In the current pandemic, people may unknowingly harbor and spread the coronavirus before they feel sick, largely because it has an incubation period of between two and 14 days. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says that one in four people could be asymptomatic carriers, never showing symptoms even as they infect others.
But there are also those who, knowing they could be carriers, refuse to cover their mouths or practice social distancing. They include the spring breakers who crowded Florida beaches and the protesters gathering in some state capitals.
Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary, was until now the most prominent example in the U.S. of the unknowing disease carrier. She spread typhoid fever to at least 53 people, causing three deaths between 1900 and 1915.
But Mallon has long been unfairly characterized as knowingly spreading the deadly disease she carried. Her memory has been resurrected recently, largely on Twitter, as a shorthand description of those who intentionally infect others with the coronavirus, #TyphoidMary.
As the author of “Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory,” I can attest to the media’s past and continuing distortion of the Mary Mallon case. It’s unfair to Mallon to attach her name to such consciously bad behavior.
Mary Mallon, the healthy carrier
Contrary to popular belief, Mallon never perceived herself to be contagious. During her famous trial of 1909, newspapers quoted her saying, “I was cook for Mr. Stebbins’ family and other families, and nobody fell sick while I was there.”
Like many people in her era, Mallon could not fathom that a healthy-looking person could transmit disease. Throughout her life, she swore her innocence, claiming that she had never had the disease.
The popular – and mistaken – beliefs about Mallon came primarily from media accounts during her life. But the mischaracterization of Mallon continued long after.
Mallon unknowingly spread typhoid fever through the dishes she prepared, mostly for wealthy families in New York. In the summer of 1906, she cooked for the Warren family at their rental house at Long Island’s Oyster Bay. From Aug. 26 through Sept. 3, typhoid fever struck six out of 11 members of the household.
The homeowners hired George Soper, a self-proclaimed “sanitary engineer,” to investigate. He eventually traced the Oyster Bay outbreak to the new cook, along with typhoid at six of her other places of employment.
Soper’s discovery prompted the New York City Health Inspector Dr. Josephine Baker and the police department to take Mallon by force to a nearby hospital.
Against her will, she underwent multiple physical examinations that included stool samples, which revealed the Salmonella typhi bacteria. Mallon was then quarantined at North Brother Island, a refuge for those ill with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, for two years without a charge or trial.