Typhoid Mary (11 page)

     Here Mary quotes Studiford as saying, ‘She’ll have the best Surgeon in town to do the cutting.’

I said no  . . . no knife will be put on me  . . . I’ve nothing the matter with my gall bladder  . . . Dr. Wilson asked me the very same question I also told him no  . . . then he replied it might not do any good  . . . also the supervising nurse asked me to have an operation performed  . . . I also told her no and she said the remark would it not be better for you to have it done than remain here  . . . I told her no  . . . There is a visiting Doctor who came here in October  . . . he did take quite an interest in me  . . . he really thought I liked it here that I did not care for my freedom  . . . he asked me if I’d take some medicine if he brought it to me  . . . I said I would so he brought me some Auto-Auto tox and some pills then Dr. Wilson had already ordered me Brewers Yeast  . . . at first I did not take it for I’m a little afraid of the people and I have a good right for when I came to the Department they said they were in my tract  . . . later another said they were in the muscles of my bowels and lately they thought of the gall bladder.

     This is not some illiterate, ignorant lumpen, oblivious and blindly disbelieving of anything to do with modern medicine. Mary Mallon sounds like a very angry convict, acutely aware of the lapses and inequities of her case. She’s been informed of the progress – or lack of it – in her treatment, appalled by the conflicting theories and opinions in her case – and underwhelmed by the level of humanitarian concern and attention paid. She sounds spiteful – and spite, a powerful motivator in many cooks, explains much of what occurs later.

I have been in fact a peep show for Everybody even the Interns had to come to see me and ask about the facts already known to the whole wide world  . . . the Tuberculosis would say there she is the kidnapped woman  . . . Dr. Parks has even had me Illustrated in Chicago  . . . I wonder if he, Said Dr. Wm. H. Park, would like to be insulted and put in the Journal and him or his wife called Typhoid William Park.

     On this up note the affidavit ends. It is interesting that Mary has chosen to be so publicly indignant. There are indications that she had simply played the part of the confused and helpless victim of circumstances.

     O’Neill’s petition to the court was more carefully worded and succinct:

. . .  Said Mary Mallon is being confined without commitment or other order of any Court within the State of New York, or that of any other person or authority having power to restrain her, in a building connected with the Riverside Hospital, North Brother Island  . . .

   
That said Mary Mallon is in perfect physical condition, and has since March 6th, 1907 the date whereon she forcibly and without warrant or order of any character [
was
] placed in the custody of the department of Health, never been obliged to receive the care and attention of a physician or surgeon, and that she is not in any way or any degree a menace to the community or any part thereof.

     He goes on to urge the court in argument to allow Mary Mallon her immediate freedom.

If such an act as this can be done in the case of any person said to be infected with typhoid germs, it can be perpetrated in the cases of thousands of persons in this city who might be infected with tuberculosis and other kindred diseases. If the mere statement that a person is infected with germs is sufficient then the person can be taken away from his or her home and family and locked up on North Brother Island. That is what has happened in this case.

   
We absolutely deny that this woman has ever suffered or is now suffering from the affliction alleged. It may be safely assumed and we have charged that in some of the households where this woman was employed the conditions were most unsatisfactory and unsanitary and the cases of typhoid referred to by the officials of the Health Department may undoubtedly be ascribed to this.

   
This woman has been a victim of unfortunate circumstances in having been employed in houses where typhoid broke out, the disease having been unquestionably the result of conditions which she had nothing to do with.

     It’s an impassioned-sounding and clever argument. It offers the artfully crafted statement that Mary was not ‘suffering’ from typhoid, and suggests an alternate theory of the case – and not an unreasonable one. There
were
other typhoid carriers out there. There were other causes. While the circumstantial evidence provided by Soper was compelling (the original letter drawing attention to the case was suspiciously lost) it was shaky in spots. And the prospect of
any
contagious patients being hounded – without due process – into isolation wards was a very real one.

     In support of the Department of Health were affidavits from Soper and Dr. Westmoreland, the resident physician at Riverside Hospital, stating that Mary Mallon was, in fact, infected with the typhoid bacilli and that during a period of eight years she had been responsible for twenty-six known cases. Turning the knife, mention was made of the ‘severe struggle’ it took to apprehend her.

     Press observers speculated on her fighting ability and weight class, wondering out loud how much trouble she’d be able to give the cops should they have to come for her again. She was ‘rosy as you please and [looked] as though she could make  . . . valid resistance’. This account goes on to describe her woefully holding a page from a Sunday newspaper. It is doubtful, judging from her affidavit, that she was happy to have her face in the papers under the header ‘Typhoid Mary’, but this particular journalist thought otherwise. ‘She held in her pocket a page  . . . a picture of Typhoid Mary dropping skulls into a skillet, Mary seemed to think that was a good picture of herself notwithstanding the sentiment.’

     The usual suspects gave background interviews. One Health Department source claimed that ‘if she should be set to work in a milk store tomorrow in three months she could accomplish as much as a hostile army.’ A Dr. Walter O. Beusal of Bellevue refers to her as a ‘great menace to public health, a danger to the community, and on that account she has been made a prisoner. In her wake are many cases of typhoid, she having disseminated – or as we might say, sprinkled – germs in various households. Mary exhales thousands of typhoid germs with every breath she expels. She has been doing this for several years, the juggler of germs say  . . . a human typhoid fever factory  . . .’

     That typhoid fever is not generally ‘sprinkled’ or spread by airborne transmission seemed to matter not to Dr. Beusal. Even Dr. Park seems to have cranked up the hyperbole a bit, admitting that while many other carriers existed, Mary was ‘the chief’, because of her profession and her known belligerence.

     Of course, O’Neill was exactly wrong. The Department of Health
did
have the power to arbitrarily lock up anyone they damn pleased. Their strange and terrible powers went further than that; Section 1170 of the Charter of Greater New York states specifically:

Said board may remove or cause to be removed to proper place  . . . any person sick with any contagious, pestilential or infectious disease; shall have exclusive control of the hospitals for the treatment of such cases.

     Section 24, Chapter 383 of the Laws of 1903 goes further:

It shall require the isolation of all persons and things exposed to such diseases  . . . It shall prohibit and prevent all intercourse and communication with or use of infected premises, places and things.

     Counsel refers to the legal precedent of
Seavey vs. Preble
, where the judge ruled that:

To accomplish and prevent the spread of contagious or infected disease, persons may be seized and restrained of their liberty and ordered to leave the state; private houses may be converted into hospitals and made subject to hospital regulations, buildings may be torn down; infected articles seized and destroyed, and many other things done which, under ordinary circumstances, would be considered gross outrage on the rights of persons and property  . . . When the public health and human life are concerned, the law requires the highest degree of care. It will not allow of experiments to see if the less degree of care will not answer  . . .

   
People ex rel. Lodes vs. Department of Health:

Boards of health  . . . act summarily, and it has not been usual anywhere to require them to give a hearing  . . . before they can exercise their jurisdiction.

     The final nail was Section 42, page 102:

The danger to the public health is a sufficient ground for the exercise of police power in the restraint of liberty of such persons.

     The court came down on the side of caution and established law. Justice Erlanger, on July 16, 1909, ruled that:

The risk of discharging the inmate of the Riverside Hospital is too great to be assumed by the Court. The injury which may be done to innocent persons  . . . are incalculable  . . . While the court deeply sympathizes with this unfortunate woman, it must protect the community against a recurrence of spreading the disease.

     Justice Erlanger was, however, troubled by some aspects of the case before him. He offered that ‘Every opportunity should  . . . be afforded this unfortunate woman to establish, if she can, that she has been fully cured. And she may, after further examination of her  . . . renew the application, or, if the petitioner prefers, the matter may be sent to a referee  . . . to take testimony and report to the court with his opinion  . . . This will allow her the opportunity to cross examine witnesses called against her and to offer her own medical experts to sustain her claim.’

     This part of the opinion could not have brought joy to the Health department. Over the next few weeks and months, it is probable that they had to give serious consideration to how amateur sleuth George Soper would hold up under a withering cross-examination. A ‘battle of the experts’ is something no attorney likes to deal with, especially when the subject matter is at the very spear tip of medical theory and practice. There were documents missing. Varying and contradictory and plainly wrongheaded accounts given to newspapers. And the petitioner cut a sympathetic figure. There were troubling implications for anyone sick with a contagious illness or for anyone who was caring for a family member with such an illness. There was the Irish dimension – the Health Department
could
, without too much trouble, be portrayed as anti-Irish in its policies. All too many immigrants from all over the world had endured all sorts of outrage on Ellis Island and at the hands of the Health Police. The judge was aware of this when he ordered that Mary’s living conditions on the island be ‘examined and ameliorated.’

     Just the same, Mary Mallon was sent back to her bungalow on North Brother Island. Angry, disappointed, and with diminished hopes for the future.

     Still, she did have an admirer.

     A Mr. Reuben Gray, age 28, of Lansing, Michigan, wrote the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Darlington, suggesting a solution to everybody’s problem. He urged the commissioner to pack Mary off to Michigan – ‘quietly, as the Michigan health authorities might object’ – so that he might make her his wife. He felt for the embattled and imprisoned Mary, he explained, adding that he himself had once been declared insane – but that he now was considered sound by ‘alienists of recognized authority’. Whether Darlington passed along this proposal is unlikely.

     During the whole habeas corpus episode, the press, and particularly the Hearst papers and the socialist rags remained extremely sympathetic to Mary’s plight. Mary herself had suddenly become media savvy, working the civil rights angle for all it was worth. She even rather shrewdly gave an interview to Hearst’s rival, the
World
. She appears to have sat for a portrait (which, by the way, made her look lovely). ‘As there is a God in Heaven, I will get justice somehow’, she was quoted as saying. ‘She says she has been kept like a leper  . . . with only a dog for company’, wrote one reporter – though the evidence shows that she did have some friends and acquaintances at Riverside – and that her days were not quite the Devil’s Island routine she portrayed. Mary had more for the fourth estate: ‘The contention that I am a perpetual menace in the spread of typhoid germs is not true  . . . My own doctors say I have no typhoid. I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast – a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.’ Another quote from her is near poetic in its lofty assertions:

There were two kinds of justice in America  . . . All the water in the world wouldn’t clear me from this charge, in the eyes of the Health Department. They want to make a showing; they want to get credit for protecting the rich, and I am the victim.

     One Hearst reporter even suggested that the evil doctors, in Mary’s mind anyway, might knock her out with ether and ‘perform a surgical operation to prove their theory.’