Leavitt's Typhoid Mary

An old file card detailing results from tests on stool specimens from Mary Mallon gives a capsule history of her capture and quarantine.

image courtesy of: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/typhoid/mary.html

The one question I have, for you (the class) and Leavitt, is why do you think Mary Mallon is a unique case? Was it the fact that she was a single working-woman, Catholic, Irish-born, or was it something that does not take such a complex lens to understand?

Take a step back and think about the different perspectives and stories that Leavitt articulates in Typhoid Mary. Ms. Mallon was not the only "healthy carrier" in the monograph to be questioned by health officials, but she is the center of the narrative. Mallon stated that: officials had "stuck her away for a reason she couldn't accept" (p. 198).

This is what makes Mallon the unique case: she never "believed" or "agreed upon" the fact that she was a carrier of a contagious disease. In the other cases, you have people isolated, institutionalized, then let free on the notion that they would try and find some other form of employment outside of the food service industry. Some did, some did not. Mallon was also offered this idea, when she signed a document stating that she understood why she was being held and that she needed to change the types of job she did in order to protect the public health: "taking measures to protect any and all persons with whom I may come in contact from any infection…which it is possible I may cause" (p. 189).

Leavitt suggests that this was simply a scam so that Mary could get on with her life and independence. Later, she alludes that Mallon had no intention of staying out of being a cook (a skill in which she had always found labor during the past). Moreover:

"Mary Mallon denied throughout her life that she transmitted typhoid fever to people for whom she cooked. Despite working for seven or eight years in a bacteriology laboratory preparing sputum slides for physicians to use in the medical diagnoses of tuberculosis, she never came to understand the connection between the sputum that carried tuberculosis bacilli and her own gallbladder that carried typhoid bacilli. SHE DID NOT ACCEPT THAT SHE WAS DANGEROUS TO OTHERS" (emphasis added) (199-201).

She was released upon signing an agreement, but broke her parole and was reinstated at the hospital. Would you claim that any other parolee who broke their agreement and was reinstitutionalized was a victim? I feel that throughout this piece, Leavitt's viewpoint is that Mallon was a victim, not culpable for anything that she actually did.

So, when considering cases in the present, which many medical historians often like to do in concluding remarks, is to look back at history with open perspectives. In terms of this book as a historiography piece, Leavitt appears to have looked at many different angles in order to construct a history of "Typhoid Mary" that is complex and imbued with class, racial, and gender prejudices. However, when looking at the content of said history, I have arrived at a different conclusion.

So, think about Mallon, and the other cases in the narrative, and see if you have arrived at a different conclusion than Leavitt has about why Typhoid Mary is an exceptional case, and why she was an exceptional woman in a time of "thousands" of healthy carriers.