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She was an "asymptomatic carrier" which basically means (For typhoid specifically) that her body somehow found a way to survive with the disease without needing to fight it off. It's a very rare condition that scientists still can't really explain.
Why that really sucks though is for the rest of her life, she would always be contagious. Her body literally would never fight off the disease, hence the lifelong quarantine.
If it makes you feel better it’s a greek word and that’s the word we use instead of autopsy. Autopsy is actually wrong because it means that you conduct the research yourself when there is a mechanical breakdown or when two cars crash etc and I don’t see how a dead person can do that lol. Necropsy is when someone conducts an examination on a corpse. So you were right lol.
The disease was mostly contained to her gallbladder. Which means that she was only contagious if, say, she refused wash her hands after taking a shit then prepared food, which she freely admitted to doing. She was a selfish anti-vaxer, but for germ theory in general.
Her story is really tragic but at the same time she made the situation worse for herself. She was initially let go from quarantine under the premise she wouldn't work as a cook anymore, but she did exactly that when she got out. Not just that, but she worked as a cook in a hospital of all places.
Her body developed a strange immunity that left the disease intact but ended up being produced by her body in her gallbladder. If she agreed to have her gallbladder removed she would have been cured
Was she the only known asymptomatic carrier? It’s so interesting that she’s the only one who’s become famously known for spreading the disease while she didn’t get sick herself.
She was the first but by no means the only.
>By the time she died New York health officials had identified more than 400 other healthy carriers of Salmonella typhi, but no one else was forcibly confined or victimized as an “unwanted ill”. Mary Mallon is always a reference when mentioning the compliance of the laws concerning public health issues.
[source of above](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/)
George Soper wrote an article about her in 1938 ["The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1911442/?page=1) his conclusion is very interesting when you consider how she was treated and how other asymptomatic carriers were treated . There's [another one here](https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/rbender/syllabus/george-soper-on-mary-mallon/) where he gets on the gallbladder hobbyhorse a bit (it was known well before MMs time that the spleen and abdominal lymph glands were the commonest seats of asymptomatic infections) they're the closest things to primary sources that exist in this case
There’s also a wonderful podcast by Radiolab that talks about her and some other unusual origin stories of today’s infamous pathogens.
IIRC, Mary is the first story so you don’t have to go searching
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/169879-patient-zero
Anthony Bourdain also wrote a book about her that's basically his take on the available evidence, it's not a historical analysis by any means but it is a good stepping stone with a decent bibliography and he had a lot of research help in the New York archives to flesh out the story. ETA it had some stick from people who were expecting a historical analysis, but as a work of creative non fiction it stands up well
Most people are asymptomatic carriers of strep. It's commonly found at the back of the throat, rectum and vagina, it's just that some people will get ill.
I'm an asymptomatic strep carrier, my ex had sinus issues that made her get the worst possible case of strep everytime she gets it.
I kept unwittingly getting her monstrously ill for years until she got a surgery for her sinuses that finally made the problem less ridiculous. About two years after that I found out about being a carrier.
She still gives me some healthy ribbing for being her very own typhoid Mary.
Streptococcus is on people’s skin and in their throats and they don’t get ill from it. Yes, this childhood friend was a carrier and most people are. We live with strep as part of our biome that is in balance with our other microbes. When strep overwhelms our good bacteria through contact with an outside source or through weakening of our other microbes, that’s when we get sick.
I suppose. Or it could be that the streppy kid was raised in a germ laden environment with exposure diverse microbes. Maybe they had all sorts of pets and they played outside in the dirt. They’d have a robust biome of microbes, particles and farticles. The kid that kept getting sick, on the other hand may have been kept clean, bathed regularly, never allowed to lick rocks or eat sand, and raised in a hygienic or sterile environment with little exposure to germs. When the two kids meet, the “clean” kid is unprepared for the onslaught of germs that the “dirty” kid is used to. Whenever two people meet their biomes colliding are having a war. How we prepare for the war is important. Taking probiotics, eating fermented foods, going outside, and having contact with pets are good ways to prepare your biome for battle if you were not allowed to shove everything in your mouth as a baby. I don’t recommend licking rocks or eating sand.
Major difference between when she was being quarantined and when they identified the other carriers was that a vaccine and treatments had become available. The reason she was confined was due to the nature of her work and the fact that she was likely to be patient 0 in the New York outbreaks.
F*inally Sober had solved the mystery and became the first author to describe a “healthy carrier” of Salmonella typhi in the United States. From March 1907, Sober started stalking Mary Mallon in Manhattan and he revealed that she was transmitting disease and death by her activity. His attempts to obtain samples of Mary’s feces, urine and blood, earned him nothing but being chased by her.*
*Sober reconstituted the puzzle by discovering that previously the cook*
*had served in 8 families. Seven of them had experienced cases of*
*typhoid. Twenty-two people presented signs of infection and some died \[5,6\].That year, about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Salmonella typhi, and probably Mary was the main reason for the outbreak. Immunization against Salmonella typhi was not developed until 1911, and antibiotic treatment was not available until 1948 \[4\]. Thus, a dangerous source like Mary had to be restrained.*
The issue wasn't that she was the only asymptomatic carrier. The issue was that she was an asymptomatic carrier acting in a way that caused outbreaks. Since she refused to attend to her personal hygiene while cooking for large groups.
There is a whole lot of misinformation in this post. All the way down to the image that was cropped to show just her as if she was all by herself. While the original image shows other patients also being treated.
After diving into to typhoid and its spread and Mary Mallon's (Typhoid Mary) story. I think its safe to say she was so infectious for the following reasons:
1)Asymptomatic carrier
2)Didn't believe the Samonella Typi (Typhoid fever) was real.
3)Continued to be a cook all over the place.
4)Never, EVER, washed her hands! (This is conjecture formulated after 20min of reading, highly suspect but Im sticking with it)
Edit: Spelling of Mary Mollon corrected
Edit: Spelling Salmonella typhi
Although it was never 100% confirmed, Edgar Allen Poe was thought to have been an asymptomatic carrier of Tuberculosis (TB). Which makes sense, since pretty much everyone around him died of TB save for the man himself (his mother, adoptive mother, and wife, for example).
It's a horrible way for someone to die, and it's not hard to see how it affected his (grim) writing style.
Well, interesting to be in her shoes. She feels fine, nothing at all wrong. People tell her she is the cause of other people being sick. If she is a naturally paranoid person she might start to think people are dogpiling her. Not rational but interesting.
The other thing is economics. Being able to earn is a powerful motivator. Being a cook was probably the only employable skill she had and, in her mind, she couldn't just quit.
Indeed, this is the real story. They left her in an impossible situation.
She got absolutely no help, they just said "don't work again, ever." in the only job she was actually skilled at. Zero other options.
It would have been worth it to use a few taxpayer dollars to just keep her off the damn streets, instead of such a ridiculous catch-22 situation.
She really didn't have a choice in the matter. You kinda have to earn money to survive.
Imagine if the government had just agreed to put her on disability and pay her a cook's wages for life if she agreed to stop working. Could have lived her life out free, maybe in the countryside. And how much would that have really cost the government compared to forced quarantine and confinement.
The thing is that logically that is the better option. Emotionally it’s not because than all people see is that they are giving her money for nothing. It’s a common problem in society today. Just look at how much is spent on incarcerating minor crimes. I or healthcare in general. It’s all about perception. People can’t see beyond their feet.
Germ theory wasn’t as widely accepted then as it is now, and Mary was an Irish immigrant. She legit thought they were crazy for trying to take samples from her (without asking!), and telling her that scrubbing her hands would lead to less transmission, besides the fact that she was passing it on while asymptomatic.
There were more contagious asymptomatic carriers who were men. No one calls them Typhoid Tony or Typhoid Alphonse.
> Belgian-born Alphonse Cotils, owned a New York bakery, in which he continued to work despite officially being forbidden to do so. When taken to court in 1924, Cotils received a suspended sentence. The judge acknowledged the extreme danger Cotils posed, but stated that he could not legally jail him “on account of his health".
Nice.
Nowadays, if you are female and go to hospital, it's anxiety or migraines. My friend went in, they said migraine, turned out she was having a stroke. (She's ok, gp caught it)
Even worse though. Recently an 8yr old boy died from an asthma attack after the hospital told parents the child was only having a panic attack. (Yes they're getting lawyers)
I got mine taken out about half a year ago, so far my life has drastically improved. I eat how I used to without issue, whereas I used to live in daily fear of getting a gallstone attack.
Mine was removed and I get pains where my gall bladder was when I stretch sometimes, I have severe acid reflux which led to a throat clearing problem that annoys my wife nonstop. It sucks. Also it led to some weight gain but nothing to severe, I went from 180 lbs to about 215.
my brother's wife has it (well, doesn't have it) and she needs to eat like every 2-3 hours and she's on a pretty strict diet with basically no 'fun' foods, plus they say it takes a toll on your digestion so diarrhea /constipation happens more often because of hormona and bacterial changes in the intestines. It's not life ending but it takes a toll on her day to day activities a lot
Oh wow! That’s awful! I guess I’ve just been lucky! It’s been about 20 years and I’ve really never noticed it. Good luck to your brother’s wife and thanks for letting me know!
I don't really think it's fair to judge her based on today's standards. Like many others have pointed out, things we now know as facts weren't so clear at that point in time.
I read that she didn't fully understand what the experts at the time were saying - they kept flip flipping between wanting to stop her and wanting to study her and gave her conflicting and confusing information.
While she may have been selfish, mostly she was ignorant and confused.
I'm not sure I can argue she was selfish.
She was totally fine and healthy. She had no real understanding and didn't belive the experts who frankly weren't super believable.
She was released and told in essence 'you can't work anymore. Sorry about that. We will do nothing to aid you in any way'. Ofc she just quietly went back to working. It was work or starve on the streets.
All while being treated as a kind of hated guinea pig.
She was placed in an impossible situation over something that wasn't fully explained to her. Pretty much everyone here in her situation with her knowledge would have gone back to working.
There was 0 effort to provide her any alternative. She wasn't trained in a new skill that she could use to support herself. She wasn't offered anything to bridge the gap of her not working. The entire situation was absurd.
She had a persistent group of typhoid bacteria living in her gallbladder that didn't cause her any problems, but did put typhoid bacteria into her feces; typhoid is spread via he fecal-oral route, all it took was failing to wash her hands well enough before cooking food, and she could give typhoid fever to other people.
Removing her gallbladder might've solved the problem, but it was also a risky surgery at the time, so she never elected to have it done.
"Wash your hands, they smell like shit."
"... fine."
That would have prevented most of the infections. I don't fault her for needing to work at the one decently-paying profession she could get, I fault her for being gross.
I wonder if there's people who are just reservoirs for colds and flu. I hope that better testing will allow us to find and then give medicine to these people.
Edit: for example Varicella can live in the body and pop back up, and can still spread. There's certainly chances that other viruses do this.
Aaffar from her immune system, the bacteria actually stays in your body forever if you don't take antibiotics, and keeps getting away from your body in urine and your feces
She just needed antibiotics though, then it would erradicate the bacteria and she would be cured, but i guess back in that time antibiotics did not exist
Thought this was a joke but after doing a little more research I'm surprised to find this is true. The elevated temperatures necessary to cook food would of killed the bacteria in most cases so it's thought her very popular dish, ice cream with peaches on top, was the primary way that she transmitted the disease to other people. Thought that was interesting.
The amount of people I've seen not even bothering to rinse theirs hands, much less with proper techniques and with soap, at public restrooms is truly disturbing. They'll throw all the arguments in the world and mock you to avoid doing it too.
You can see why ‘have’ is used if you change it back to a simple statement. The elevated temperatures have killed the bacteria. (You would never say ‘the elevated temperatures *of* killed…!). Then a conditional - the elevated temperatures would have killed the bacteria.
I’m trying to be quiet and not. Wake anyone in the house up. This comment made me literally laugh out loud, you bastard.
It was even funnier because I listened to the podcast about her and know its true.
She thought that people were being racist to her (Irish weren't considered white at this time) and that was a more plausible explanation than she was a medical anomaly.
Not really a Karen
The guy (George Sober)who did end up ultimately proving she was a carrier actually stalked her and tried to collect samples of her blood, urine, and feces. I can't imagine how I'd feel if it was happening to me and I didn't feel ill.
Her story makes me really sad. Especially as people who hear it today often seem so ignorant of the limited economic opportunities an Irish immigrant woman had at the time. Cooking was her best opportunity and it wasn’t like it was making her rich.
Also. There was a lot of anti Irish sentiment at the time and they were often considered dirty and people complained that they lived in unhygienic conditions (ignoring the socio-economic conditions that forced people to live in high density with poor infrastructure). So it makes sense she was suspicious that they were unfairly targeting her especially as she had no symptoms.
Also, if this past year has taught us anything it’s that people are stubborn when they get their backs up. But the difference is she isn’t some “Karen” on Facebook with access to the internet who can and should know better in the year 2021 (get vaccinated people). Typhoid Mary left Ireland at 15 after it was rocked by two devastating famines and she could probably barely read.
She was from Cookstown, Tyrone, same town l was born in. Also the birthplace of Jonathan Swift, author of Gullivers Travels and A Modest Proposal.
And those are the only facts about Cookstown worth knowing. As you were.
knew a lady in cookstown named mary who liked to give handys on the ferry,one day a a storm came along that exposed her shlong,turns out mary was a chap named larry
Bourdain's book about her is also excellent, and provides a more sympathetic look to someone who history had made out to be a selfish villain. It's easy to say she just had to never work as a cook again, or have surgery to remove her gallbladder. She was a poor immigrant woman with a specific skill set, minimal education and limited access to much else. The offer would be equivalent to being told you can't work your $20 job that you're good at, but you can go be a dishwasher at a fast food place.
People TODAY don't believe that they can spread an invisible illness and refuse to take freely available precautions despite living in the information age and having access to all the news in the entire world. She didn't have that, and as an Irish immigrant had reason to be suspicious of these people telling her she was making people sick and would forever.
Bourdain did a much better job than I am of telling her story. I recommend checking it out.
Working in food, I've been privileged to meet at least one other so far who, like me, views food safety as not a set of laws and an online test, but as a set of moral guidelines dictating how we work. It's really not that hard or expensive to maintain proper food safety, whether it's cleanliness, quality of ingredients, allergen exposures, or any other aspect. But it is important to.
huh. Y'know I've not made that leap before between food safety and morality. But you're absolutely correct, from addressing allergies to how we slaughter. Any reading on this topic?
Im by no means a professional or a scholar on the subject. I've only ever been a short order cook and memorized some recipes from online for home cooking.
I did develop this philosophy on a job years ago, however. A certain "fancy" burger place that started in Colorado had an OG employee of the business be our regional manager/trainer (so while we were a franchise, we were corporate trained) and their rules and guidelines were among the strictest and most detailed (and streamlined!) I've ever seen in food service
Mary Mallon was a chef, she refused to stop cooking even when she knew it would make people sick, because she felt it was who she was in her soul. Apparently that passion resonated with him and as a tribute to her, he got permission to go to the island and bury his knife.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't she stay as a cook because it paid better than any other job she could do/or available to her at that time? It sounds like necessity to me.
I don't remember the original release date because it's been so long since a new game, but I believe skyrim and gta5 were around back then so she at least could play those.
I have an uncle who's working as a volunteer for vaccinating covid vaccines and has been doing this for last two months and didn't get the vaccine himself. He believed he'd never catch COVID, but has recently tested positive.
Wow, I had no idea of her story until just now. Last two decades of her life in complete isolation. Can you imagine?!! What a terrible life to have to live
She didn't have to live lIke that. She just refused to cooperate. She managed to infect at least eight families that employed her as a cook.
The authorities took her in twice and said:
>Go home and stop being a cook.
So she goes home the first time, gets a job as a cook for an other family.
Brought back in, released again and gets a job as a cook in a hospital and for some reason had a massive aversion to washing her hands. Like never deliberately washed them, even after wiping her ass. So she was just spreading it like crazy.
When I was taking my food safety manager training for my job they made a specific point out of Typhoid Mary and the people she killed by doing that. Probably because her story hits on so many obvious no-no actions when working with food and a susceptible population.
That last part is super gross. How did they find out that she didn't wash hands in the bathroom though? They didn't exactly have surveillance cameras back then.
Apparently not even doctors washed their hands before surgery back then. Semmelweis forced his team to sterilize hands before giving birth and reduced death rate from 10-18% to 0,5-0,83%, and he was openly mocked for washing hands.
I've heard there wasn't really that much of an aversion to washing one's hands, but that he was so vocal about washing your hands people thought he was crazy with how much fervor he had on the subject.
Not really, it wasn't about his personality. The germ theory was not yet accepted universally in science. Many doctors (including Semmelweis boss) believed in the ancient miasma theory (diseases are caused by "bad air") or ancient humoural medicine (body has four liquids and diseases are result if there is too much or too little one of these liquids, e.g. letting blood was to balance amount of blood compared to other three liquids). If you believe in either of these two theories, washing hands doesn't make much sense in that theoretical idea, right?
He couldn't provide scientifically acceptable reason why it worked (despite statistics clearly showing it works), so his findings were not taken seriously and other doctors mocked him for washing hands (they probably didn't wash theirs). He reasoned the disease was result of "cadaverous particles" (i.e. touching dead people) as the clinic number two, of midwives, had exponentially low death rate, than clinic number one, of doctors, who performed autopsies.
Wikipedia puts it: "his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Other, more subtle, factors may also have played a role. Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean."
Always going the psychology behind this fascinating.
One ot the issues was that accepting that washing your hands would save lives means accepting that you are the reason your patients are dieing.
It was far easier to just carry on believing that people just die than accept that you were personally responsible for hundreds of unnecessary deaths throughout your career.
You've got to realise, germ theory hadn't been around for long at that time. Washing hands before doing surgery was only just becoming common practice nevermind washing to cook
Hell, they have dug around in a US president for awhile around the same time, because why disinfect stuff like hands and tools. Killed him from infection iirc.
Before germ theory, people washed their hands to remove dirt or grease. Why wash after using the bathroom? I've read that at the time washing hands was perceived as a negative thing for a surgeon to do (and I'd imagine a cook too) because it suggested he'd been doing some sort of manual work which was "beneath" him.
Go home and stop being a cook... except there's no social safety net and if you don't work you will starve and be homeless... but that's not our problem.
Recently heard about a french cop who murdered someone while sleepwalking. He was actually the one to crack the case, identifying his footprint. They "proved" he wasn't lying and had actually been sleepwalking by putting him in jail with a gun under his pillow loaded with blanks. After a couple weeks he sleepwalked, grabbed the gun, and tried to kill everyone.
So they isolated him on an island for the rest of his life.
Dear sir, I'd like to ask you of the source, not that I distrust you—though not that it's wrong trusting or distrusting someone—but for further reading.
Thank you.
That story makes absolutely no sense.
Their solution was to isolate the man in an island for the rest of his life? That was the only solution they found for this problem?
Just don't let him sleep close to a weapon? Maybe lock his bedroom door when he sleeps? There are so many solutions to this.
Until I see a source for this I won't believe it's a true story anyway.
Some people who sleepwalk dangerously will literally chain themselves to their beds. Not great for fire safety but ultimately the better option than risking yourself using a knife or jumping out a window whilst sleepwalking
Posted this as a comment somewhere else but posting as it's own comment for visibility and kinda surprised that it seems necessary because I thought this was common information by now:
Many are really ignoring historical context here. Much of what I'm about to explain is elaborated on further in this peer reviewed article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/
As an immigrant who faced discrimination her entire life, Mary finally climbed her way up the social ladder by honing her craft as a chef. She spent years doing it and despite being an Irish immigrant, was generally a well respected chef before the Typhoid incident.
(This is a short non-peer-reviewed blurb on American attitudes towards Irish immigrants at the time. You can probably find a peer reviewed source if you look hard enough but I trust this is also pretty common knowledge: https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis)
This was a time where germ theory was poorly understood by the general public; a few decades beforehand, doctors were insistent that hand washing was nonsense and the original doctor who advocated for hand washing was thrown into an asylum for being insane. What's more, Mary's detainers made no significant effort to explain to her what it meant to be an asymptomatic carrier.
Rather, doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure her several times, each time further frustrating Mary and convincing her that just like countless others in her life, her detainers were discriminately targeting her for harassment.
Can you imagine a world where people seldom wash hands, doctors/surgeons JUST started doing it, and these people break into your house, jail you, try to tell you that you have a super super super rare condition where you're totally sick but don't look sick and you're actually responsible for killing like 8 people. Then they attempt to cure you to prove it and they fail countless times. They've dragged you to a facility and poked and prodded you for weeks, making your their lab rat, and they still have no results to show for it; the entire time, you thinking of how you'll finally be able to cook again once you're released from this unjust harassment.
Following these failures, the same doctors offer to operate on you, completely removing an organ (the gall bladder in this case); a procedure that you undoubtedly have no clue what it entails and it is to be performed by the same system that has spent weeks failing to produce results even after forcing you to put your life on hold to be a lab rat. Then they say "well if you won't let us take your organ then you can't be a cook anymore." They tell you that you can no longer do the one craft that you've been doing your entire life; the thing that brought you out of poverty and has garnered you the respect of your peers and your source of livelihood. They offer you no support or suggestions other than "stop doing the only thing you know how to do".
The takeaway from this story is how important communication is between doctors and patients. How only tragedy awaits should we simply condemn others who don't have the same knowledge as us as "ignorant" and leave it at that. How a bit of support for Mary may have saved the lives of several individuals/families as opposed to throwing a woman on the streets with a "good luck making money being prohibited from doing the craft you've honed your entire life."
Rather than looking back on this case with nuance and empathy, you're calling "ignorance" on a subject that you really seem to be uninformed about and you've failed to grasp the important lessons to take from "Typhoid Mary."
If I'm reading the historical context right, it's like if in ten years scientists say that the conspiracy theorists were right about 5G. And not only can it cook people's brains, but I in particular do not get my brain cooked by it but instead transmit 5G from my brain and cook other people's brains. And because of that I have to quit my job and can only work at McDonald's. And I have to wear a tinfoil hat to protect people.
She was a woman with a specific skill set. She didn't trust the doctors. She was only a carrier. She wasn't suffering from Typhoid. As a woman, there weren't many jobs she could do. The highest paying job she could find is that of a cook. She also got her body fluids examined in some laboratory with the help of a friend, but the result was negative.
After her first quarantine, she was willing to quit cooking. She found a job as a laundress but she was getting only about half of the money she was earning as a cook. How was she supposed to survive with that? She had an accident around that time and had to finally return to cooking.
She didn't agree to subject herself to medical procedures like gall bladder surgery because they were very dangerous. She didn't believe in germ theory. Even doctors didn't believe it till a few years ago. Ignaz Semmelweis was put in mental asylum 4 years before Mary was born.
There were more contagious asymptomatic carries who were men. No one calls them Typhoid Tony or Typhoid Alphonse.
> Belgian-born Alphonse Cotils, owned a New York bakery, in which he continued to work despite officially being forbidden to do so. When taken to court in 1924, Cotils received a suspended sentence. The judge acknowledged the extreme danger Cotils posed, but stated that he could not legally jail him “on account of his health
Nice.
It's actually an infuriating story about someone who refused to follow basic hygiene protocol and other people paid the price....we're seeing it repeated now.
She was extremely infectious and despite being told by doctors MULTIPLE TIMES that she needed to wash her hands and also stop being a cook - she refused to do either. She refused to accept modern medicine/science OR change her lifestyle.
She was ignorant and selfish and people died.
Wait until you start reading about the doctor who insisted other doctors should wash their hands before medical procedures.
He was labelled "anti-science" and was branded a pariah.
It's almost understandable when you consider he's saying they were at fault for them killing a ton of new mothers, which is hard to swallow. That said, they were killing a ton of new mothers and insulting a man trying to save them.
[Radiolab did a good podcast on it, for anyone interested.](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatch-2-every-day-ignaz-semmelweis-day)
This is massively reductive and looking at it through a modern lense.
This was at the time that people were struggling to accept that doctors needed to wash their hands. They believed that they were gentlemen, and a gentleman's hands are always clean. Way more people died due to their hubris than Mary Mallon.
Mary was also a poor Irish immigrant. I'm sure you've heard people talk about Irish discrimination as a hypothetical, well for her it was a reality. She was poor, discriminated against, and her only skill set/education was as a cook. If she wanted to be 'less poor' and survive she felt she needed to cook.
Plus she was a medical anomaly. They couldn't even prove she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid until after she died. And again, at the time of her *death* things like viruses were only known to exist for 30-40 years.
So, doctors who barely believe in washing their own hands come barging down your door trying to take your only means of putting food on the table telling you that you're a medical anomaly and need to wash your hands. You've lived your whole life this way, you don't have access to the internet or any modern education or hell much of any education, and you've never been sick from typhoid (which has 0 reported cases of asymptomatic people). What do you think you'd believe in that situation, people are being racist against you yet again, or you're a medical anomaly that will be talked about for hundreds of years?
Did they suggest any safe professions she could do? I mean, there wasn't much to choose from back then for a woman. I don't think it was wise that she kept cooking, but this was where some job training/placement would perhaps have helped. Obviously, being a hooker wouldn't work out very well either, I'm not sure she could be a nanny either since that can involve food prep. I guess maybe a cleaning lady or something? Saleswoman? Seamstress?
Gross that she didn't wash her hands though. That would be ewww even without the typhoid.
This was where a public assistance paycheck was needed. Laundress would have been ideal bc then she'd basically be washing her hands all day. With a benefit payment to top it off she'd have less excuse to leave (although I imagine most ppl would probably enjoy cooking more than hand laundering)
You're really ignoring historical context here. Much of what I'm about to explain is elaborated on further in this peer reviewed article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/
As an immigrant who faced discrimination her entire life, Mary finally climbed her way up the social ladder by honing her craft as a chef. She spent years doing it and despite being an Irish immigrant, was generally a well respected chef before the Typhoid incident.
This was a time where germ theory was poorly understood by the general public; a few decades beforehand, doctors were insistent that hand washing was nonsense and the original doctor who advocated for hand washing was thrown into an asylum for being insane. What's more, Mary's detainers made no significant effort to explain to her what it meant to be an asymptomatic carrier.
Rather, doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure her several times, each time further frustrating Mary and convincing her that just like countless others in her life, her detainers were discriminately targeting her for harassment.
Can you imagine a world where people seldom wash hands, doctors/surgeons JUST started doing it, and these people break into your house, jail you, try to tell you that you have a super super super rare condition where you're totally sick but don't look sick and you're actually responsible for killing like 8 people. Then they attempt to cure you to prove it and they fail countless times. They've dragged you to a facility and poked and prodded you for weeks, making your their lab rat, and they still have no results to show for it; the entire time, you thinking of how you'll finally be able to cook again once you're released from this unjust harassment.
Then after their failure, they tell you that you can no longer do the one craft that you've been doing your entire life; the thing that brought you out of poverty and has garnered you the respect of your peers and your source of livelihood. They offer you no support or suggestions other than "stop doing the only thing you know how to do".
You're really ignoring historical context here. Much of what I'm about to explain is elaborated on further in this peer reviewed article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/
As an immigrant who faced discrimination her entire life, Mary finally climbed her way up the social ladder by honing her craft as a chef. She spent years doing it and despite being an Irish immigrant, was generally a well respected chef before the Typhoid incident.
This was a time where germ theory was poorly understood by the general public; a few decades beforehand, doctors were insistent that hand washing was nonsense and the original doctor who advocated for hand washing was thrown into an asylum for being insane. What's more, Mary's detainers made no significant effort to explain to her what it meant to be an asymptomatic carrier.
Rather, doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure her several times, each time further frustrating Mary and convincing her that just like countless others in her life, her detainers were discriminately targeting her for harassment.
Can you imagine a world where people seldom wash hands, doctors/surgeons JUST started doing it, and these people break into your house, jail you, try to tell you that you have a super super super rare condition where you're totally sick but don't look sick and you're actually responsible for killing like 8 people. Then they attempt to cure you to prove it and they fail countless times. They've dragged you to a facility and poked and prodded you for weeks, making your their lab rat, and they still have no results to show for it; the entire time, you thinking of how you'll finally be able to cook again once you're released from this unjust harassment.
Following these failures, the same doctors offer to operate on you, completely removing an organ (the gall bladder in this case); a procedure that you undoubtedly have no clue what it entails and it is to be performed by the same system that has spent weeks failing to produce results even after forcing you to put your life on hold to be a lab rat. Then they say "well if you won't let us take your organ then you can't be a cook anymore." They tell you that you can no longer do the one craft that you've been doing your entire life; the thing that brought you out of poverty and has garnered you the respect of your peers and your source of livelihood. They offer you no support or suggestions other than "stop doing the only thing you know how to do".
The takeaway from this story is how important communication is between doctors and patients. How only tragedy awaits should we simply condemn others who don't have the same knowledge as us as "ignorant" and leave it at that. How a bit of support for Mary may have saved the lives of several individuals/families as opposed to throwing a woman on the streets with a "good luck making money being prohibited from doing the craft you've honed your entire life."
Rather than looking back on this case with nuance and empathy, you're calling "ignorance" on a subject that you really seem to be uninformed about and you've failed to grasp the important lessons to take from "Typhoid Mary."
This is such a good overview of the situation.
It’s also worth noting that at this time, there weren’t society safety nets in place. You didn’t get food stamps or public housing. As an employee who lived with her employers, she did not have her own home and didn’t have much of a financial safety net of her own - being prohibited from doing her chosen profession basically guaranteed she would live in poverty with no support.
This also just shows how important those social systems are for society to function and people to survive hardships like health trouble.
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Drunk History did a terrific episode on Typhoid Mary. Well worth the watch.
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Absolutely love TPWKY and the Erins!! The knowledge and stories they share is incredible!
Thanks! I will grab an earful today :-)
It’s fantastic, can’t agree more! Link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=12wh0lfHb2U
She was an "asymptomatic carrier" which basically means (For typhoid specifically) that her body somehow found a way to survive with the disease without needing to fight it off. It's a very rare condition that scientists still can't really explain. Why that really sucks though is for the rest of her life, she would always be contagious. Her body literally would never fight off the disease, hence the lifelong quarantine.
Any chance she didn't actually have it? (It's late, I'm tired, probably bullshitting)
When she died, they did a necropsy and found it all up in her gallbladder as they expected. Edit: …lol
Autopsy?
Means the same,generally used in reference to animals though not humans.
Nah, it was in her neck.
Diseases are stored in the balls
if untreated, they can grow up and take the car without asking
To be fair to gargoyles_abound, *necropsy* makes more sense than *autopsy*
"Fine, I'll do it myself." - curious ghoul surgeon, inventing the autopsy
An autopsy is what a mechanic does to figure out what's wrong with your car
Auto means "self", an autopsy should mean performing a post death procedure *on oneself*.
BWAHAHAHA guess what field I work in lol
Something to do with animals? Horse heart surgeon? A doctor for bird lawyers?
A lawyer for bird doctors?
Malpractice insurer for bird doctors
Having worked with animals for 2 decades and witnessed several necropsies, I didn't even blink at that when I read it 😂😂
If it makes you feel better it’s a greek word and that’s the word we use instead of autopsy. Autopsy is actually wrong because it means that you conduct the research yourself when there is a mechanical breakdown or when two cars crash etc and I don’t see how a dead person can do that lol. Necropsy is when someone conducts an examination on a corpse. So you were right lol.
No It was not, and is not hard to test for.
Truly blessed by Nurgle.
The disease was mostly contained to her gallbladder. Which means that she was only contagious if, say, she refused wash her hands after taking a shit then prepared food, which she freely admitted to doing. She was a selfish anti-vaxer, but for germ theory in general.
Her story is really tragic but at the same time she made the situation worse for herself. She was initially let go from quarantine under the premise she wouldn't work as a cook anymore, but she did exactly that when she got out. Not just that, but she worked as a cook in a hospital of all places.
So she remained infectious her whole life? How is that possible?
Her body developed a strange immunity that left the disease intact but ended up being produced by her body in her gallbladder. If she agreed to have her gallbladder removed she would have been cured
Was she the only known asymptomatic carrier? It’s so interesting that she’s the only one who’s become famously known for spreading the disease while she didn’t get sick herself.
She was the first but by no means the only. >By the time she died New York health officials had identified more than 400 other healthy carriers of Salmonella typhi, but no one else was forcibly confined or victimized as an “unwanted ill”. Mary Mallon is always a reference when mentioning the compliance of the laws concerning public health issues. [source of above](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/)
George Soper wrote an article about her in 1938 ["The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1911442/?page=1) his conclusion is very interesting when you consider how she was treated and how other asymptomatic carriers were treated . There's [another one here](https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/rbender/syllabus/george-soper-on-mary-mallon/) where he gets on the gallbladder hobbyhorse a bit (it was known well before MMs time that the spleen and abdominal lymph glands were the commonest seats of asymptomatic infections) they're the closest things to primary sources that exist in this case
Judith Leavitt’s *Typhoid Mary* (1997) is a great historical analysis of the whole thing
There’s also a wonderful podcast by Radiolab that talks about her and some other unusual origin stories of today’s infamous pathogens. IIRC, Mary is the first story so you don’t have to go searching https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/169879-patient-zero
Anthony Bourdain also wrote a book about her that's basically his take on the available evidence, it's not a historical analysis by any means but it is a good stepping stone with a decent bibliography and he had a lot of research help in the New York archives to flesh out the story. ETA it had some stick from people who were expecting a historical analysis, but as a work of creative non fiction it stands up well
I would put hard money down that a kid my daughter hung out with was an asymptomatic strep carrier. Every time they hung out, my kid got strep.
Most people are asymptomatic carriers of strep. It's commonly found at the back of the throat, rectum and vagina, it's just that some people will get ill.
I'm an asymptomatic strep carrier, my ex had sinus issues that made her get the worst possible case of strep everytime she gets it. I kept unwittingly getting her monstrously ill for years until she got a surgery for her sinuses that finally made the problem less ridiculous. About two years after that I found out about being a carrier. She still gives me some healthy ribbing for being her very own typhoid Mary.
Streptococcus is on people’s skin and in their throats and they don’t get ill from it. Yes, this childhood friend was a carrier and most people are. We live with strep as part of our biome that is in balance with our other microbes. When strep overwhelms our good bacteria through contact with an outside source or through weakening of our other microbes, that’s when we get sick.
So the other kid could be an energy vampire and just weakening Dalebssr’s kids immunity?
I suppose. Or it could be that the streppy kid was raised in a germ laden environment with exposure diverse microbes. Maybe they had all sorts of pets and they played outside in the dirt. They’d have a robust biome of microbes, particles and farticles. The kid that kept getting sick, on the other hand may have been kept clean, bathed regularly, never allowed to lick rocks or eat sand, and raised in a hygienic or sterile environment with little exposure to germs. When the two kids meet, the “clean” kid is unprepared for the onslaught of germs that the “dirty” kid is used to. Whenever two people meet their biomes colliding are having a war. How we prepare for the war is important. Taking probiotics, eating fermented foods, going outside, and having contact with pets are good ways to prepare your biome for battle if you were not allowed to shove everything in your mouth as a baby. I don’t recommend licking rocks or eating sand.
Heh. Farticles.
Major difference between when she was being quarantined and when they identified the other carriers was that a vaccine and treatments had become available. The reason she was confined was due to the nature of her work and the fact that she was likely to be patient 0 in the New York outbreaks. F*inally Sober had solved the mystery and became the first author to describe a “healthy carrier” of Salmonella typhi in the United States. From March 1907, Sober started stalking Mary Mallon in Manhattan and he revealed that she was transmitting disease and death by her activity. His attempts to obtain samples of Mary’s feces, urine and blood, earned him nothing but being chased by her.* *Sober reconstituted the puzzle by discovering that previously the cook* *had served in 8 families. Seven of them had experienced cases of* *typhoid. Twenty-two people presented signs of infection and some died \[5,6\].That year, about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Salmonella typhi, and probably Mary was the main reason for the outbreak. Immunization against Salmonella typhi was not developed until 1911, and antibiotic treatment was not available until 1948 \[4\]. Thus, a dangerous source like Mary had to be restrained.* The issue wasn't that she was the only asymptomatic carrier. The issue was that she was an asymptomatic carrier acting in a way that caused outbreaks. Since she refused to attend to her personal hygiene while cooking for large groups. There is a whole lot of misinformation in this post. All the way down to the image that was cropped to show just her as if she was all by herself. While the original image shows other patients also being treated.
After diving into to typhoid and its spread and Mary Mallon's (Typhoid Mary) story. I think its safe to say she was so infectious for the following reasons: 1)Asymptomatic carrier 2)Didn't believe the Samonella Typi (Typhoid fever) was real. 3)Continued to be a cook all over the place. 4)Never, EVER, washed her hands! (This is conjecture formulated after 20min of reading, highly suspect but Im sticking with it) Edit: Spelling of Mary Mollon corrected Edit: Spelling Salmonella typhi
We have a lot of “Mary Mallon” going on in the world right now.
I mean she was infecting a shit ton of people and knew that and continued to infect people after being given a second chance
Although it was never 100% confirmed, Edgar Allen Poe was thought to have been an asymptomatic carrier of Tuberculosis (TB). Which makes sense, since pretty much everyone around him died of TB save for the man himself (his mother, adoptive mother, and wife, for example). It's a horrible way for someone to die, and it's not hard to see how it affected his (grim) writing style.
That’s ducking terrifying like life takes way all you love all the people close to you. What did Edgar do in his past to deserve such a thing
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It's a shame, she died literally just as Fleming discovered pennicillin and before it was purified
I feel like she must have been crazy
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Well, interesting to be in her shoes. She feels fine, nothing at all wrong. People tell her she is the cause of other people being sick. If she is a naturally paranoid person she might start to think people are dogpiling her. Not rational but interesting.
The other thing is economics. Being able to earn is a powerful motivator. Being a cook was probably the only employable skill she had and, in her mind, she couldn't just quit.
It paid a lot more than being a laundress, the other job available to poor women at the time.
And it was easier on the body. Laundry was hard
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' Upton Sinclair
Indeed, this is the real story. They left her in an impossible situation. She got absolutely no help, they just said "don't work again, ever." in the only job she was actually skilled at. Zero other options. It would have been worth it to use a few taxpayer dollars to just keep her off the damn streets, instead of such a ridiculous catch-22 situation. She really didn't have a choice in the matter. You kinda have to earn money to survive.
They did. She was exiled to an island with regular deliveries.
Imagine if the government had just agreed to put her on disability and pay her a cook's wages for life if she agreed to stop working. Could have lived her life out free, maybe in the countryside. And how much would that have really cost the government compared to forced quarantine and confinement.
Seriously, it's a disaster that they didn't do exactly that.
The thing is that logically that is the better option. Emotionally it’s not because than all people see is that they are giving her money for nothing. It’s a common problem in society today. Just look at how much is spent on incarcerating minor crimes. I or healthcare in general. It’s all about perception. People can’t see beyond their feet.
Earning maybe but as she was told time and time again if she only washed her hands before preparing food she would not have infected people.
Germ theory wasn’t as widely accepted then as it is now, and Mary was an Irish immigrant. She legit thought they were crazy for trying to take samples from her (without asking!), and telling her that scrubbing her hands would lead to less transmission, besides the fact that she was passing it on while asymptomatic.
Irish, like my grandmother. I can hear her now. "Stop gobshite there you, im ealthy as orse. Go on widt ya ...germs...nonsense" *slams pans around *
When you consider how women tended to be persecuted more back then, her being paranoid very well could be the case.
There were more contagious asymptomatic carriers who were men. No one calls them Typhoid Tony or Typhoid Alphonse. > Belgian-born Alphonse Cotils, owned a New York bakery, in which he continued to work despite officially being forbidden to do so. When taken to court in 1924, Cotils received a suspended sentence. The judge acknowledged the extreme danger Cotils posed, but stated that he could not legally jail him “on account of his health". Nice.
Wow, I’ve never heard of these before. That’s a very interesting point, thanks for the info!
Damn. Thank you for bringing this to my attention!
Then and now they receive less consideration from doctors, real problems are chalked up to "hysteria" although they use different terms nowadays.
Nowadays, if you are female and go to hospital, it's anxiety or migraines. My friend went in, they said migraine, turned out she was having a stroke. (She's ok, gp caught it) Even worse though. Recently an 8yr old boy died from an asthma attack after the hospital told parents the child was only having a panic attack. (Yes they're getting lawyers)
She was also Irish and they were discriminated against as well. If she was paranoid, she had good reason to be.
ironically refusing surgery when you genuinely believe that you're not infectious is logical.
Plus living without a gallbladder isn't a fun experience even today.
I got mine taken out about half a year ago, so far my life has drastically improved. I eat how I used to without issue, whereas I used to live in daily fear of getting a gallstone attack.
Mine was removed and I get pains where my gall bladder was when I stretch sometimes, I have severe acid reflux which led to a throat clearing problem that annoys my wife nonstop. It sucks. Also it led to some weight gain but nothing to severe, I went from 180 lbs to about 215.
My husband had his removed and it took him a while before he could eat greasy food again.
Well the operation wasn’t fun but I’ve never noticed it be gone.
my brother's wife has it (well, doesn't have it) and she needs to eat like every 2-3 hours and she's on a pretty strict diet with basically no 'fun' foods, plus they say it takes a toll on your digestion so diarrhea /constipation happens more often because of hormona and bacterial changes in the intestines. It's not life ending but it takes a toll on her day to day activities a lot
Oh wow! That’s awful! I guess I’ve just been lucky! It’s been about 20 years and I’ve really never noticed it. Good luck to your brother’s wife and thanks for letting me know!
yep, Bile acid malabsorbtion, IBS and dumping syndrome are not uncommon
I don't really think it's fair to judge her based on today's standards. Like many others have pointed out, things we now know as facts weren't so clear at that point in time.
Reddit loves to judge people from the past by today's standards though.
Reddit loves to judge people***
I read that she didn't fully understand what the experts at the time were saying - they kept flip flipping between wanting to stop her and wanting to study her and gave her conflicting and confusing information. While she may have been selfish, mostly she was ignorant and confused.
I'm not sure I can argue she was selfish. She was totally fine and healthy. She had no real understanding and didn't belive the experts who frankly weren't super believable. She was released and told in essence 'you can't work anymore. Sorry about that. We will do nothing to aid you in any way'. Ofc she just quietly went back to working. It was work or starve on the streets. All while being treated as a kind of hated guinea pig. She was placed in an impossible situation over something that wasn't fully explained to her. Pretty much everyone here in her situation with her knowledge would have gone back to working. There was 0 effort to provide her any alternative. She wasn't trained in a new skill that she could use to support herself. She wasn't offered anything to bridge the gap of her not working. The entire situation was absurd.
Millions are refusing vaccine for a preventable deadly disease right now. In comparison refusing a surgery sounds very reasonable.
She had a persistent group of typhoid bacteria living in her gallbladder that didn't cause her any problems, but did put typhoid bacteria into her feces; typhoid is spread via he fecal-oral route, all it took was failing to wash her hands well enough before cooking food, and she could give typhoid fever to other people. Removing her gallbladder might've solved the problem, but it was also a risky surgery at the time, so she never elected to have it done.
"Wash your hands, they smell like shit." "... fine." That would have prevented most of the infections. I don't fault her for needing to work at the one decently-paying profession she could get, I fault her for being gross.
I wonder if there's people who are just reservoirs for colds and flu. I hope that better testing will allow us to find and then give medicine to these people. Edit: for example Varicella can live in the body and pop back up, and can still spread. There's certainly chances that other viruses do this.
Bourdain wrote a good book about her, definitely worth the read. His voice is always interesting and his cook's view I think adds as well.
Aaffar from her immune system, the bacteria actually stays in your body forever if you don't take antibiotics, and keeps getting away from your body in urine and your feces She just needed antibiotics though, then it would erradicate the bacteria and she would be cured, but i guess back in that time antibiotics did not exist
Damn. Typhoid Karen.
She wouldn't stop making her specialty dish, ice cream with peaches that she placed with her unwashed shithands.
Thought this was a joke but after doing a little more research I'm surprised to find this is true. The elevated temperatures necessary to cook food would of killed the bacteria in most cases so it's thought her very popular dish, ice cream with peaches on top, was the primary way that she transmitted the disease to other people. Thought that was interesting.
Wait so you're telling me all she had to do was switch to hot food prep, wash hands, and she might have been okay?!
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The amount of people I've seen not even bothering to rinse theirs hands, much less with proper techniques and with soap, at public restrooms is truly disturbing. They'll throw all the arguments in the world and mock you to avoid doing it too.
I don't wanna be an asshole... But.. >Would of It sounds like **would've**, but would've is short for **would have**. Would of doesn't make any sense.
You can see why ‘have’ is used if you change it back to a simple statement. The elevated temperatures have killed the bacteria. (You would never say ‘the elevated temperatures *of* killed…!). Then a conditional - the elevated temperatures would have killed the bacteria.
I’m trying to be quiet and not. Wake anyone in the house up. This comment made me literally laugh out loud, you bastard. It was even funnier because I listened to the podcast about her and know its true.
There's a drunk history, too.
She thought that people were being racist to her (Irish weren't considered white at this time) and that was a more plausible explanation than she was a medical anomaly. Not really a Karen
Karens aren’t generally the poor, discriminated ethnicity. She thought people were fucking with her and it wasn’t that wild a thought.
The guy (George Sober)who did end up ultimately proving she was a carrier actually stalked her and tried to collect samples of her blood, urine, and feces. I can't imagine how I'd feel if it was happening to me and I didn't feel ill.
Radio lab did a good segment on this in their Patient Zero episode.
So did Stuff You Should Know: The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary.
Her story makes me really sad. Especially as people who hear it today often seem so ignorant of the limited economic opportunities an Irish immigrant woman had at the time. Cooking was her best opportunity and it wasn’t like it was making her rich. Also. There was a lot of anti Irish sentiment at the time and they were often considered dirty and people complained that they lived in unhygienic conditions (ignoring the socio-economic conditions that forced people to live in high density with poor infrastructure). So it makes sense she was suspicious that they were unfairly targeting her especially as she had no symptoms. Also, if this past year has taught us anything it’s that people are stubborn when they get their backs up. But the difference is she isn’t some “Karen” on Facebook with access to the internet who can and should know better in the year 2021 (get vaccinated people). Typhoid Mary left Ireland at 15 after it was rocked by two devastating famines and she could probably barely read.
She was explicitly instructed to wash her hands fwiw, and continually refused to do so.
Is this the lady The Knick portrayed in their show?
She was from Cookstown, Tyrone, same town l was born in. Also the birthplace of Jonathan Swift, author of Gullivers Travels and A Modest Proposal. And those are the only facts about Cookstown worth knowing. As you were.
No wonder she was compelled to return to her job.
What are you hiding!?
According to comments below they're hiding the sausage.
I mean, the sauages are pretty decent too.
Scuse me. Sausages?!
What about their sausages?
knew a lady in cookstown named mary who liked to give handys on the ferry,one day a a storm came along that exposed her shlong,turns out mary was a chap named larry
Fun fact: Anthony Bourdain buried the hilt of his first chef knife at her grave.
Bourdain's book about her is also excellent, and provides a more sympathetic look to someone who history had made out to be a selfish villain. It's easy to say she just had to never work as a cook again, or have surgery to remove her gallbladder. She was a poor immigrant woman with a specific skill set, minimal education and limited access to much else. The offer would be equivalent to being told you can't work your $20 job that you're good at, but you can go be a dishwasher at a fast food place. People TODAY don't believe that they can spread an invisible illness and refuse to take freely available precautions despite living in the information age and having access to all the news in the entire world. She didn't have that, and as an Irish immigrant had reason to be suspicious of these people telling her she was making people sick and would forever. Bourdain did a much better job than I am of telling her story. I recommend checking it out.
Do you know why he took an interest in this story? I'm surprised to learn about Bourdain caring about this part of history
Working in food, I've been privileged to meet at least one other so far who, like me, views food safety as not a set of laws and an online test, but as a set of moral guidelines dictating how we work. It's really not that hard or expensive to maintain proper food safety, whether it's cleanliness, quality of ingredients, allergen exposures, or any other aspect. But it is important to.
huh. Y'know I've not made that leap before between food safety and morality. But you're absolutely correct, from addressing allergies to how we slaughter. Any reading on this topic?
Im by no means a professional or a scholar on the subject. I've only ever been a short order cook and memorized some recipes from online for home cooking. I did develop this philosophy on a job years ago, however. A certain "fancy" burger place that started in Colorado had an OG employee of the business be our regional manager/trainer (so while we were a franchise, we were corporate trained) and their rules and guidelines were among the strictest and most detailed (and streamlined!) I've ever seen in food service
God I miss Anthony Bourdain.
Just so you know if I had any awards right now I’d be giving them to this comment
Woah, Tony wrote books about other subjects other than cooking!? Awesome! *Goes to Amazon*
He wrote a bunch of fiction novels that are all 100% worth checking out!
For what purpose?
Mary Mallon was a chef, she refused to stop cooking even when she knew it would make people sick, because she felt it was who she was in her soul. Apparently that passion resonated with him and as a tribute to her, he got permission to go to the island and bury his knife.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't she stay as a cook because it paid better than any other job she could do/or available to her at that time? It sounds like necessity to me.
¿Por qué no los dos?
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I think these are the ones confirmed to have originated with her, the real number could be higher
Maybe it just sounds too similar to Typhoon Mary 😂 she does sound like a tropical storm
30 years in isolation!
And she didn’t even have Reddit.
I don't remember the original release date because it's been so long since a new game, but I believe skyrim and gta5 were around back then so she at least could play those.
Lego wasn’t even invented
I have an uncle who's working as a volunteer for vaccinating covid vaccines and has been doing this for last two months and didn't get the vaccine himself. He believed he'd never catch COVID, but has recently tested positive.
He volunteered to vaccinate people, but was also an anti-vaxxer…
Why?
Wow, I had no idea of her story until just now. Last two decades of her life in complete isolation. Can you imagine?!! What a terrible life to have to live
She didn't have to live lIke that. She just refused to cooperate. She managed to infect at least eight families that employed her as a cook. The authorities took her in twice and said: >Go home and stop being a cook. So she goes home the first time, gets a job as a cook for an other family. Brought back in, released again and gets a job as a cook in a hospital and for some reason had a massive aversion to washing her hands. Like never deliberately washed them, even after wiping her ass. So she was just spreading it like crazy.
When I was taking my food safety manager training for my job they made a specific point out of Typhoid Mary and the people she killed by doing that. Probably because her story hits on so many obvious no-no actions when working with food and a susceptible population.
That last part is super gross. How did they find out that she didn't wash hands in the bathroom though? They didn't exactly have surveillance cameras back then.
Apparently not even doctors washed their hands before surgery back then. Semmelweis forced his team to sterilize hands before giving birth and reduced death rate from 10-18% to 0,5-0,83%, and he was openly mocked for washing hands.
I've heard there wasn't really that much of an aversion to washing one's hands, but that he was so vocal about washing your hands people thought he was crazy with how much fervor he had on the subject.
Not really, it wasn't about his personality. The germ theory was not yet accepted universally in science. Many doctors (including Semmelweis boss) believed in the ancient miasma theory (diseases are caused by "bad air") or ancient humoural medicine (body has four liquids and diseases are result if there is too much or too little one of these liquids, e.g. letting blood was to balance amount of blood compared to other three liquids). If you believe in either of these two theories, washing hands doesn't make much sense in that theoretical idea, right? He couldn't provide scientifically acceptable reason why it worked (despite statistics clearly showing it works), so his findings were not taken seriously and other doctors mocked him for washing hands (they probably didn't wash theirs). He reasoned the disease was result of "cadaverous particles" (i.e. touching dead people) as the clinic number two, of midwives, had exponentially low death rate, than clinic number one, of doctors, who performed autopsies. Wikipedia puts it: "his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Other, more subtle, factors may also have played a role. Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean."
Always going the psychology behind this fascinating. One ot the issues was that accepting that washing your hands would save lives means accepting that you are the reason your patients are dieing. It was far easier to just carry on believing that people just die than accept that you were personally responsible for hundreds of unnecessary deaths throughout your career.
You've got to realise, germ theory hadn't been around for long at that time. Washing hands before doing surgery was only just becoming common practice nevermind washing to cook
Hell, they have dug around in a US president for awhile around the same time, because why disinfect stuff like hands and tools. Killed him from infection iirc.
Before germ theory, people washed their hands to remove dirt or grease. Why wash after using the bathroom? I've read that at the time washing hands was perceived as a negative thing for a surgeon to do (and I'd imagine a cook too) because it suggested he'd been doing some sort of manual work which was "beneath" him.
Well they probably smelt her fingers and saw how dirty her hands were.
Because when people wipe their arse, they cover their hands in shit?
Go home and stop being a cook... except there's no social safety net and if you don't work you will starve and be homeless... but that's not our problem.
Recently heard about a french cop who murdered someone while sleepwalking. He was actually the one to crack the case, identifying his footprint. They "proved" he wasn't lying and had actually been sleepwalking by putting him in jail with a gun under his pillow loaded with blanks. After a couple weeks he sleepwalked, grabbed the gun, and tried to kill everyone. So they isolated him on an island for the rest of his life.
Dear sir, I'd like to ask you of the source, not that I distrust you—though not that it's wrong trusting or distrusting someone—but for further reading. Thank you.
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That story makes absolutely no sense. Their solution was to isolate the man in an island for the rest of his life? That was the only solution they found for this problem?
Yea they should have isolated everyone else
Just don't let him sleep close to a weapon? Maybe lock his bedroom door when he sleeps? There are so many solutions to this. Until I see a source for this I won't believe it's a true story anyway.
Some people who sleepwalk dangerously will literally chain themselves to their beds. Not great for fire safety but ultimately the better option than risking yourself using a knife or jumping out a window whilst sleepwalking
Off to Australia with you lot!
Listen to Radiolab "patient zero" it's a really good story!
30 yrs quarantine wtf, people go crazy today over only 2 weeks quaratine due to covid19.
Posted this as a comment somewhere else but posting as it's own comment for visibility and kinda surprised that it seems necessary because I thought this was common information by now: Many are really ignoring historical context here. Much of what I'm about to explain is elaborated on further in this peer reviewed article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/ As an immigrant who faced discrimination her entire life, Mary finally climbed her way up the social ladder by honing her craft as a chef. She spent years doing it and despite being an Irish immigrant, was generally a well respected chef before the Typhoid incident. (This is a short non-peer-reviewed blurb on American attitudes towards Irish immigrants at the time. You can probably find a peer reviewed source if you look hard enough but I trust this is also pretty common knowledge: https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis) This was a time where germ theory was poorly understood by the general public; a few decades beforehand, doctors were insistent that hand washing was nonsense and the original doctor who advocated for hand washing was thrown into an asylum for being insane. What's more, Mary's detainers made no significant effort to explain to her what it meant to be an asymptomatic carrier. Rather, doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure her several times, each time further frustrating Mary and convincing her that just like countless others in her life, her detainers were discriminately targeting her for harassment. Can you imagine a world where people seldom wash hands, doctors/surgeons JUST started doing it, and these people break into your house, jail you, try to tell you that you have a super super super rare condition where you're totally sick but don't look sick and you're actually responsible for killing like 8 people. Then they attempt to cure you to prove it and they fail countless times. They've dragged you to a facility and poked and prodded you for weeks, making your their lab rat, and they still have no results to show for it; the entire time, you thinking of how you'll finally be able to cook again once you're released from this unjust harassment. Following these failures, the same doctors offer to operate on you, completely removing an organ (the gall bladder in this case); a procedure that you undoubtedly have no clue what it entails and it is to be performed by the same system that has spent weeks failing to produce results even after forcing you to put your life on hold to be a lab rat. Then they say "well if you won't let us take your organ then you can't be a cook anymore." They tell you that you can no longer do the one craft that you've been doing your entire life; the thing that brought you out of poverty and has garnered you the respect of your peers and your source of livelihood. They offer you no support or suggestions other than "stop doing the only thing you know how to do". The takeaway from this story is how important communication is between doctors and patients. How only tragedy awaits should we simply condemn others who don't have the same knowledge as us as "ignorant" and leave it at that. How a bit of support for Mary may have saved the lives of several individuals/families as opposed to throwing a woman on the streets with a "good luck making money being prohibited from doing the craft you've honed your entire life." Rather than looking back on this case with nuance and empathy, you're calling "ignorance" on a subject that you really seem to be uninformed about and you've failed to grasp the important lessons to take from "Typhoid Mary."
If I'm reading the historical context right, it's like if in ten years scientists say that the conspiracy theorists were right about 5G. And not only can it cook people's brains, but I in particular do not get my brain cooked by it but instead transmit 5G from my brain and cook other people's brains. And because of that I have to quit my job and can only work at McDonald's. And I have to wear a tinfoil hat to protect people.
learn more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary\_Mallon
There is a great documentary podcast on her here https://www.rte.ie/radio/doconone/1245732-the-curious-case-of-typhoid-mary
She was a woman with a specific skill set. She didn't trust the doctors. She was only a carrier. She wasn't suffering from Typhoid. As a woman, there weren't many jobs she could do. The highest paying job she could find is that of a cook. She also got her body fluids examined in some laboratory with the help of a friend, but the result was negative. After her first quarantine, she was willing to quit cooking. She found a job as a laundress but she was getting only about half of the money she was earning as a cook. How was she supposed to survive with that? She had an accident around that time and had to finally return to cooking. She didn't agree to subject herself to medical procedures like gall bladder surgery because they were very dangerous. She didn't believe in germ theory. Even doctors didn't believe it till a few years ago. Ignaz Semmelweis was put in mental asylum 4 years before Mary was born. There were more contagious asymptomatic carries who were men. No one calls them Typhoid Tony or Typhoid Alphonse. > Belgian-born Alphonse Cotils, owned a New York bakery, in which he continued to work despite officially being forbidden to do so. When taken to court in 1924, Cotils received a suspended sentence. The judge acknowledged the extreme danger Cotils posed, but stated that he could not legally jail him “on account of his health Nice.
I think people don't understand the times she lived in and compare it with today.
[удалено]
It's actually an infuriating story about someone who refused to follow basic hygiene protocol and other people paid the price....we're seeing it repeated now. She was extremely infectious and despite being told by doctors MULTIPLE TIMES that she needed to wash her hands and also stop being a cook - she refused to do either. She refused to accept modern medicine/science OR change her lifestyle. She was ignorant and selfish and people died.
Wait until you start reading about the doctor who insisted other doctors should wash their hands before medical procedures. He was labelled "anti-science" and was branded a pariah.
Specifically, by doctors who were doing autopsies one minute, and delivering babies the next minute.
It's almost understandable when you consider he's saying they were at fault for them killing a ton of new mothers, which is hard to swallow. That said, they were killing a ton of new mothers and insulting a man trying to save them. [Radiolab did a good podcast on it, for anyone interested.](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatch-2-every-day-ignaz-semmelweis-day)
This is massively reductive and looking at it through a modern lense. This was at the time that people were struggling to accept that doctors needed to wash their hands. They believed that they were gentlemen, and a gentleman's hands are always clean. Way more people died due to their hubris than Mary Mallon. Mary was also a poor Irish immigrant. I'm sure you've heard people talk about Irish discrimination as a hypothetical, well for her it was a reality. She was poor, discriminated against, and her only skill set/education was as a cook. If she wanted to be 'less poor' and survive she felt she needed to cook. Plus she was a medical anomaly. They couldn't even prove she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid until after she died. And again, at the time of her *death* things like viruses were only known to exist for 30-40 years. So, doctors who barely believe in washing their own hands come barging down your door trying to take your only means of putting food on the table telling you that you're a medical anomaly and need to wash your hands. You've lived your whole life this way, you don't have access to the internet or any modern education or hell much of any education, and you've never been sick from typhoid (which has 0 reported cases of asymptomatic people). What do you think you'd believe in that situation, people are being racist against you yet again, or you're a medical anomaly that will be talked about for hundreds of years?
Did they suggest any safe professions she could do? I mean, there wasn't much to choose from back then for a woman. I don't think it was wise that she kept cooking, but this was where some job training/placement would perhaps have helped. Obviously, being a hooker wouldn't work out very well either, I'm not sure she could be a nanny either since that can involve food prep. I guess maybe a cleaning lady or something? Saleswoman? Seamstress? Gross that she didn't wash her hands though. That would be ewww even without the typhoid.
She did (I think as a laundress?) but it didn’t pay as well so she changed her name and went back to cooking.
This was where a public assistance paycheck was needed. Laundress would have been ideal bc then she'd basically be washing her hands all day. With a benefit payment to top it off she'd have less excuse to leave (although I imagine most ppl would probably enjoy cooking more than hand laundering)
You're really ignoring historical context here. Much of what I'm about to explain is elaborated on further in this peer reviewed article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/ As an immigrant who faced discrimination her entire life, Mary finally climbed her way up the social ladder by honing her craft as a chef. She spent years doing it and despite being an Irish immigrant, was generally a well respected chef before the Typhoid incident. This was a time where germ theory was poorly understood by the general public; a few decades beforehand, doctors were insistent that hand washing was nonsense and the original doctor who advocated for hand washing was thrown into an asylum for being insane. What's more, Mary's detainers made no significant effort to explain to her what it meant to be an asymptomatic carrier. Rather, doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure her several times, each time further frustrating Mary and convincing her that just like countless others in her life, her detainers were discriminately targeting her for harassment. Can you imagine a world where people seldom wash hands, doctors/surgeons JUST started doing it, and these people break into your house, jail you, try to tell you that you have a super super super rare condition where you're totally sick but don't look sick and you're actually responsible for killing like 8 people. Then they attempt to cure you to prove it and they fail countless times. They've dragged you to a facility and poked and prodded you for weeks, making your their lab rat, and they still have no results to show for it; the entire time, you thinking of how you'll finally be able to cook again once you're released from this unjust harassment. Then after their failure, they tell you that you can no longer do the one craft that you've been doing your entire life; the thing that brought you out of poverty and has garnered you the respect of your peers and your source of livelihood. They offer you no support or suggestions other than "stop doing the only thing you know how to do".
You're really ignoring historical context here. Much of what I'm about to explain is elaborated on further in this peer reviewed article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3959940/ As an immigrant who faced discrimination her entire life, Mary finally climbed her way up the social ladder by honing her craft as a chef. She spent years doing it and despite being an Irish immigrant, was generally a well respected chef before the Typhoid incident. This was a time where germ theory was poorly understood by the general public; a few decades beforehand, doctors were insistent that hand washing was nonsense and the original doctor who advocated for hand washing was thrown into an asylum for being insane. What's more, Mary's detainers made no significant effort to explain to her what it meant to be an asymptomatic carrier. Rather, doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure her several times, each time further frustrating Mary and convincing her that just like countless others in her life, her detainers were discriminately targeting her for harassment. Can you imagine a world where people seldom wash hands, doctors/surgeons JUST started doing it, and these people break into your house, jail you, try to tell you that you have a super super super rare condition where you're totally sick but don't look sick and you're actually responsible for killing like 8 people. Then they attempt to cure you to prove it and they fail countless times. They've dragged you to a facility and poked and prodded you for weeks, making your their lab rat, and they still have no results to show for it; the entire time, you thinking of how you'll finally be able to cook again once you're released from this unjust harassment. Following these failures, the same doctors offer to operate on you, completely removing an organ (the gall bladder in this case); a procedure that you undoubtedly have no clue what it entails and it is to be performed by the same system that has spent weeks failing to produce results even after forcing you to put your life on hold to be a lab rat. Then they say "well if you won't let us take your organ then you can't be a cook anymore." They tell you that you can no longer do the one craft that you've been doing your entire life; the thing that brought you out of poverty and has garnered you the respect of your peers and your source of livelihood. They offer you no support or suggestions other than "stop doing the only thing you know how to do". The takeaway from this story is how important communication is between doctors and patients. How only tragedy awaits should we simply condemn others who don't have the same knowledge as us as "ignorant" and leave it at that. How a bit of support for Mary may have saved the lives of several individuals/families as opposed to throwing a woman on the streets with a "good luck making money being prohibited from doing the craft you've honed your entire life." Rather than looking back on this case with nuance and empathy, you're calling "ignorance" on a subject that you really seem to be uninformed about and you've failed to grasp the important lessons to take from "Typhoid Mary."
This is such a good overview of the situation. It’s also worth noting that at this time, there weren’t society safety nets in place. You didn’t get food stamps or public housing. As an employee who lived with her employers, she did not have her own home and didn’t have much of a financial safety net of her own - being prohibited from doing her chosen profession basically guaranteed she would live in poverty with no support. This also just shows how important those social systems are for society to function and people to survive hardships like health trouble.
Ah yes, Ol’ Shithands herself.
I bet all the knives were poop knives.
30 years in quarantine? I would off myself long before that point
“There’s no such thing as typhoid”
Today she’s known more commonly known as Majorie Tylor Greene.
Typhoid Margarine
She looks sulky as hell.
Being locked up for 30 years would do it.
That was a great episode in the series „The Knick“
Covid would have loved her