Imagine, if you will, being at work and minding your business when a stranger bursts in accusing you of killing people and demands your bodily fluids.
All for making some delicious peach ice cream.
Today’s Moment of Science… Mary Mallon, better known to history as Typhoid Mary.
Typhoid fever is caused by the bacteria salmonella typhi that only lives in and affects humans. There’s a vaccine for it, and it can be treated with antibiotics, but it’s still nasty business. Symptoms include a high fever, headache, cough, bradycardia, delirium, enlarged liver, and those are the symptoms before this disease gets all “oh shit you’re gonna die, champ.”
It’s been virtually eliminated in countries with modern hygiene and clean drinking water. Due to inequitable access to sanitation, it was largely associated with poverty by the turn of the twentieth century.
So about that fucking ice cream.
Mary Mallon immigrated to the US from Ireland at fifteen years old in 1884. A good paying job for an immigrant with little education was culinary work. She started working as a private chef in 1900 for affluent families in New York. Her highly demanded specialty was fresh peach ice cream.
Mallon admittedly almost never washed her hands when she worked. To be fair, handwashing wasn’t yet standard practice for handling food, so she wasn’t really to blame for an industry-wide behavior. Microbes being as sneaky as they are, the lack of handwashing meant she transported just enough poop particles from the bathroom to the peaches.
If she’d just washed her hands.
If she’d been living in a time when wearing gloves to handle food was standard.
If she worked in any field other than food service.
But she didn’t. Her unwashed hands would have been far less of a problem if she was preparing something you cooked to hell because heat kills the bacteria. But salmonella can survive the cold, and Mallon’s signature peach ice cream transmitted the disease with quiet efficiency.
This is where shit gets murky about medical ethics and who’s to blame for this mess.
After a typhoid fever outbreak in the eighth family she worked for, Mallon’s employer hired sanitation engineer George Soper to find the culprit of the outbreak. These were wealthy people afflicted with a disease of the ‘dirty poors’, there had to be someone to blame.
Soper traced outbreaks from seven of her employers back to Mallon. When he approached her in 1907, Soper claimed he was “diplomatic” in his request to test her. I try to see this from her point of view though.
Germ theory had just started to gain acceptance the previous decade in the scientific community, but not everyone was convinced. She was likely the first documented case of an asymptomatic carrier spreading this disease. This meant Mallon had to accept- with minimal proof- that her body housed a phenomenon that heretofore hadn’t existed. Skepticism was natural.
So imagine you’ve never had so much as a sniffle when a stranger walks up to you at work to inform you that you’ve been the cause of a deadly disease you never experienced, and he demands samples of your spit, shit, and piss.
I might have chased the fucker with a carving fork too.
She was quarantined for nearly three years, regularly testing positive for the bacteria that causes typhoid. She never exhibited symptoms though. They hypothesized that the disease was in her gallbladder, and recommended removal. We kinda sucked at surgery a hundred years ago though, and her trust in the people holding her hostage wasn’t exactly at “knock me out and take my organs” level.” She also didn’t believe she was a carrier.
She eventually sued for her freedom and was released on the condition that she stop cooking for people.
Which she did.
For a while.
She returned to cooking shortly after seeing her finances suffer in lower paying jobs. Inevitably, more typhoid fever spread in her wake. Soper caught up with her in 1915. She was locked up for the last 23 years of her life, having been documented as the source of fifty-three cases of typhoid fever and three fatalities. She died in captivity in 1938.
In New York City alone by the time of her death, the health department had identified over 400 healthy asymptomatic carriers. None of them were ever jailed or otherwise forcibly confined. Most famously, another asymptomatic carrier named Tony Labella sickened 122 and killed five. Why no Typhoid Tony?
Pick an answer. She was a loud, combative, Irish immigrant who didn’t accept authorities’ word and didn’t comply. She didn’t just make any people sick, she made rich people sick.
Most of the people Tony Labella sickened were children at an orphanage in New Jersey.
This has been your daily Moment of Science with a humble suggestion that, delicious as it is, avoid eating ass in regions of the world with endemic typhoid. And peach ice cream, just to be safe.
Anthony Bourdain had an excellent book about Mary: Typhoid Mary. Highly recommend!!