes in and he starts asking this family, you know,
what are eating habits? What's going on here? He starts
investigating the food supply, is like, are the water supplies
that getting tainted with the sewage? And it wasn't. He
investigated the oysters, as we mentioned it was Oyster Bay community,
so people thought maybe it was the oysters, and he said, no,
they're cooked, and the people who didn't eat the oysters
(05:04):
still got the disease. So what's going on here? And
so he zero in on the white staff and he
knew that it often came from unsanitary people and the
white staff. And he found out that one cook had
left the family a couple of weeks before he got there,
and a couple of weeks happens to be about the
incubation period for typhoid, so um, even if people had
just gotten sick, it still could have caused or come
(05:25):
from her. This girl's named Mary Mallon. That he started
investigating this cook, and he knew that it was possible
for people to carry this disease without suffering from the symptoms.
And so Mary might have been just this kind of
person because the family had dismissed her as an idea
because she she didn't have typhoid, she wasn't showing any symptoms,
but souper new that was still possible. And we should
(05:48):
mention that Mary Mallon was a pretty tough cookie. She
was an Irish immigrant born in eighteen sixty nine in
Ireland and came to the United States as a teenager.
And she came by herself, and once she arrived in
New York City, she lived with some family members, and
once she was established in New York City, she became
a very in demand cook for some pretty affluent families,
(06:10):
and as Jane was mentioning, she sort of left this
slimy microbial trail wherever she went because the families that
she was cooking for, these well to do families, were
getting sick. And we know that in these communities there
was a little bit more attention taken to sanitary measures,
and certainly their their homes and their surrounding yards would
(06:32):
have been a little bit cleaner than the main streets
of New York City at this good point. So it's
very strange to think, well, why are these families getting sick?
When the fingers point to Mary Mallen, that's right. And
so unfortunately, Mary had a tendency to not leave forward
forward addresses for um the places that she left, and
so Sober was able to go back um to places
(06:53):
that she had left families that she had worked for
before this family, and sure enough he found that they
two had been suffering for tight forward outbreaks. And after
that he was pretty convinced he needs to track down
Mary and test her for the disease. So he finally did,
and he approached Mary in the kitchen of where she
was working out at the time, and he tried to
explain it to her. Look like you you may not
(07:16):
suffer from symptoms of the disease, but you may still
carry it, and I need to test you for it.
And apparently, as the story goes, she did not take
this news lightly and she chased him out of the
kitchen with a carving fork. And who knows what bedside
manner this epidemiologist had, but basically he was going to
have to check her yurine and feces for traces of
the disease. So, um, I think Jane mentioned to me
(07:38):
before he might not have put it in a very
gentlemanly or delicate way. So one can understand that Mary
tough cookie there she was was offended. And we should
mention too that as a prized cook, one of her
specialties was peaches and ice cream. And um, I don't
know about you guys, but we eat ice cream cold
and my family we don't cook it. And one of
(07:59):
the best ways to destroy any symptoms of microbes from
typhoid fever is kicking food with with heat. But if
Mary was serving this dish up to these families, then
there's no chance that the disease could have been eradicated
by proper treatment of food. That's right, so that was
a really likely call for her ice cream, and peachees
that that's a good point, and also um, soaper is
(08:20):
is Uh. He knows that Mary is probably the culprit here,
but he can't prove it until he can bring her in,
and she's being very uncooperative. So he goes to the
New York City Department of Health and ask for reinforcements,
and he brings up all's evidence, and sure enough, they
give him a female inspector to go check this out,
along with police backup in an ambulance. So they come
(08:42):
and uh, the female and spect knocks on the door
with the policeman. Uh. Mary is actually the one who
opens the door. So she looks and she knows that
they're here to pick her up, and she flees. She
has the call to just she's not going to give
up under any circumstances, and she flees. And it took
about three hours for them to actually track her down
in an outside closet um and even on the way
(09:04):
over to the hospital, apparently the female inspector had to
sit on her because she was being so unrouying, and
at this time there wasn't a really effective way to
deal with people who had the disease or who were
carriers of the disease. So New York came up with
a solution in the form of a quarantine island. And
Mary was sent to one of these places, uh North
Brother Island, and she was made to stay there, and
(09:27):
she was told after a few years that she could
go back to living among society if she promised, promised, promised, promised,
she would not cook anymore. And here's where the story
takes an interesting turn, and you really have to think
about this in an ethical sort of way. Here's a
woman who's been sent against her will to live in
(09:48):
a quarantine island, and she doesn't have the disease. She
may not fully understand why she's there, and even from
Mary's letters, we know that she was treated almost like
in an animal and a lab. She wrote, I have been,
in fact a peep show for everybody. People would come
medical interns, doctors, sanitation workers and just stare at her
(10:08):
and try to figure out what was going on with her.
And she felt like she was on display for no
good reason. And when she returned to mainstream society again,
remember she emigrated to the United States, from Ireland. She
may not have had many tools, many trades. She turned
back to the one thing that she knew to survive,
and that was cooking, even though she had been forced
(10:29):
to promise she wouldn't do it. And that's really what
I think outrages people about this, the story. And it's
interesting when she was on the island, or by the
time she got there, the press had got in ahold
of this, which added to what you were saying. She
became a peep show in the whole public, especially in
New York City, really focused on this story. And there's
this fascinating illustration you can look at you google typhoid
(10:50):
Mary and look at images. Uh there's a fascinating illustration
of her cracking skulls into a skillet and it tells
the story of typhoid Mary like as if she were
intention only giving all of her victims typhoid. And so, yeah,
you're right, she went back to cooking at least after
a couple of years. We're not sure exactly what happened
to her within between when she was let go and
(11:11):
when she started cooking again, but we know that there
was an outbreak in a particular hospital and Dr soaper,
the same guy was asked to go in and investigate it.
In sure enough, he saw his old nemesis Mary working
in the kitchen. And this time, though she did go
kind of without a flight, she knew that the juke
was up. She did. And this is where history really
cast a discerning eye on the typhoid Mary story. And
(11:34):
for as many people in the press who dubbed her
typhoid Mary and made her out to be a murderer,
there were just as many who who looked a skier
with the story and wondered where where were civil civil
liberties in this case? Why was no one defending Mary
who was trying to stick up for her? And I
think that people look back at her as either a
villain and this murderer, or else someone who was unfairly
(11:56):
scapegoated for a disease that was plaguing in New York City.
So really it's up to you how you want to
conceive of typhoid Mary or Mary Mallen. I guess it's
a nicer way to refer to her, that's right. And
it's particularly important to me to uh to remember that
she didn't have the symptoms. So even if she like
saw the trail following her. She could have somehow convinced
herself she didn't have it. She didn't believe the doctors.
(12:18):
You may have just wanted to survive and keep on
cooking for that would measure. If you want any great
recipes or information on diseases and more about typhoid Mary,
be sure to visit how stuff works dot com and
if you have suggestions for us for future topics or
any feedback you'd like to send, send us an email
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
(12:44):
more on this and thousands of other topics because at
how stuff works dot com
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