Terrible Typhoid Mary: Chapters 10–11

Such stories appear in certain popular tabloids and online publications but do not usually appear in reputable newspapers.

Such stories appear in certain popular tabloids and online publications but do not usually appear in reputable newspapers.

“She is practically a human vehicle for typhoid fever germs,” said the reporter. “There are millions of them in her system, and the physicians and surgeons are baffled in their attempts to rid the woman of the infinitesimal creatures that are enemies of mankind.”

They dubbed her “Mary Ilverson,” an Irish girl, and said she was housed in Bellevue Hospital, not Willard Parker.

Today, federal law provides statutes that guard medical privacy.

The Privacy Rule protects most health records from disclosure.

In a newspaper article, Dr. Walter Bensel explained the need to quarantine the cook. “This woman is a great menace to health, a danger to the community, and she has been made a prisoner on that account,” he said. “In her wake are many cases of typhoid fever, she having unwittingly disseminated—or, as we might say, sprinkled—germs in various households.”

In the Old Testament book of Leviticus 13:1-46, for example, rules are given for the treatment of those with skin diseases and for the isolation of lepers.

According to the Communicable Disease Center (CDC), these diseases include cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and viral hemorrhagic fevers such as yellow fever and ebola.

Public health laws require that certain communicable diseases must be reported, victims must be treated, and if necessary, victims must be isolated while they are treated.

Health officials strive to respect a victim’s autonomy, liberty, and privacy, but these rights are not absolute when the public’s health and safety are threatened.

In 1897 Mrs. Plunkett, the author of a popular household hygiene book, warned, “The zephyrs will come along and pick up the disease germs and bear them onward, distributing them to whomever it meets, whether he be a millionaire or a shillingaire…”

Still, health department officials were in a quandary over Mary.

Provision 1170 stated:
Said board [of health] may remove or cause to be removed to [a] proper place to be by it designated, any person sick with any contagious, pestilential or infectious disease; shall have exclusive charge and control of the hospitals for the treatment of such cases.

Health officials told the New York American reporter that they were appealing to eminent lawyers to determine their course of action.

The steamer carried her up the East River, and she arrived on North Brother Island frightened and angry and more resistant than ever.

Over the years, the city filled in the sandy, marshy ground and built a strong seawall to buffer the breakers.

The twitching may have been caused by fatigue or stress or even a benign tumor that later went away on its own.

Two or three times a week, attendants collected fecal, urine, and blood specimens. Sometimes the results were positive; other times they were negative. This indicates that Mary was an intermittent carrier of typhoid fever.

One doctor called anti-autotox “a proved measure” and said that “combined with colonic irrigation, treatment is most efficacious.”

Such medical experimentation was fraught with danger, something that George Soper acknowledged.

“Anything that will kill the bacilli will apparently kill the individual who is the locus, as we say, for those bacilli,” he said.

Mary continued to lobby for her release. “I never had typhoid in my life and have always been healthy,” she told a New York American reporter in 1909. “Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only a dog for a companion?”

More than likely, as a naturalized citizen of the United States, Mary knew that she had the right to stay in America.

Over the next nine months Breihof delivered at least ten specimens, taking a brief hiatus over the winter months when the ferry didn’t run.

But the Ferguson Laboratories results bolstered Mary’s hopes. They confirmed what she had been saying all along: that she didn’t have typhoid and had never suffered from the disease.

But Mary was adamant.
Mary was no physician, but her instincts were right. Even today, surgery is never without risk, and surgery was much more dangerous in 1908.

Park was wrong; at this date, twenty-four, not twenty-eight, cases had been attributed to Mary.

For two years and three months, as Soper and Park delivered their lectures and published their papers, as they gained fame and notoriety within medical circles, Mary waited for the day when she could clear her name and win her release.

And then, one warm Sunday morning in June 1909, Mary Mallon opened the Sunday magazine section of the New York American and saw her full name and likeness splashed across two lurid pages.