Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health [Paperback]

Judith Walzer Leavitt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807021032 | ISBN-13: 978-0807021033 | Publication Date: July 31, 1997

She was an Irish immigrant cook. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected twenty-two New Yorkers with typhoid fever through her puddings and cakes; one of them died. Tracked down through epidemiological detective work, she was finally apprehended as she hid behind a barricade of trashcans. To protect the public's health, authorities isolated her on Manhattan's North Brother Island, where she died some thirty years later.

This book tells the remarkable story of Mary Mallon--the real Typhoid Mary. Combining social history with biography, historian Judith Leavitt re-creates early-twentieth-century New York City, a world of strict class divisions and prejudice against immigrants and women. Leavitt engages the reader with the excitement of the early days of microbiology and brings to life the conflicting perspectives of journalists, public health officials, the law, and Mary Mallon herself.

Leavitt's readable account illuminates dilemmas that continue to haunt us. To what degree are we willing to sacrifice individual liberty to protect the public's health? How far should we go in the age of AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases? For anyone who is concerned about the threats and quandaries posed by new epidemics, Typhoid Mary is a vivid reminder of the human side of disease and disease control.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mary Mallon was a feisty 36-year-old Irish immigrant who made her living as a cook for wealthy New York City families when she was seized, in 1907, by officers of the city's Public Health Department and detained in a cottage on North Brother Island where, except for two years, she lived in isolation for the remaining 26 years of her life. Her crime was that, although healthy herself, she was a carrier of the typhus bacillus and had innocently infected 22 people. Leavitt raises questions about this famous case: whether race, gender and class bias played a part in Mallon's detention. At the time, feelings against the Irish were strong; and she was a woman and a servant. Male carriers of the bacillus were not deprived of their livelihoods, nor were they isolated from society. The press, clamoring for a news-making story, influenced the harsh treatment of Mallon, demonizing her as "Typhoid Mary." Most important, Leavitt, a professor of medical history at the University of Wisconsin, discusses the difficult issue of serving the public good while protecting individual liberty. She suggests that instead of stigmatizing or impoverishing those who unknowingly threaten the health of the community, we treat them humanely and guarantee them economic security. Resurrecting forgotten history, Leavitt raises an alarm that is much needed in this day of AIDS.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The story of Mary Mallon, the Irish immigrant cook who later became known as "Typhoid Mary," dramatically illustrates the conflict between the needs of an individual and the needs of society. After she infected 22 people with typhoid, the public health authorities forcibly isolated Mallon for most of her adult life in an attempt to limit the spread of the disease. Leavitt (history of medicine, Univ. of Wiscon, Madison) has examined the medical, legal, and social perspectives of the early 20th century as she endeavors to understand Mallon's situation, her reactions to her isolation, and the reaction of the media and of the public. Leavitt concludes her book with an interesting discussion of the relevance of Mallon's story to recent public health concerns. Her discussion of the identification and labeling of people is particularly enlightening with regard to the current HIV dilemma. Leavitt does an admirable job of demonstrating the "delicate balance between personal liberty and public health." Recommended for any health science collection.?Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (July 31, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807021032
• ISBN-13: 978-0807021033
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #57,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Painstaking research into a historical personality, February 19, 2001

By 

K. Fromal "kristinof" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health (Paperback)

Leavitt's book, Typhoid Mary, attempts to reconstruct the life and times of Mary Mallon, the first identified typhoid carrier in the United States. Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant, and worked as a cook among the elite families of New York city. She is also the centerpiece of one of the scientific advances of the twentieth century: the understanding that some illnesses are caused by germs, rather than vague miasmas, and that apparently healthy individuals can spread these germs to others. An understanding of this scientific truth, however, raises an even more puzzling question: how can the public address these individuals who, through no bad acts on their part, are able to risk the public's health? Leavitt analyzes Mary's story with the use of seven different perspectives: that of medicine, public policy, the law, social expectations, newspaper accounts, her own, and the story's modern retelling. These seven accounts combine to provide the reader a full account of the medical and social conditions of the day, and how they combined to account for Mary's lifelong isolation. The research on this book is well-done and the writing interesting. My biggest complaint was that some of the material is repetitive, as the different perspectives do overlap at times.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Social History, May 2, 2000

By 

T. C. Ross (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health (Paperback)

Less a history of Mary Mallon herself than of how the U.S. reacted to typhoid, Typhoid Mary makes for an interesting look into turn-of-the-century understandings of epidemiology and public health.

Leavitt does a nice job of telling the story of how Mary was identified as a vector for typhoid and of how she was treated by the state of New York. However, the book is laced with lots of analysis and attempts to draw connections between the way typhoid was treated/viewed in the late 1800s and early 1900s and with how AIDS has been treated/viewed in the late 1900s. These connections are valid and interesting, but the manner in which they are scattered throughout the text become a bit distracting. This said, Typhoid Mary remains enlightening and interesting reading.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough Historcal Analysis of the Pheomenon "Typhoid Mary", December 10, 2010

By 

R. Batta - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health (Paperback)

Leavitt's, Typhoid Mary, is a rigorous historical analysis of "Typhoid Mary". The most interesting aspect of this book is the multiple (atleast 7) historical perspectives it provides regarding Mary Mallon. For those that don't remember "Typoid" Mary Mallon, she was a single, Irish immigrant woman who was a "healthy carrier" of Typhoid. She happened to be the first "healthy carrier" that was tracked in New York City and quarantined. She was confined to life imprisonment on an island off of NYC based on the evidence by the new emerging field of bacteriology. What is puzzling is the fact that social prejudices and expectations played the major factor in her "quarantine"; there were other healthy carriers whose offenses objectively were greater than Mary Mallon's, but they were not quarantined because of their social position.

The value of this book is its historical analysis that aims to raise political, ethical, gender, social, science issues and values regarding Public Health Policy and the individual's rights. The book provides just enough interpretation to hint at the larger issues and does not provide the author's personal opinion about what should have been regarding the issues. Many of these issues are still relevant regarding the AIDS epidemics and other public health concerns. It is important for modern society to confront the conflict between broader health values of the public and the personal liberties of "victimized" individuals.

The aim of this book is to allow readers to evaluate the consequences of what happened to transform Mary Mallon into the stigmatized "typhoid mary". This book is a must read for anyone that works in the field of public health and administration and is also a model for how historical phenomena and sensations should be analyzed.