 |
She was still working as a cook at Oyster Bay, Long Island in 1906 with the same outcome, and in several other positions she took up.
It was in 1907 that an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association made a direct connection between Mallon and the typhoid outbreaks which while not totally unknown among the most abject slum dwellers was very rare among the type of upper class families which employed Mallon.
So over the course of at least six years she had infected a considerable number of people, while herself remaining in “perfect health,” according to George Soper who wrote the piece.
She was clearly aware of her role in spreading the infection and disappeared to a new job once an outbreak took place. She refused to co-operate with a medical examination but by 1908 was named publicly by Soper and earned the popular sobriquet “Typhoid Mary.”
She was taken up and detained in quarantine for a period on North Brother Island but was released in 1910 on her promise that she would not work as a cook, However, after a few years as a laundress she changed her name to Brown and returned to cooking.
In 1915 she was at the centre of another outbreak at the Sloane’s Women’s Hospital. She was arrested and sent back to North Brother Island. There she remained in quarantine until her death from pneunomnia at the age of 69 in 1938. The post mortem revealed that she carried typhoid bacteria in her gall bladder. She is buried in the Bronx, her grave still a minor tourist curiosity.
Typhoid Mary provides what used to be called a “cautionary tale” in the midst of the current Covid-19 crisis. With people now being told not to leave their homes, this has heightened a certain degree of paranoia that other people are potential carriers of the virus that might be passed on through even the most casual encounter.
On Saturday morning, a heavy Garda presence was evident in Finglas when. I passed at least four vehicles on patrol. It would also seem however that off-license sales of alcohol are being tolerated perhaps on the basis that is acts as a safety valve.
Most people do appear to be abiding by the restrictions – even the little girls who played football and camogie on my road seem to have disappeared.
There have been tabloid reports of potential ‘Typhoid Marys’ spitting at Gardaí and others but no evidence that there are gangs of infected roaming the streets spreading the contagion. The most egregious and selfish thing I have seen was an idiot who insisted on smoking in the ward toilets in the Mater.
If all this works and the tide is turned – as in slowing and reversing the rate of infection and death over the next several months, then we shall be saved.
The unknown factor is that like earlier pandemics there may yet be a sting in the tail.
 |
According to Newsday this is an illustration that appeared in 1909 in The New York American.
According to Nova the precise date was June 20, 1909.
|
Matt Treacy is a writer and a former republican prisoner.
Matt
ReplyDeletePandemics are always likely to the racking up of fear of and prejudice towards certain "out groups" deemed to be likely carriers and spreaders utterly irrational though such beliefs may be. In our era of Covid -19 it has been people of Chinese and East Asian origin because of its Chinese origin; in the AIDS/HIV epidemic of the 1980s it was gay people as it was originally seen as the "gay plague" and during the bubonic plague or Black Death in the Middle Ages it was Jews who carried the can. It would not surprise if there was more than an elemwent of anti-Irish prejudice that led to Typhoid Mary's permanent quarantining although her behaviour was certainly deplorable.
Generally the pandemic is bringing the best out in people although the "anti-social" will always be with thus.
Another informative and interesting piece, Matt.
Sometimes when I'm in the supermarket a fellow shopper will walk up to me and come in real close, and stay there. They have chosen not to adhere to the distancing guidelines published throughout the store. They act from personal freedom to express their doubts about the significance of social distancing. I'm not in a high risk category for covid outcomes but I have daily contact with my mother and brother, who are. So the biological exchange in the supermarket is really between my fellow shopper and my mother and brother. There's a conflict here between someone's need to just be normal and the wishes of an elderly woman and a disabled man to be healthy and alive. I understand that feeling isolated within what is normally a social context hurts, mentally. But until we invent social outsize condoms this distance is our prophylactic. Not getting close has become a way to show someone that you care about them.
ReplyDeleteDiffering notions of what is right or wrong I think, don't have the kind of force of the immediacy of the human condition. It reminds me of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: you are horrified that your brother has become a large insect climbing along the walls / it's such a nice day outside.
Julia, I hope your Mother and Brother are well. I don't get the science of two metres apart. If I have covid and don't know and I am in the same shop,I forget to wash my hands, touch the same shelf, sneeze, breathe you're going to be infected whether I'm two metres away or not. I think such measures give an illusion of safety. I'm not being flippant, my mother is high risk. How do you stay away from each other for 18 months until they have a vaccination? What are the consequences? Will poverty kill more than the disease? What are the civil liberties in jeapordy? You can't let fear rule you. Hundred thousand people left Wuhan everyday. 1.8 million people came to Britain from January to March. Scientists believe 80 per cent of us who get infected won't know. Loads of people I know isolated because they had symptoms, how do we know how many have been affected. Not a bit late to start tracking now, no? Think of even a small number had it at Cheltenham, with a transmission power of 1 to 6 extrapolate that into the wider community, who knows?
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteSure, if you're in the same space the chance of infection increases. And if you go closer and longer then it increases further. There's going to be a tipping point somewhere along the line between a moderate spread of the virus and the kind of growth that kills a lot of people.
In armed conflict, you sometimes hear military commanders talking about the numbers of dead noncombatants in the enemy population. They say things like: the enemy doesn't attach the same kind of value to life as we do. He is saying the taking of life is okay in order to protect his enlightened society, and that our respect for life is one more thing that shows how civilised we are.
'You can't let fear rule you.' Do you think you are ruled, or do you act as a rational agent? Is that even a dichotomy?
I hope your mother is keeping well and not too spooked by it all.
J
Julia,
ReplyDeleteFirst of, let me be clear, I don't know anything about viruses etc. Just trying to understand it. There's an argument being made that the virus was here in December and quarantining healthy people is counterproductive. I don't know. Sometimes I play devil's advocate to try and understand it.
In western society we certainly put more value on life from this part of the globe. 140,000 people died of measles in Africa last year, can't remember a campaign to send a vaccine over. If the virus was killing only Asians would you hear that much of it?
Can you divorce rule and rationality? I don't know, both are subjective. I do think there's hysteria from people who should be calm as a job description.I
Thanks