I thought I knew the story of Typhoid Mary. I was wrong. I only knew one small snippet of her story.
Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant, and naturalized US citizen, who worked as a cook from some of the wealthy elite in the early 1900s. It was a job that, for the time, was well paid and much sought after, especially for an immigrant woman. It was also a job that put her at the center of the spread of typhoid within the NYC area.
Over time, the story has, in many ways, dehumanized the real-life Mary, much in the way Lizzie Borden has become a figure of tales, almost fictional. But the truth of Mary’s story really illuminates aspects of her life that most of us probably don’t know. Including the fact that Mary was not the only carrier of typhoid, nor even responsible for the majority of cases. Yet she was the only one treated the way she was, causing her to become the demonized face of the epidemic.
The book is more than an historical account of the typhoid epidemic. It’s also a commentary on civil rights versus public health, of the treatment of women and immigrants, of yellow journalism, of questionable medical knowledge, of sheer misogyny.
I highly recomment this book!