Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary

Episode Date: January 13, 2018

In the 19th century, typhoid was considered a disease of the lower classes. When an outbreak occurred in wealthy Oyster Bay, New York, a mystery was afoot. Tune in to learn how this event began an ongoing debate over public safety versus civil rights. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Stuff You Should Know Selects. It's a Saturday, but I'm here anyway because I love you. This week, I am choosing The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary from October 13th, 2011. And to be honest, I picked this one,

well, for a couple of reasons. A is because I love it. I love our history podcasts. And this one was super, super interesting. And the other reason is, to be honest, I really just love this title, The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. I titled this one myself. And I just wanted to see it in our feet again

because I like looking at it. So here we go. The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HouseTuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Greeny Boy, Chuck Bryant.

And Jerry, back in the his house. Yep. No more guests producing. No. That was a rough week. Sure was. But she's back. Yeah.

Hey Jerry, did you hear that, everybody? Probably not, Chuck. Yes. Jerry, have you guys ever heard how much manure a horse produces in a day? I'm glad you went with this. I was never really occurred to me. Go ahead.

25 pounds, 25 pounds of manure. Did you do the math? Because I did. Well, you come with that in a second, okay? So just go back with me a little bit, Chuck, to the time when Daniel Day Lewis was walking around New York with a meat cleaver overacting a little bit, in my opinion.

And it's the late 19th century, and the horse is the preferred mode of transportation for everything from the most humble delivery cart to the greatest ambulance to people who like to ride horses, three musketeers, that kind of thing. Everybody had a horse. To the limo, to the airport. Wherever.

So there were about 200,000 horses in New York City in use in 1895, right? Yeah. Multiply that times 25 pounds of poop a day. And what do you get, Chuck? Well, I did 225,000, because I thought that was the number. Okay, so that's fine, we'll go with that.

More than 6.2 million pounds of horse poop per day deposited on the streets of New York. Okay, now, let's say that's 1894. Okay. Okay, there's that many horses. There's 6.2 million pounds of horse poop every day. That's a lot of poop. It's a lot of poop, but not only that,

there was no one cleaning it up. It was just- Not enough people cleaning it up, let's say that for sure. It was just left there, basically, in a lot of cases, to basically be ground into the cobblestone. And you know, it makes you think, like, I'll bet there's a substantial layer of horse manure under the streets of New York

that make up, like, that initial stratum of earth. They call that the pooposphere, I think. Oh, wait, that would be an outer space. No, no, because the lithosphere is part of- Oh, is it? Yes, so you were dead on. Thank you. The pooposphere.

1895, things changed a little bit. The New York Institute's Department of Health and a group of, basically, an army of cleaning guys, very much like the garbage man that Homer Simpson envisions in the Garbage Commissioner episode. I can't remember which one it is. Yeah.

Oh, the Love Day episode is what it is. Okay. These guys, they're called White Wings. They are deployed to clean up the streets of New York, and they do a heck of a job. Yeah. And possibly the fact of the episode, if I may take it. Please.

This is where the term cleanliness is next to godliness is coined. Pretty cool. The New York Department of Health slogan in 1895. Downtown New York, Josh, at the turn of the century back then was a disgusting, filthy place. And yet, I love New York. I love the history of New York.

We both watched the same Nova video on Typhoid Mary today, and they had photos of mountains of manure pushed to the sidewalks. And sort of like if you've ever been in New York on Garbage Day, imagine all those garbage bags as poop. Yeah, but not poop in bags, just mounds of poop. And they were dead animal carcasses. Did you see that one shot?

Dead people, probably. It was like these boys playing in the street with just a dead horse right in the middle of their little stickball diamond. I guess he was on base or something. And it was just a foul, disgusting, unclean, unsanitary place, which, like you said, led to the formation of the Department of Sanitation.

Right, so the Department of Sanitation was imbued with a lot of clout from the get-go. It's a big problem. Yeah, and as you said, the Nova documentary on Typhoid Mary, it's called The Most Dangerous Woman in America, I believe. But it's also on YouTube under Typhoid Mary Nova. Yeah, that's good.

It was. But they had a lot of clout. They could forcibly inoculate you with these newfangled inoculations. They could forcibly remove you to a quarantine island, and New York had a bunch of them. Yeah, that was popular at the time. Yeah, but basically, your civil liberties

could be entirely suspended without any sort of due process of law, and if you were considered sick. And a lot of this was based on this new understanding of science, of germ theory, thanks to our buddy Louis Pasteur. Bacteriology. Yep, so the problem was, science reporting hadn't been established yet.

So all of the people who were in charge understood what was going on. They understood germ theory. They understood inoculations. They understood forced quarantine. But no one had explained it to the public fully. Right, that's a recipe for disaster. Right.

So there's this thing called typhus, or typhoid, I'm sorry. And apparently, they were one and the same until the 19th century. About this time, typhus and typhoid, typhoid fever, were separated. But typhoid fever, which is the star of this, co-star of this episode, is particularly nasty, isn't it? It is, Josh.

We're talking not just ordinary diarrhea, but doubled over, cramping, painful diarrhea. I think you'd call that violent diarrhea. Violent diarrhea. High fever, red rashes, sleeplessness, death, if you don't treat it. A lot of people through history have been stricken with it, including Mary Todd Lincoln, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ravi Shankar.

Roy Cohn. Oh, really? No. Frank McCourt, author. And Wilbur Wright, actually, of the Wright Brothers fame, died from typhoid fever. No way. Wow.

Pretty sad. And that was, I mean, that's a scant sampling from a long, long list of famous people that have had typhoid. Well, those are the people who count who had typhoid fever. I think Lincoln's son actually died from it as well. But I don't think Mary Todd Lincoln died from it. Yeah. But you can.

No, she died of insanity or something like that, is what they would have called it. No, that was Abraham Lincoln. Hysterics. Right. OK. Nice. So before we started to get a handle on typhoid fever,

it's, by the way, it's caused by the bacterium salmonella typhi. It's a type of salmonella. And before we got a handle on it with antibiotics, apparently 12% of people died from typhoid. So it's a big public health problem. Yeah. In New York especially, there were 4,000 new cases per year

and killed one in 10 people at the time. Or one in 12%. OK. Over that goal. Was that nationwide? Yeah, as I understand it, before antibiotic. Gotcha. So let's even just say 10%.

That's a big public health problem. And because it's spread by the bacterium salmonella, did that come out weird? Because it did in my head. Slightly. A little bit of the lazy tongue there. Because it's spread through salmonella, or because it's a result of salmonella,

it's very, very easily spread from handling your own poop, e.g. using the bathroom, not washing your hands, and then handling food, uncooked food specifically. It was normally considered to be a disease of the lower classes until 1906, was it, Chuck? The summer of 1906, in a wealthy quarter of the United States on Long Island called Oyster Bay. Billy Joel's home, I believe.

It's neither here nor there. OK. Still, that's one extra fact you just gave everybody. That's true. Yeah, when it happened in Oyster Bay, it was a much bigger deal because it was more closely associated with, let's say, the Lower East Side, tenement housing, the filth of Lower Manhattan at the time.

They've cleaned all that up now. And it is expensive. What you get, though, when you're in Oyster Bay, is you get wealthy families who can spend a little money. And that's what you had in the case of the Thompson family. They were afraid that they would not be able to rent out the house that they were living in because people were getting sick in that house

over and over and over. And they couldn't figure it out. They decided to hire an investigator who turned out to be a very prominent figure in this case named Dr. George Soper, a sanitation engineer and epidemiologist. One of the first epidemiologists. Really looking to make his career as it turned out. He had a reputation of being able to track any illness

back to its source. So this family, the Thompson family, is that the one who owned the house or the one who got sick? They owned the house. And I believe some family members had also gotten sick. OK. But there was a family that rented it originally. That's where the typhoid outbreak first happened.

Oh, so maybe they were just the homeowners. The Thompson family hired Soper, I believe. Yeah, yeah. And said, hey, we can't rent this house anymore because people are dying from typhoid. I love that that was their concern. Right, yeah. So Soper gets on the case, finds the family

where the typhoid outbreak occurred, and starts interviewing the heck out of them. And he's stumped. He can't figure it out. Like, where did this thing come from? These are clearly patient zeros right here. Like, nobody else on Oyster Bay had it before then. Right, right.

They didn't bring it with them from the city. There's somebody missing. There's something missing. And he finally says, have I talked to everybody who was in this house in the summer of 1906? And they said, you should talk to typhoid Mary. Yeah. I don't know why I didn't think of that.

He goes, what? No, what he did was he interviewed kitchen staff. And it turns out that there was a former employee that was no longer there, Mary Mallon. Yeah. And he said, wait a minute. Maybe I should check this lady out. Turns out she loved to serve this ice cream in fresh peaches,

which is uncooked. That was, I guess, she was noted for that dessert. Right, but even more incriminating than the dessert is the idea that when he looked into her history, she'd worked for eight families in 10 years and six of those families that had typhoid outbreaks. Yeah. Yeah.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help, this I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

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App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So he began to think that there was something special about Mary Mallon and that she was what's called a healthy carrier, meaning, and I'm just going to paraphrase this awesome way that Nova Doc put it, right? When you get typhoid fever, there's almost always a clear winner. If the bacteria wins, you die.

And if you win, if your immune system wins, the bacteria dies. But there's sometimes where there's a stalemate where your immune system continues to function and you live, and the bacteria continues to live in your system, which means you're healthy, but you're also extremely contagious. And that's what Soper came to believe Mary Mallon was. So she was technically, she actually had typhoid fever,

but her immune system was able to suppress all of it, except the killing of all the bacteria part. Right, so. Pretty cool. Soper. We're not cool, but interesting because this is brand new. Yeah, and this guy's on the cutting edge of this kind of thinking.

Yeah, and he knew, potentially, she could be the face of bacteriology. The first bacteriology lab had just set up in New York City, and it was a burgeoning, not industry, but science. So he was like, man, this is really going to put me on the map if I can prove this, at least. So he didn't have any training in science reporting either, though, did he?

He didn't have training in people skills either. He goes to her and he's like, I finally found you. I believe you're infected with typhoid, so I need samples of your stool, your urine, and your blood. By the way, my name is George Soper. Good to meet you. Yeah, and she's like, oh, no, you're not. Yeah, so it's about this time that Mary Malin.

Who was she? We should describe who she is, at least. Oh, go ahead, Chuck. Mary Malin was Irish. She, Oyrish, came over as a teenager by herself. She was born in the poorest town county in Ireland, and Ireland at that time, especially in the poorest county, not a great place to be.

No. Also dirty, also lots of death and dying, and filth and disease. And she was born in 1869, so I think it's on the heels of the potato famine, if not still in the middle of it. So she comes over as a teenager, lives with her aunt and her uncle, who pass away,

and then is basically on her own in New York. And by all accounts, as a result of how she grew up, and then being on her in New York, she was very, very tough and fiery. And independent and resourceful. Like, had it been anyone else, this might not have gone down like this. No, huh?

They picked literally, not picked, but as it turns out, it sounds like she was the toughest, most obstinate, stubborn, fiery woman in New York City. Right, and, but she was also good at what she did. She worked her way up in the domestic servant classes to the pinnacle of it, a cook in that era, in the domestic service. And sort of manager of the kitchen staff.

Well, not just that, almost the whole house, basically. All of the servants, the cook was pretty much at the top, maybe tied with the butler, depending on the house. But, she was a cook for all these families, and not just, you know, families that could afford a cook, but like, very wealthy families. So, she was good at her job, but she took no guff from any man, and when Soper came and told her

that he wanted her feces, she chased him off with a carving fork, supposedly. That's how Soper reported it. Yeah, and, you know, we'll get into her specifics later, and she got a real bad rap, but at the time, there was, like you said, there was no understanding on the public's behalf of this. This whole zero, I'm sorry, healthy carrier

is not even proven yet. So, I mean, what is she supposed to do? Just say, like, sure, I'll go with you, stranger. Take my poop, and put me in a quarantine. So, she fought it like she probably had every right to. Right, most people, though, wouldn't normally, you know, brandish a fork, a carving fork on somebody, but again, it's lost the history

whether she really did do that or not. It's a good story. So, Soper takes off, and he's not one to let his career just kind of slip through his fingers, and he goes to the New York Commissioner of Health. Herman Biggs. So, Biggs was, he was the one, he was the first one, and he was the one who was like,

oh, by the way, we can come into your house and forcibly inoculate you and your children if we want, and we will do that, too, if we think that it's in the interest of the public health. So, Biggs was very sympathetic to Soper's description of the story of this crazy Irish woman who was just patient zero in more than one outbreak, and basically needed to be dealt with.

So, he ordered one of his case workers, a few cops and an ambulance out to where Mary lived, a tenement. Yeah, Josephine Baker was the inspector. Not the dancer. No, but she apparently was a pretty tough lady as well. Oh, yeah. She started her own rainbow family.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, and you know, we should also point out, one of the reasons that Mallon was so upset initially was that she got the feeling they were essentially calling her dirty and unsanitary. Right, yeah. Because he explained to her like,

oh, you go poop, and then you get poop in your hands and you handle peaches that you feed people. And so, she was very, she was upset that they felt like they were picking on her cleanliness. Right. She was just a dirty Irish immigrant or something like that. Yeah, exactly. There were dirty drunks and causing problems,

and that was just the stereotype at the time, and she wasn't like that, she said. Right. So, Soper goes to Biggs. Biggs orders some people out. They use their power and grab Mary. Well, she hides out in the house for a while, though. Okay.

Like, it took three hours to find her. Well, when they finally did, apparently it took all either three or four cops to drag her to the ambulance, and then the female case worker sat on her for the whole ride to this hospital, this quarantine hospital, where she was kept for a while. And like you said, it just happened to work out that the person who was Typhoid Mary

was this very stubborn, obstinate, self-assertive woman from Ireland. And she came about at a time where there was a big question about public health, like where do an individual's civil rights and the greater public good begin? That's still going on. It still is, but she forced this conversation into the national spotlight, starting about now.

Yeah. So they keep her, they test her. They're like, you need to poop into this bag right now. And she did, and they tested it, and they said, well, this thing's lousy with Typhoid. They called her stool a factory for Typhoid. Yeah. And what they did was they said, here's the deal.

Give up cooking, because that's how you're transmitting this, and we'll let you go. And she... So did they say that immediately? I caught that from the article, but not necessarily from the documentary. I think they initially offered her that deal that she refused, which was one reason why she was

lambasted in the public later on in newspapers. But again, at the time, she had managed to climb up out of the poor conditions that she was living in Ireland and get a really good job, and one that she was good at. And she didn't wanna have to learn something new and start over again. So at the time, like later on, I can dull out some of the blame on her,

but early on, she still feels well. It's like, I'm not sick. This doesn't make any sense. What is this healthy carrier thing? Yes. Yeah, she was not buying it at all. And she basically came to believe that the public health department had a vendetta

against her personally and felt quite persecuted. So when she said no, she wasn't going to stop cooking. They said, okay, well, we're gonna take you to a nice little island called North Brother Island. Yeah, it's not a nice island. 1907, they took her there and quarantined her there. North Brother Island is a, or it was a tuberculosis hospital quarantine.

Quarantine hospital, I should say. And she didn't have tuberculosis, and she wasn't even sick. She didn't have any symptoms, and yet she was being kept here against her will on North Brother Island, which you sent a killer urban exploration photo spread that I want everybody to go check out.

It's creepy. It's angothamist.com, and that's G-O-T-H-A-M-I-S-T. And it's titled A Trip to the Abandoned North Brother Island. It is so cool. Yeah, located there was Riverside Hospital, and initially there was nothing there. And they said, hey, the idea of island quarantines was pretty popular at the time.

They said we should build a hospital there so we can treat these people. But North Brother Island sort of gained a reputation over the years because one, it was, I mean, it was much more than tuberculosis. It was like, later on it was like heroin junkies were treated there, syphilis, like any kind of nasty disease or addiction,

they would dump you on at Riverside Hospital. It was in asylum. It basically was. It was sort of like, what's the decaprio? Shutter Island. Shutter Island. But they had a hard time staffing it with real doctors for a while,

because doctors understandably didn't want to work there. So they had nurses only for a time. Eventually there was a public campaign to clean it up and to build better buildings and change this rep, which sort of worked, sort of didn't. But in New York City at the time, especially in the Lower East Side and where poor people lived,

it had a very bad reputation as you don't want to go there because you go there and you don't come back. People were afraid of it. So that's where they send this Mary Malinoff to. So and when she gets there, she starts trying to get out. She hired a- Not escaping. Right, no, using legal channels.

She hired a lab, a private lab, and started sending them samples of her stool, and they were testing it, and they were not getting the same results. Her boyfriend would sneak her poop through the lab. And they weren't getting the same results that the public health department said that they were getting,

as far as her being a factory for typhoid. Right, which could have been a false negative, right? It could have been, but they said that you don't always find it in the testing. Isn't that what they said in the documentary? I believe so. But there was a discrepancy, and it was enough for her to get her day in court.

Yeah, New York Supreme Court. So she makes her way, she's allowed to leave the island to go for her court date, and basically the public health department was like, look, she's a healthy carrier, and she's a public health threat. Yeah. And Mary's like,

these people are holding me against my will. And the New York Supreme Court said, you're a public health threat, go back to North Brother Island. Yeah, and around the same time, it started getting newspaper coverage, courtesy of William Randolph Hearst. Who may have financed her law.

That's crazy. Her legal expenses. I imagine it was great for the papers. So I could see him throwing a little money toward it. Totally. But that's where she was dubbed Typhoid Mary, and that's where the public sentiment really swung, because she was painted as someone

who was willingly giving people typhoid fever. Right. Well, no, she was called Typhoid Mary because they were protecting her identity as well. That didn't work too well. No, so Mary goes back to North Brother Island and is there for another, well, she was there for three years total, I believe,

and in the third year, New York City got a new health commissioner, and he was not about basically squashing people's civil rights. Literally. So he not only freed her, he got her a job. Yeah, and a lot of people, while she was incarcerated, and it was an incarceration, I guess, there were a lot of people that did cry out

for her release at times, public officials even, but the Department of Health, basically it was such a unique case, they wanted to experiment on her and said, no, we're gonna do some tests on her and not let her out. Well, they did do some tests on her. They thought that perhaps the gallbladder, her gallbladder was the culprit,

so they were like, we're gonna take your gallbladder out, and she's like, no, you're not. She's like, no one's touching me. She's afraid they're gonna kill her. Well, it could have to. They did forcibly medicate her. They tried some stuff out, and she said that she wrote in a diary

that if they keep this up for much longer, she'll surely die, because just such a, the side effects were so horrid. So it wasn't just like, hey, stay in this cottage, there's a nice view of the water. It was rough for her in addition to the civil liberties being squashed. Exactly, and so as you pointed out,

the new commission comes in laterally of public health and a bit more sympathetic. Like you said, he found her a job in laundry, which apparently was the bottom of the barrel for a woman's career aspirations. And in domestic servant. Like no money, like the lowest pay, the worst work, and she was like, this sucks.

I don't wanna do this. Right, I don't wanna work in the laundry. Did you know that Atlanta has one of the taxi drivers in Atlanta, is a Ghani's king? No way. That's what I thought of when I was reading about that, when she got a job in the laundry, and it's like, she worked her way past that,

she's way past that. Is he really? There's a Ghani's king. It's like coming to America. Who operates a cab here in Atlanta. Ain't none but ultra-perm. Yeah, that was a good movie. Dude, I could quote it from heart, I think.

In full. Let's start. Okay. Bark like a dog. That is like it, gosh, you love the shock. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so, back to Mary. Where are we here? She's just been released, or he offered her the job, right? Yeah, and she's out, and she's making three years. Yeah, but she's making contact with the health department.

They're like, we need to be able to keep up with you, and make sure we know what you're doing and everything. And then, you know, we're going to be able to do that. And then, you know, we're going to be able to do that. And then, you know, we're going to be able to do that. And then, you know, we're going to be able to do that. You're doing and everything, and then they're like, we know where she is, we know what she's doing,

we talk to her every day, and okay, we lost her. Yeah, we don't know where she is anymore. It's pretty cool at the time, you could disappear. Yeah. And if you don't leave a forwarding address, it's like, oh well, no Google searching going on there. You could disappear into the folds of Daniel DeLuis's overacting.

So a few years after this, Josh, after they had lost her, Dr. Sopers brought in, again, to investigate another typhoid outbreak at the upscale hospital, Sloan Hospital. And I think it was a baby birthing hospital at the time. Yeah. Maternity hospital. Yeah.

And what they discovered was, Mary was cooking in the kitchen at the hospital. Yeah, under an assumed name. 25 doctors and nurses were sick, and I believe two of them died. And they said, you know, you're in big trouble this time. Yeah, but not only did they discover it, it was Soper himself was called into the case.

This is like Les Miserables. And exactly, it is, very much like that. And he comes to the hospital, and he recognizes Mary by sight as one of the cooking staff, and he's like, you were kidding me. She's whipping up her ice cream in beaches. And just stops, like a mid-stroke, like a poop on her hands.

This is awkward. So, this time she goes willingly. She knows that it's over, it's done. She still doesn't believe that she is a carrier, or the problem, but she knows that they think she is, and that she's broken some sort of horrendous law somehow. It was kind of sad at that point, from the way it was described in the documentary,

she was just sort of like, I mean, all the fight of this fiery woman was gone. She's just like, I just can't fight this anymore, take me. And part of it also, I imagine, was public opinion turned against her. Like you said, the first time she was incarcerated at North Brother Island, there was a lot of public outcry. This time, there's a lot of public outcry,

but it was against her, because she had willfully, and knowingly, gone back into cooking, and had gotten more people sick. Yeah. And I think 50-something cases were attributed to her, and three deaths. Yeah, I think 49 to 52 is what I read. And we got to say, I'm defending her in a lot of ways,

but they gave her a few pretty good deals along the way that she did not take, which was A, to give up cooking. B, I think at one point they said, why don't you just move to Connecticut with your sister? And she was like, I don't have a sister. And they were like, sure you do, Jane. Yeah, she's like, wait, are you having a stroke?

Exactly, so she didn't take them up on that offer. And Soper promised her 100% of the profits of a book that he would write about her and about the situation. And she was like, no, no, no, no. And wasn't that weird? Anthony Bourdain is one of the experts in that Nova documentary. Yeah, a little odd.

Yeah. I guess he knows his Typhoid Mary. Yeah, he lives on Oyster Bay, I guess. With Billy Joel. So the legacy of Typhoid Mary is this great debate over how much civil liberty, how many civil rights does a person get to keep when they pose some sort of public health threat.

And I guess the answer to that is contagion. Yes. Have you seen it? I have not. You did the other night, right? Was it good? I like it. Was it frightening?

No, it was definitely, my back was tense the whole time. It wasn't frightening, but it was good. There was a really good editorial piece too that I read I sent you where basically this could have gone down in so many different ways. It was sort of like the perfect storm of headstrong woman, health guy that didn't have a lot of people skills. They said if that, or his opinion was it,

that initial meeting had have gone down differently, the whole history might be rewritten. But it went down as them budding heads and just got worse from there. Pretty interesting. Yeah. So Typhoid Mary, was she a bad person, Josh? Oh, I can't, I reserve judgment on historical figures.

Okay. I don't know enough about them. Yeah, I think you can only judge your contemporaries really. All right. What about me? I reserve judgment on. My testers. Yeah.

Okay. So if you want to know more about Typhoid Mary, you can watch Nova's excellent documentary, The Most Dangerous Woman in America. If you want to know the origin of the word quarantine, you should go back and listen to our Black Death episode. But if you haven't heard of it before, and you've read 1491, don't bother emailing in.

I know already. I know, I know. I'm sorry. You can also look up the House of Works article, who was Typhoid Mary, T-Y-P-H-O-I-D space, M-A-R-Y, question mark. You want to type that into the search bar at house-stuff-works.com,

and that means it's time for a listener mail. DING! They should do a good movie about that. I can't believe they have it. Yeah. This is like great. At the very least, there has to be a book on SOAPER. Like this is the kind of thing

that the public's eating up right now. Yeah. You know, thanks to this SARS, thanks to this economic collapse, you know? The SARS guard, SARS guard. Did you ever see that Saturday at live skit? It was during the SARS outbreak and the SARS guard, the actor, what's his name?

Peter SARS guard. He was on there pitching. It was like a little infomercial and he's pitching the SARS guard, SARS guard. Awesome. Awesome. Alrighty. Josh, I'm going to call this Moon Smackdown.

The nicest Moon Smackdown we got. Alrighty. Because we got a lot of them, and this guy was actually really, really kind about it. Guys, love the podcast. I listen as I ride my bike to and from work past the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I'm away to the Moon.

Learning interesting facts makes my day a little better. However, I had to send a note about a couple of mistakes in the Moon podcast. You got the current theories about the formation of the Moon and how it affects Earth's precession, right? As far as I know. And those are really the hardest things to understand. Thank you.

So well done, yeah. But you did perpetuate a few myths. Number one, the Moon doesn't rotate and is dragged along by the Earth. Well, sort of. The Moon is held in place by the Earth's gravity, but it does rotate. The reason it doesn't appear to rotate,

which is what we were trying to say, is because its period of rotation is exactly the same as its period of revolution around the Earth. About 29 days, it's tidally locked, which brings me to point number two. The Moon has a, quote, dark side that is never eliminated, not true.

I don't remember saying that. Did we say that? We must have, because everyone said that we did. Maybe we didn't say this, which led people to believe that we don't know it. All right, the Moon has one face we never see from Earth, but is not permanently in darkness. That's known as the far side of the Moon.

So it's Gary Larson, not Darth Vader. Wow. And number three, we have tides because the Moon, quote, pulls up on the water on the Earth and pulls up on the Earth underneath as well. Definitely not true. While the Moon's gravity does pull up the Earth and its water, the effect is minuscule

compared to the Earth's own gravity. It's the horizontal differential in the Moon's gravity across the Earth that causes the water to slide towards and away the direction of the Moon. So the water slides sideways, not up. Wow, that's pretty cool. And that is from Chris B, and he was very cool about it.

And he says, P.S., I'm a little worried about going back and listening to the Sun podcast because the Sun is way more complicated than the Moon. Yeah. And Chris, don't do it. Don't do it. Just skip it, brother. Yeah.

Go listen to Cannonball Run. Yeah, that's a good one. No mistakes. That is a great, great one. Or Twinkies, that was pretty good too. Yeah, Muppets. Yeah, anything but the Sun. Anything but them.

I guess if you have a correction, we want to hear it. We've been reading them again now lately. I think that's good, Chuck. I forgot all about them. I forgot about being wrong. Well, we were right for a good stretch. Well, we weren't doing ones like on the Moon or whatever. Yeah, these tough ones are hard.

Yes, they are. Yes. If you have a correction, you can tweet it to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can see us on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us a plain old fashioned email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.