Typhoid Mary was a healthy cook who unknowingly spread typhoid and was held for decades

historyWellcome Collection1907 · New York, USA

Typhoid Mary was a healthy cook who unknowingly spread typhoid and was held for decades

the gist

In 1907 New York sanitary engineer George Soper traced a typhoid outbreak to Mary Mallon, a cook who was healthy herself. Soper linked her to several earlier outbreaks in homes where she had worked. When she refused to give samples, health officials seized her and confined her to hospital, where her stool was found to contain a pure culture of typhoid bacteria. Mallon was held on North Brother Island, and in 1909 the press gave her the nickname Typhoid Mary. She was released in 1910 on condition she stop cooking, but she later took a job under a false name and was linked to a further outbreak in 1915. She spent most of the rest of her life quarantined. Her case raised lasting questions about public health and individual rights.

so what

Her case was among the first to show that healthy carriers can spread serious infectious disease, and it still raises questions about how far authorities can go to protect the public.

fun fact

Typhoid Mary became a term still used for a person who spreads something harmful without realising it.

more on this

background

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), commonly known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born cook who lived in the United States from a young age and is believed to have infected up to fifty-seven people with the bacteria that cause typhoid fever. The infections caused three confirmed deaths. She was the first person in the U.S. to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella typhi bacteria.

Between 1897 and 1907, Mallon worked at the houses of several New York–based families; members of four of the households contracted typhoid. An investigation by George Soper, an epidemiologist at the New York Department of Health, identified Mallon as the potential disease vector. In 1907, she was forcibly quarantined at the Riverside Hospital, an institution for those with quarantinable diseases, on North Brother Island in New York City's East River. She was released in 1910 after she swore to report to the health department every quarter and not return to cooking as a career.

From Wikipedia: Mary Mallon (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

see

RoySmith, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Unknown artist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

key facts

Born: 23 September 1869
Died: 11 November 1938
Known as: cook

Facts: Wikidata (CC0)

Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0

Illustrative photo · Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

source: Wellcome Collection ↗

historyThe Public Domain Review1909 · United States

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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