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Friday 28 June 2013

.....Typhoid Mary. A brief history.

Just read this article in the Daily Mail. Have heard and used the phrase Typhoid Mary but knew nothing about the background.  Love the work that the photographer has done to portray the decaying buildings that were to house Mary Mallon to try to quarantine a healthy carrier of the typhoid virus.
Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary, seemed to be a healthy young woman when a health inspector knocked on her door in 1907, yet she was the cause of several typhoid outbreaks in New York City.
Mary was the first 'healthy carrier' of typhoid fever in the United States.
It all began in the summer of 1906, when New York banker Charles Henry Warren took his family on vacation.
The Warrens hired Marry Mallon to be their cook. Soon afterwards, one of the Warren's daughters became ill with typhoid fever.
Then, Mrs Warren and two maids became ill; followed by the gardener and another of the Warrens' daughter's.
In total, six of the eleven people in the house came down with typhoid.
Mary could not understand how someone who was not sick could spread the disease, so she went on the run.

Eventually she was captured and forced to live in isolation upon North Brother Island, a particularly treacherous stretch in New York's East River.
Mary Mallon was taken by force and against her will and was held without a trial. She had not broken any laws, yet the government locked her up in isolation indefinitely.
Riverside Hospital, was the name of the facility on the island where she was kept. It treated everything from smallpox and leprosy to venereal disease and heroin addiction.
The island has been abandoned since 1963, but more than a dozen buildings remain, in various states of disrepair.
Typhoid Mary was presumed to have infected some 51 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook.
She died after a total of nearly three decades in isolation.
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