Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Typhoid Mary

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

In 1906, George Soper, a freelance sanitary engineer, was hired to investigate several outbreaks of typhoid fever in wealthy New York households.  The reason why it was mysterious is that typhoid fever usually only occurred in places with unsanitary conditions. What Soper discovered radically changed our knowledge of infectious diseases and how they spread.  Learn more about Typhoid Mary and how she was discovered on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsor If you’re looking for a simpler and cost-effective supplement routine, Athletic Greens is giving you a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to athleticgreens.com/EVERYWHERE.  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1906, George Soper, a freelance sanitary engineer, was hired to investigate several outbreaks of typhoid fever in wealthy New York households. The reason why these outbreaks were mysterious is that typhoid fever was only something which occurred in places with unsanitary conditions. What Soper discovered radically changed our knowledge of infectious disease and how they spread. Learn more about typhoid Mary and how she was discovered on this episode of Everything Everywhere daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is

exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about a lot of entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to nothing much happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Typhoid fever is a bacterial infection

caused by the Tiffy variant of the bacterium salmonella and Erika. It is a highly contagious disease that's transmitted through contaminated food and water or through direct contact with an infected person. Symptoms of typhoid fever can include high fever, headache, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and a rash of flat rose-colored spots. In severe cases, complications such as intestinal bleeding, pneumonia, or meningitis can occur. We don't hear much about typhoid fever anymore, which is a good thing. Because it's spread through bacterial contamination, improved sanitation, water chlorination, and food handling, have dramatically slashed cases over the last 100 years. While typhoid fever hasn't been totally eradicated, it mostly only occurs in developing countries

with poor water treatment, and the disease can be treated with antibiotics if caught in time. This, however, was not the case at the start of the 20th century. Typhoid fever was a disease that affected and killed millions. Such notable people as President William Henry Harrison, Wilbur Wright, and Prince Albert all died from typhoid fever. Typhoid fever had been around for ages. The plague of Athens, which occurred in 430 BC, was believed to have been a case of typhoid fever. In the late 19th century, the bacteria which caused typhoid fever had been identified by the German pathologist Carl Eberth and was confirmed

four years later by the German microbiologist Georg Gaffke. So in the first decade of the 20th century, typhoid fever was definitely still a thing, but they at least knew where it came from and had an idea of what caused it. It was spread mostly through food and water, usually in unsanitary conditions. In August of 1906, a wealthy New Yorker by the name of Charles Henry Warren rented a house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where its family could spend time in the summer. In a one-week span between August 27th and September 3rd, six of the 11 people in the family came down with typhoid fever. The doctors in Oyster Bay found it perplexing because this disease almost never appeared in the well-to-do community of Oyster Bay. The landlord from whom Charles Warren rented the house was concerned

that if the property had a reputation for harboring typhoid fever, he would never be able to rent the property again. They took water samples from all over the house and could find nothing. Eventually, the landlord hired the sanitation engineer George Soper to investigate the matter. Soper knew that the case in Oyster Bay wasn't the only case of typhoid fever that had struck wealthy New York families. There had been several cases that had popped up over the last several years. Soper found a link between the outbreaks in many of the upscale New York homes. They had all hired an Irish woman as a cook who fit a similar description in every house. The problem was Soper was unable to find the woman because she seldom worked in one place for an extended period and would often leave the home after an outbreak began.

The big break in the case occurred in January 1907, the household of Walter Bowen, who lived in an upscale Park Avenue address had an outbreak of typhoid fever. Several members of his household staff caught it, and his daughter actually died. When Soper investigated the Bowen household, he found the woman he had been looking for, a 38-year-old Irish immigrant by the name of Mary Mallon. She was the link between all of the typhoid fever cases. Malin was born in 1869 in County Tyrone, Ireland. At the age of 15, she migrated to New York City. She initially took jobs as a maid. but eventually moved into cooking because the money was better. An investigation into her work history between 1900 and 1907 found that she had worked as a cook

for eight families in New York City, seven of which had come down with typhoid fever. Soper first attempted to notify Malin about his discovery while she was working at the Bowen household. It was a very touchy conversation because how exactly do you tell someone that they're responsible for passing a deadly disease to dozens of people? Despite trying to be diplomatic, Mary had a very violent reaction to being told the news. She refused to believe that she was the cause of this, as she had never been sick, and she claimed, not incorrectly, that there were typhoid cases all over the city. When she was asked to provide urine and stool samples, she threatened soper with a carving fork.

He arranged another meeting with her at her boyfriend's apartment, and once again she refused to provide samples that they could test for the bacteria. Given his concern about Mary further spreading the disease, he got the New York City Department of Health involved and told them about the results of his investigation. As a result, the New York City Department of Health arrested Mary Mallon as being a threat to public health and safety. She was forcibly taken away in an ambulance by five police officers who had to physically restrain her.

She was taken to a hospital where she was forced to provide stool samples. What they found was an incredible number of typhoid fever bacteria. Mary Mallon was somehow carrying the bacteria, but not suffering from the disease. Once the test results came back, she began to accept her condition and cooperated with the researchers. One of the key things she mentioned was that she almost never washed her hands. Here I should mention what some of you are probably thinking. This sounds very familiar to the episode I did and Dr. Ignace Semmelweis, who encountered something similar almost 60 years earlier in Vienna. Despite the mounting evidence, the germ theory of disease still wasn't universally accepted at this point.

In March 1907, she was sentenced to involuntary quarantine at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the East River of New York, located between the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Riverside Hospital was built as a quarantine hospital. It wasn't prison, but it also wasn't not prison, if you know what I mean. Soper wrote an article on his findings for the Journal of the American Medical Association of Mary. That article was picked up by local newspapers and tabloids who coined the phrase typhoid Mary. The forced quarantine of Mary was controversial at the time. Not all doctors agreed that she should be isolated. Rather, they felt if she just learned to take certain precautions, her condition

could be treated. Mary herself never really believed that she was a carrier. She arranged for an independent analysis of her samples, which came back negative, as did a quarter of the samples taken while she was in quarantine. Eventually, after three years of isolation in February 1910, she signed an affidavit that she would stop being a cook and would take other precautions and was released. No one was sure where she got the money to pay for her legal fees. One persistent rumor was that it was the media mogul William Randolph Hearst who paid for it. After being released, she took a job cleaning clothes instead of cooking, which paid significantly less than what she was making before. Eventually, desperate for money and on the edge of poverty, Mary returned to the

world of food preparation. She used fake names to avoid detection. She couldn't work for upscale homes anymore, so instead she began to work in the commercial food industry. She took jobs cooking at hotels and restaurants. And pretty much everywhere she worked, there were outbreaks of typhoid fever. Soper tried to track her down again, but had a difficult time because she changed jobs frequently and use different aliases. In 1915, there was an outbreak of typhoid fever at the Sloan Hospital for women. When Soper was called in to investigate the outbreak, all the signs pointed back to Mary Malon. This time, the police managed to find Mary, who was traveling to Long Island to deliver food to a friend. She was returned to North Brother Island, but this time her stay was

quite different. She ended up spending the next 23 years of her life on the island. She was eventually given a small cottage on the island and was given a job as a laboratory assistant. Mary suffered from a stroke in 1932 and died in 1938 at the age of 69. 26 years of her life was spent in isolation. Nine people attended her funeral. In hindsight, we can see that Mary Mallon was the first person identified as what we would now call an asymptomatic carrier, also known as a super spreader. The bacteria it was believed lived and grew in her infected gallblast.

She may have had it her entire life as her mother had typhoid when she was pregnant. However, for whatever reason, she never suffered from the symptoms of the disease. The number of cases of typhoid fever and the number of deaths she was responsible for varies widely. On the low end, there may have been just three deaths and on the high end, perhaps as many as 50. After Mary was put into isolation, typhoid fever cases would still periodically appear. During her isolation, another 400 asymptomatic carriers, of typhoid fever were found, but none of them were put into isolation like Mary Malin. One of the lingering mysteries was how she was able to spread the disease when the high temperatures

from cooking would kill the bacteria. The answer may have lied in one of her signature dishes, peach ice cream. The dessert was never cooked, and it could have been the vehicle of transmission. The case of Mary Malin has been debated by ethicists for over a century. She had no idea that she was the carrier for the disease, and in fact, the very idea of an asymptomatic carrier didn't even exist before she was arrested. By almost any measure, she lacked malice and would be considered innocent if the case had come to court. However, after her release, she knew very well what she was doing and what could happen, and the disease spread yet again. The case of Mary Malin helped researchers better understand just how diseases were spread and helped introduce the concept of super spreaders.

Today, most people have heard the term typhoid Mary, and it's used to describe someone who unwittingly causes harm. But few people know the story of the actual woman who spread the disease and how she was discovered. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place

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