Typhoid Mary never felt ill, and spent decades in quarantine.
Mary Mallon was a cook for wealthy New York families, and typhoid seemed to follow her from house to house. She felt perfectly healthy, which is exactly what made her dangerous: she was the first known 'healthy carrier' of typhoid in the United States. She spent about 26 years confined on an island.
Born in Ireland in 1869, Mallon emigrated to New York as a teenager and built a good career as a cook. From 1900 onwards, typhoid broke out in one household after another where she worked. In 1906 a Long Island landlord, worried about his rental property, hired the sanitary engineer George Soper to investigate. Soper traced her work history and found typhoid in seven of the eight families she had cooked for. One suspect dish was ice cream with fresh peaches, which no cooking would have made safe.
Soper suspected she was an asymptomatic carrier, someone who harbours and sheds the bacteria without being sick, an idea known from European research but new to the public. Mallon felt fine and refused to give samples, at one point advancing on him with a carving fork. In 1907 she was taken by force, tested positive and sent to North Brother Island in the East River. She was released in 1910 after promising never to work as a cook again.
By 1915 she was cooking once more, under the name Mary Brown, at a New York maternity hospital, where an outbreak caused 25 cases and two deaths. She was returned to the island and stayed there until her death in 1938, latterly working in its laboratory. Up to 57 infections and three confirmed deaths have been linked to her.
Historians see her case as a hard lesson in public-health ethics. Hundreds of other healthy carriers were identified during her confinement, and none was held as long as she was; some were helped into other jobs and even had their rent paid. Her gender, class and Irish background seem to have shaped how officials and newspapers treated her. Her story is revisited in every epidemic because it asks a question that never goes away: how far may society restrict one person to protect everyone else?
Source: Wikipedia — Mary Mallon · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
