A Terrifying Legacy
Everywhere Mary Mallon went, death followed. Working as a cook in a wealthy household—and suddenly, sickness. Moving on to another house—in the blink of an eye, entire families down for the count. All the while, Mary was in perfect health. For decades, no one understood what was happening, least of all Mary herself. When they finally discovered the truth, the real nightmare began.
1. She Came To America
Little of Mary Mallon’s early life would foreshadow her terrible legacy. Born in 1869 in Ireland, she spent her youth in Europe before emigrating into the United States in 1884 when she was 15 years old, posting up with an aunt and uncle who had already made it over.
At the time, the most dangerous thing about Mallon was that she had to find work.
2. She Worked For The Wealthy
At first, Mallon found work as a maid, but in 1900 she landed on what would be the most lucrative occupation she’d ever have: A private cook for families throughout New York. Moreover, as Mallon’s experience with cooking for families grew, wealthier and wealthier clans began to hire her. Even then, a disturbing pattern was emerging.
3. She Kept Changing Jobs
From 1900 to 1907, Mallon jumped around quite a bit between families, working first in Mamaroneck, New York, but relocating soon after in 1901 to Manhattan. By the summer of 1904, she was working in yet another household, this time with the well-to-do lawyer Henry Gilsey, but she didn’t stay long there either.
Each time, usually just before she left a family, one alarming event occurred.
4. She Was Haunted
Wherever Mary Mallon went, sickness came too. Almost every family she stayed with showed signs of typhoid fever, an illness that ravages its victims, burning them up with fever for weeks, wasting away and weakening their bodies, and sometimes even killing them. And while no one yet knew what was happening, the trail Mallon left told a tale.
5. She Left Sickness In Her Wake
When Mallon worked in Mamaroneck, the residents developed typhoid fever within just two weeks of her arrival. When she went to Manhattan, the family members also developed fevers and diarrhea—both symptoms of the fever.
The late 19th century had no real way to understand why these outbreaks were occurring, but evidence kept piling up.
6. One Family Was Spared
Even more revealing to the timeline of illnesses was Mallon’s time with the lawyer Henry Gilsey. Crucially, the Gilsey family lived apart from the servants, and this completely changed the vector of the disease. The Gilseys themselves remained healthy, but four of the seven members of the household staff fell ill with tell-tale symptoms. Mary’s response to this was also telling.
7. She Fled The Scene
During this time, Mallon had a chilling reaction. Although we can’t know for sure what was going on in her head each time her new family fell ill, we do know she began to abruptly up and leave her families as soon as the illness appeared, though she never showed any sign of typhoid fever.
Mallon must have thought she was cursed. She was.
8. She Couldn’t Stop It
Right after working for Henry Gilsey and then watching her fellow staff fall ill, Mallon left to work as a cook in the village of Tuxedo Park for George Kessler. But she couldn’t escape fate: Once more, just two weeks after she came, a laundry worker in the Kessler household fell ill and was taken to the hospital. When the doctors examined the worker, they raised the alarm.
9. She Left Traces
Lo and behold, the laundry worker was diagnosed with a case of typhoid fever—but doctors were utterly puzzled. Typhoid fever hadn’t been seen in the area for a long while, and they couldn’t quite pin down the patient zero. An investigator, Dr RL Wilson, was sure it had to be the laundry worker, but (partly since he was wrong) he just couldn’t seem to prove it.
Worse news was on the way.
10. She Killed Someone
In a certain number of cases, typhoid fever wastes away the body so much that the infected person perishes, and this was the case with poor George Kessler’s laundry worker. Soon after Dr Wilson gave up the investigation into the cause of the typhoid, the worker died.
By then, Mary Mallon was on to the next, but the truth was creeping closer.
11. She Went To Long Island
By 1906, Mallon had made it all the way to Oyster Bay on Long Island, where she was working, again as a cook, for the New York banker Charles Elliott Warren at the family’s leased summer home. History repeated once more. Six people in the family contracted typhoid fever, and once more the outbreak was an extremely rare occurrence in that location.
This time, though, it didn’t just all go away for Mallon.
12. They Launched An Investigation
The landlord of the summer home knew he now had a difficult task on his hands: To rent out what was essentially a plague house to some other wealthy vacationer after the sick Warrens vacated. Trying to stay ahead of the rumors, he hired several experts to track down where the fever had come from. The answers stumped them.
13. There Were No Clues
Although the experts worked away at Oyster Bay to determine the source of the outbreak, they kept coming up with…nothing. The researchers examined and tested the pipes, faucets, toilets, and even the cesspool looking for traces of typhoid, but could find no molecule of it anywhere, despite how sick the Warren family had been. So they began to look elsewhere.
14. One Man Wouldn’t Give Up
One of the investigators at Oyster Bay was sanitary engineer George Soper, who couldn’t seem to let the mystery go. More than that, Soper had heard of more typhoid outbreaks among several affluent families in the New York City area, and he was sure it couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Indeed, he was sure something connected all of the cases…or someone.
15. She Kept Appearing
As Soper looked further into the outbreaks, he noticed that one figure kept popping up: That of a heavyset, female, Irish-born cook who was eminently healthy despite these outbreaks. Yet every time Soper tried to locate her, he discovered that this cook had left immediately after the outbreak—without giving anyone a forwarding address to reach her at.
The circumstances set off alarm bells, but it was nothing compared to what came next.
16. She Was In An Active Outbreak
During Soper’s investigations surrounding the Oyster Bay and other outbreaks, he got wind of another development. There was an active outbreak right then, in the Bownes family of Park Avenue. Working fast, Soper found out that Mallon was indeed the cook at the Park Avenue outbreak, and that she was likely still at the house. He had no time to waste.
17. He Confronted Her
In March of 1907, Soper finally tracked the 37-year-old Mary Mallon down to the Park Avenue brownstone where she was currently working, finding her in the kitchen. Soper would later claim he was “as diplomatic as possible” during his encounter, but he nonetheless told her he believed she was somehow the cause of the outbreak, and wanted to take samples of her blood and other fluids.
Her reply made his blood run cold.
18. She Attacked Him
Although Soper believed he was as gentle as he could be about the accusation, it was an accusation all the same, and Mary Mallon reacted with fury from almost the moment the words escaped his lips. As he recalled, “She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction”. Rightly taking that as a no, Soper still didn’t give up.
19. He Tallied Her Wreckage
After leaving Mallon that day, Soper went through his meticulous notes and compiled everything he knew about the families Mary had worked for during her career as a cook. The evidence was damning. All in all, a full seven of the total eight families Mallon worked for were blighted by typhoid in one way or another.
But Soper knew he’d need more firepower than that.
20. He Went To Her Boyfriend
Soper was an excellent investigator, and he ended up discovering where Mallon’s boyfriend lived and going to him to try to have someone she knew and trusted ask her to give over the samples. It was a smart idea, but it didn’t make a bit of difference: Once more, Mallon refused, aghast at the thought that she was the harbinger of doom.
As it happened, she had good reason to be angry.
21. She Couldn’t Have Known
At the time, Soper’s accusation of Mallon was as vicious as it was outlandish. As Mallon herself noted, everybody “knew” typhoid was everywhere and that it was brought about by contaminated food and water—not healthy people who had never shown a single sign of the illness. But Soper was working on a hunch that proved to be right.
22. She Was A Carrier
Mary Mallon was one of the very first known “carriers” of a disease. That is, she was someone who was asymptomatic of an illness—in her case, typhoid fever—but she nonetheless did carry the illness with her, and could infect other people with it. Soper couldn’t prove it, not without her samples anyway, but to him it seemed like the only explanation.
He would go to great, controversial lengths for vindication.
23. He Reported Her
Soper knew he was right, and that Mallon was a danger to others, if not to her herself. As a result, he notified the New York City Health Department of his findings, which he also published in an article in June of 1907. The department, too, quickly realized that Mary Mallon’s “perfect health” was not everything it appeared to be—and they took desperate measures.
24. She Escaped The Law
Feeling they were out of options, the City descended on Mary Mallon, but she did not go gently. When officers came to arrest her as a public health threat, Mallon managed to evade them for five hours, hiding out. A scrap of her dress, which had gotten caught in the door to where she was hiding, eventually gave her away. And still, she fought.
25. She Resisted Arrest
Mallon was, understandably, still outraged at Soper and now the City’s accusations, and five officers had to force her into an ambulance while a doctor, Sara Josephine Baker, reportedly had to sit on the Irish cook to restrain her while they brought her in. Even so, Mary Mallon’s ordeal was only just beginning.
26. They Forced Her To Comply
Mallon ended up at Willard Parker Hospital, where authorities continued to treat her as a hostile enemy. There, they forcibly restrained and equally forcibly took samples from her at long last. For four full days, she wasn’t even allowed to get up out of bed to use the bathroom on her own, lest she go rogue again.
While the authorities waited for the samples to come back, they asked questions with increasingly alarming answers.
27. Her Hygiene Was Horrible
During the course of their interrogation of Mallon, investigators and hospital personnel questioned the cook on various aspects of her hygiene…and discovered that she almost never washed her hands. Though germ theory wasn’t prevalent in those days and Mallon was far from the only cook to neglect hand washing, it was a sobering answer nonetheless.
In fact, there was a whole lot Mallon’s doctors didn’t know.
28. They Were Fumbling In The Dark
In these early stages of her hospitalization, Mallon underwent psychological torment. Since disease vectors were so little understood, doctors took a long while to comprehend how and why Mallon was a carrier, and they forced her to give samples three times a week while they combed through the results. Then they added insult to injury.
29. They Kept Changing Her Story
While their patient was restrained, questioned, and treated like a science experiment, doctors kept switching up Mallon’s diagnosis. First, they told her the typhoid was residing in her intestinal tract, then switched this to her bowel muscles before finally discovering—through immense amounts of bacteria in her stool—that the source was her gallbladder.
They finally had an answer, but this presented its own issues.
30. She Was In Denial
After pinpointing the source of the typhoid, medical and governmental authorities suggested that Mallon remove her gallbladder if she wanted to continue living normally. Her answer may have surprised them. Once more, Mallon refused. After all, the surgery was dangerous and even fatal at the time—and besides, Mallon still didn’t believe she was a carrier.
Yet that didn’t mean she didn’t have health problems.
31. They Nearly Killed Her
During this time, Mallon suffered from paralysis in her eyelid, but authorities still banned her from seeing an eye doctor for six months while they got a handle on the nature of her contagion. More than that, to “treat” her, they gave her the urinary tract medicine urotropin, which could potentially harm her kidneys, as well as brewer’s yeast.
Mallon tried, and failed, to help herself.
32. They Quarantined Her
Eventually, Mallon wrote a letter to her lawyer complaining that the authorities were treating her like a “guinea pig” and detailing all the back and forth she had been subjected to while they took their samples and performed their tests. Sadly, it did her no good: In March, 1907, the government sent her from the hospital to full quarantine on North Brother Island. Still, Mallon kept fighting.
33. She Tested Negative
Still adamant that she wasn’t a carrier, Mallon solicited the help of a friend and sent some of her samples (voluntarily this time) to an independent laboratory. The results were eye opening. All of these samples came back negative for typhoid. Even more puzzling, while she was on North Brother Island, almost a quarter of her samples for over a year came back negative.
Mallon was proving to be a mystery, and the city soon had enough.
34. They Freed Her
After nearly three years spent in quarantine, Mary Mallon finally got a break. The New York State Commissioner of Health decided that carriers no longer needed to be quarantined, and that Mallon could once more go out into society—provided she avoid transmitting “her” disease to other people, specifically by giving up her work as a cook. Desperate, Mallon signed an affidavit swearing she would find other employment and returned to mainland New York.
It was far from the end of her story, or her tragedy.
35. She Lived On The Edge
Prior to George Soper tracking her down, Mallon lived an extremely precarious life. She owned no home of her own, and so was always on the verge of destitution if just one thing went wrong. More than that, her work as a cook helped her keep the wolf from the door more than any other occupation, as it paid the most. Even so, she committed to her promise. At first.
36. She Lost Her Job
After leaving North Brother Island, Mallon got herself employment as a laundry worker, even though it paid less than half the salary of her cooking work. She nonetheless stuck it out, until disaster struck. During this job, she injured her arm and the wound got infected, putting her out of any and all work for half a year. It was too much for her to take.
37. She Broke Her Promise
After trying for years to avoid cooking work, Mallon broke down and began the more lucrative job once more. More desperate than ever, she worked under fake last names—ones like Breshof or Brown—and accepted employment as a cook anywhere she could, though the higher-end families were now out of her reach.
Mallon, who still didn’t believe her diagnosis, might have thought she’d get away with it. She was wrong.
38. She Played A Game Of Cat And Mouse
For the next while, Mallon toiled mostly in the kitchens of restaurants, hotels, and spas. It was a case of terrible deja vu: Nearly everywhere she was, a typhoid outbreak was sure to follow. Indeed George Soper, who continued to track the outbreaks, saw them and knew that Mary Mallon was cooking once more, but could never manage to nab her before she left the job.
Even so, her final reckoning was around the corner.
39. She Infected A Hospital
In 1915, Mallon took up work at the Sloane Hospital for Women. It was one of her deadliest jobs. Before long, 25 people in the vulnerable establishment were infected, with two of them dying. Alarmed and concerned for the patients, the chief obstetrician called up none other than George Soper and asked him to intervene.
Soper knew exactly what, and who, he was dealing with.
40. Her Nemesis Tracked Her Down
After very little time talking to hospital staff, Soper had confirmed Mallon’s presence in the hospital: People gave verbal descriptions of the cook, and Soper also found her handwriting on site. Her ghostly traces, and her illness, were everywhere, but Mallon herself had already fled. She just couldn’t run forever.
41. They Caught Her Again
In the wake of the hospital outbreak, a full-blown manhunt commenced for Mallon. Eventually, officers were tipped off to her whereabouts after she took food to a friend on Long Island, and they immediately found and arrested her.
Once more, with little ceremony, they shunted her off to North Brother Island for quarantine on March 27, 1915. This time, there was no way out.
42. They Locked Her Away
Mary Mallon never got out of this second quarantine, and would stay on North Brother Island for over 23 years in a private cottage the authorities designated for her. Besides some supervised trips to the mainland, Mallon spent most of her time working as a lab technician for a physician on the island, washing bottles and preparing glasses.
But outside her small, static world, things were changing.
43. Public Opinion Turned
Where newspapers originally decried Mallon for carelessly infecting those around her, her decades in this second quarantine presented a different story. Now, the press empathized with Mallon and instead began criticizing the health department for their treatment of her, all while health officials defended themselves by saying that Mallon still refused to comply with their requests.
In any case, by then the damage was done.
44. She Hated Her Nickname
Around the time of her first quarantine, the press had dubbed Mallon “Typhoid Mary,” the name she is still infamous for today. But her own reaction to it was heartbreaking. Mallon hated the term and, speaking of bacteriologist Dr William Park, wrote to her lawyer saying,
“I wonder how the said Dr William H Park would like to be insulted and put in the Journal and call him or his wife Typhoid William Park”.
Still, she saved her worst anger for George Soper.
45. She Despised Publicity
At one point, George Soper visited Mallon while she was in quarantine and brought up the idea of writing a book about her and the unusual way her body dealt with typhoid fever, even suggesting she get part of the royalties. But Mallon was having none of Soper profiting off her pain: She flew into a rage, rejected the proposal, and locked herself in a bathroom until Soper left.
Then again, once more, she had every right to be furious.
46. She Wasn’t The Only One
Estimates put Mallon’s toll at 51 to 122 infected people, with three confirmed deaths and as many as 50 fatalities, but by her second quarantine she wasn’t even the only known carrier of typhoid fever. Other carriers that came after Mallon included Jennie Barmore, or “Typhoid Jennie”; Tony Labella, who caused more than 100 cases; and an Adirondack guide called “Typhoid John”.
Mallon wasn’t unique, she was just the first carrier they found. And that’s not all.
47. They Unfairly Punished Her
As it happens, it’s not extremely rare to be a carrier of typhoid fever: Up to 6% of people who’ve had typhoid become carriers themselves, and there were hundreds of carriers in New York during Mallon’s time. If we think about it country-wide, there were thousands of carriers in the United States. Yet for all that, Mallon was the only one forcibly quarantined.
48. She May Have Contracted It As A Baby
Although we may never know how and when Mallon contracted typhoid, there’s a real possibility it was always with her. One theory suggests that her mother, who contracted typhoid while she was pregnant with Mallon, passed it onto her baby, and Mallon came into the world with the destructive potential inside her.
It doesn’t mean she deserved her fate.
49. She Had A Tragic Decline
Mallon’s end was as tragic as her beginnings. In 1932, when she was in her 60s, she suffered from a stroke and never completely recovered. With half her body paralyzed, Mallon spent the next six years nearly bedridden before perishing from pneumonia in 1938 at the age of 69. Despite her infamy in life, only nine people attended her funeral.
50. She Fought Her Fate
Decades after Mallon's death, historians now believe almost everything we knew about her is completely wrong. They cite her case as a lesson in medical ethics, public health, and how to treat the ill, pointing out that New York health officials had identified some 400 other healthy carriers of Salmonella typhi, but that she was the only one punished. Some came to the conclusion that "This case highlighted the problematic nature of the subject and the need for an enhanced medical and legal-social treatment model aimed at improving the status of disease carriers and limiting their impact on society". Mallon actually taught doctors how to identify asymptomatic carriers of not just typhoid, but other diseases—and was punished for it.
To this day, Mary Mallon’s story is a pressure point for ethics in public health, with many experts—even during Mallon’s time—believing her forced quarantines were unnecessary and unnecessarily damaging. For Mallon, there was no question: She hated, as she said, being a “peep show for every body,” and thought of herself as a “kidnapped woman”.
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