Typhoid Mary Read Free Page B

found out? That in every household in which she had worked in the last ten years there had been an outbreak of typhoid fever. Mind you, there wasn’t a single exception.
        The question that confronted me now was: Where is she?
        Following her trail backward to cases in 1904, I found she had worked at the home of Henry Gilsey at Sands Point, Long Island, where four of seven servants suddenly got the disease. Going back still further, I found that five weeks after Mary had gone to cook at the summer home of J. Coleman Drayton at Dark Harbor, Maine, in 1902, seven out of nine persons in the house contracted typhoid, and so did a trained nurse and a woman who came to the house to work by the day. There had been an outbreak of the disease in New York in 1901, and I had reason to believe that Mary was behind this. In 1904, Tuxedo Park, the fashionable summer resort, was stricken  . . . and (I) discovered she had cooked there in that time.
     
         Soper now uncovered ‘other episodes’, as he called them. Provocatively, there was a two-year period for which there were no records available at all for Ms. Mallon’s employment – the period between the Gilsey family incident and Mary’s arrival in Oyster Bay.
         The two-year blank was tantalizing to Soper. Where had Mary been? Who had she been cooking for? She must have been cooking somewhere  . . . The sanitary engineer’s mind teemed with disturbing images. He no doubt pictured the cook stirring soup in some unknown and very busy cellar kitchen, barehanded, unknowing, infecting untold multitudes of solid citizens with potentially deadly bacilli.
         Dr. Soper’s breathless, self-serving, yet ultimately unreliable accounts to newspapers give a sense of how excited he was, how exhilarated by the thrill of the chase and the tantalizing prospect of being onto something really important. At first he had anticipated a case that might last only a few weeks – a little sea air, a few bowls of steamers, some resolution, and back to the city – but now he found himself further drawn into a quest which had already occupied him for a full four months. The Warrens were long gone – back home with the other summer renters. The weather had turned colder, the house now stood empty.
         But George Soper was still on the case, sensing that with Mary Mallon’s help, he was about to make medical history.
         First of all, he realized the typhoid outbreaks associated with Mary Mallon were unusual in that they seemed to afflict the clean, well-kept houses of the affluent. While the ‘filth theory’ of contagion – which stated that filth, in and of itself, was the cause of disease – had been recently supplanted by the specific identification of disease-causing microbes, there was still a general sense that epidemics were closely associated with dirty living conditions and with marginal, impoverished people who lived in close, unsanitary circumstances. Many still held this notion, including some in the scientific community, where papers continued to be published in 1906 stating that typhoid rose up out of ‘sewer gasses: and the ‘miasma’. Society, for good reason, had been congratulating itself on such sensible collective widespread improvements as clean, feces-free drinking water, carefully monitored dairy products, more effective waste disposal, and new kitchen design and equipment which allowed more sanitary food handling. Congress had passed, in 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and major food processors like Heinz and Kellogg’s made ‘purity’ of food products a selling point. Sick people and people who were thought likely to be infected – such as immigrants – were routinely detained and quarantined to avoid the possible spread of contagion. This particular situation, the situation of Mary Mallon, however, indicated something new and different. No one in the Warren household had been sick with typhoid prior to the outbreak – nor had