New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.
In March that year, Mallon, a cook, was visited by a sanitary engineer at her place of work, a swanky townhouse on New York’s Park Avenue. The unexpected caller told Mallon he suspected her of making people sick and requested samples of her urine, faeces and blood. This encounter marked the first time any healthy person in America had been accused of transmitting typhoid fever, a disease responsible for the deaths of 13,000 people in the USA the year before.
Mallon almost certainly thought the engineer’s claim preposterous. It was true that two members of the Park Avenue household in whose kitchen she worked had recently contracted typhoid: a chambermaid, followed, fatally, by the daughter of the homeowner. But Department of Health officials had already blamed the outbreak on the public water supply, and Mallon, who took pride in her work, was surely too clean to be a threat?
Besides, typhoid was everywhere, and Mallon had never had the disease herself, so how could she possibly spread it? Angry at the intrusion into her workplace and the smear against her character, Mallon seized a carving fork and chased her accuser out onto the street.
Mallon’s reaction was the complete opposite of what the sanitary engineer, George Soper, had expected. He later made sense of the cook’s “indignant” and “stubborn” behaviour by classifying her as peculiar and “perverse”, adding descriptions of her walking and thinking “more like a man than a woman” to his otherwise scientific reports. This idea of Mallon as unfeminine, deviant and wayward perhaps made it easier to justify her later treatment, or perhaps even influenced how Soper and others approached her in the first place.
Though the two had not met prior to their Park Avenue showdown, Mallon was identified by Soper as the guilty party in a mystery he had been unravelling for months. Asked to investigate an unexplained typhoid epidemic at the summer house of a New York banker the year before, Soper’s killer clue was the discovery that a cook had started work in the house three weeks before the outbreak and had moved on three weeks afterwards. Soper tracked down this “Irish woman about 40 years of age, tall, heavy, single” and in “perfect health”, through the employment bureau that had placed her in that role.