[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LYNN LEVY: So have we said where we are on tape yet?

JAD ABUMRAD: Starting us off today are our producers Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.

SEAN COLE: Very pretty day to be on an abandoned island where victims of contagious disease were quarantined. And one in particular who lived here, died here, never believing that she was, in fact, sick and dangerous.

ROBERT KRULWICH: So this is a story that begins when?

SEAN: It—well actually, it starts in 1906. And it doesn't start on the island, it starts in Oyster Bay.

ROBERT: Oh, nice neighborhood!

SEAN: Very nice. And there was this one rich family on vacation there.

JUDY LEVITT: And their daughter gets sick. She gets sick first.

SEAN: This is Judy Levitt.

JUDY LEVITT: I am a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin.

SEAN: And she wrote a book about this story. So basically, the girl, the daughter, has a fever. Then her sister comes down with it, and then her mom, and a maid.

JUDY LEVITT: About six out of eleven in the family gets sick.

SEAN: And with this disease, the fever's just the first part of it.

JUDY LEVITT: Both diarrhea or constipation are reported. So it can go either way, I guess.

JAD: What is it?

SEAN: Typhoid.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JUDY LEVITT: And they couldn't figure out what had caused the disease, so they called in this sanitary engineer named George Soper.

SEAN: With the Public Health Department. He was the go-to guy for outbreaks like this. Back then, the Department of Public Health was thinking, you know, you'd get sick because of something dirty near you.

ROBERT: In the well or in the pipes.

SEAN: Yeah. So he looks into all of that.

JUDY LEVITT: Did a whole test on the house and the water and everything. Couldn't find anything, and so ...

SEAN: He starts talking to the family.

JUDY LEVITT: And he started quizzing them all, and they ...

SEAN: Eventually, he builds up this whole picture of several outbreaks going back years.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 1900. Mamaroneck. A New York family had a house for the summer ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 1902. Dark Harbor, Maine.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 1904. Seven cases.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Sands Point, New York.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Autumn, 1906.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Winter, 1907. New York City]

SEAN: All these cases. And they all had one thing in common.

ROBERT: What?

SEAN: Each of these families had employed the same cook.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Really?

SEAN: Which is funny, because when you cook food you kill the bacteria in the food.

JAD: Yeah!

ROBERT: So it couldn't be the cook then.

SEAN: But this cook ...

JUDY LEVITT: Her most famous dish was Peach Melba, which is ice cream and fresh peaches.

SEAN: Fresh peaches. Raw fruit.

JUDY LEVITT: It was a perfect medium.

SEAN: And the cook's name was Mary Mallon.

JAD: Mary Mallon. Wait a second, Sean Cole.

ROBERT: Typhoid ...

JAD: Typhoid Mary is who we're talking about.

ROBERT: Oh, so we know this story.

SEAN: No, you don't know this story.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

SEAN: Everybody thinks they know this story. I thought I knew this story. And then when I looked into it, I realized I didn't know the first thing about it. And when you look into the details, they tell us some very difficult things about who we were and who we still are in a lot of ways. It's all in the details, all of the juice and problem.

JAD: Like the peach juice.

ROBERT: The peach juice.

SEAN: Just like the peach juice. Still dealing with ...

ROBERT: Wait! I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Go ahead. Go ahead, do your part!

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab. And in this hour ...

JAD: A series of stories that all hew to that delicious story archetype we call ...

ROBERT: Patient Zero. The first cause.

JAD: We'll try to trace ideas and trends and massive social traumas like pandemics back to that one person.

ROBERT: Or one critter. Or the other way you could call it is called the "but for." If you didn't have this thing, but for this thing, you wouldn't have the rest of the story.

JAD: I like the but for.

ROBERT: The but for.

JAD: But meanwhile ...

ROBERT: Back to the peaches.

SEAN: So George Soper's like, "I've got to find this woman." And when he finds her ...

JUDY LEVITT: She's in New York City working for another family.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The laundress had recently been taken to the Presbyterian Hospital with typhoid fever.]

SEAN: This is from an article Soper wrote called The Curious Case of Typhoid Mary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And the only child of a family, a lovely daughter was dying of it.]

SEAN: So he goes to the house, walks into the kitchen. Sees this woman, 5'6", blond hair, blue eyes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Had a good figure, and might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy.]

SEAN: Irish immigrant, 36 years old.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Not particularly clean.]

JUDY LEVITT: And he says, "Mary Mallon, I think you are causing disease in people and I want samples of your urine, feces and blood." [laughs]

SEAN: [laughs] Good afternoon!

SEAN: And she says ...

DAVID ROSNER: What are you accusing me of being sick?

SEAN: Playing the role of Mary is Columbia Public Health Professor David Rosner.

DAVID ROSNER: How dare you? I'm not a sick person.

JAD: What does she do?

DAVID ROSNER: She chases him out of the building.

JUDY LEVITT: With a fork in her hand.

SEAN: A serving fork.

JAD: A serving fork?

SEAN: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I felt rather lucky to escape.]

JAD: But did she have typhoid? I mean, did she outwardly have typhoid?

SEAN: Well, that's the thing.

DAVID ROSNER: She never had any symptoms. She felt perfectly healthy.

SEAN: She was actually the first documented case in North America of a healthy carrier, which is to say someone who has the disease and is contagious, but never actually feels ...

ROBERT: The symptoms?

SEAN: The symptoms. So in one weird way, Soper's thrilled. Like, he's only read about this. And then here she is in front of him. But think of how all of this must have sounded to Mary. I mean, some guy from outer space comes into your kitchen and says, "You're diseased and you're hurting people." She must have thought ...

DAVID ROSNER: What? I feel fine. I'm living a moral life. I'm not a vagrant. I'm employed. I'm a good, solid citizen. You know, you would be crazed too, wouldn't you? Even today.

JAD: You'd—you'd probably grab your knife, yeah.

DAVID ROSNER: Yeah, you'd grab your knife.

ROBERT: Well, does he have any evidence though, that she is spreading the disease?

SEAN: Not yet. That's why he needs her poop.

ROBERT: Ah.

SEAN: So he goes back, finds her at a rooming house. She kicks him out, swears at him.

JUDY LEVITT: She apparently had quite a temper.

SEAN: And then the health department sends in this female doctor ...

JUDY LEVITT: By the name of S. Josephine Baker. Maybe she could ask for blood, feces and urine a little more gently than ...

SEAN: I just don't know how you ask for that gently.

SEAN: But she tries. And when it doesn't work, she comes back a little bit later with cops.

JUDY LEVITT: And they come to the house and Mary Mallon, when she realizes what's happening disappears.

SEAN: What do you mean, disappears? She just vanishes?

JUDY LEVITT: Just completely vanishes. They end up searching the entire place, and they can't find her. Finally, I think they're about to leave when one of them spots ...

DAVID ROSNER: ... her skirt coming outside of a door.

JUDY LEVITT: It's a little piece of calico kind of stuck in a doorway.

DAVID ROSNER: They open the door and there she is.

JUDY LEVITT: And so they drag her out and she comes out kicking and screaming and ...

DAVID ROSNER: ... screaming and kicking.

JUDY LEVITT: It takes all of them to drag her out.

DAVID ROSNER: Protesting.

JUDY LEVITT: They get her in the ambulance and Josephine Baker sits on her. According to her, sits on her.

SEAN: And Baker later said ...

JUDY LEVITT: Something like it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.

SEAN: So they take her down to the hospital.

JUDY LEVITT: They tested her feces and urine, and they found that yes, she was in fact a carrier of live typhoid bacilli.

MAN: It's a weird island. I spent a while on here.

JUDY LEVITT: So they isolate her, and they ultimately move her from Manhattan to North Brother Island.

DAVID ROSNER: And there she is.

SEAN: We went there to just to try to get our heads around what she must have thought.

JAD: What was the island like?

SEAN: Man, everything is completely overgrown.

SEAN: It was really creepy.

ROBERT: Creepy because it was in such dissolution?

SEAN: Yeah. Yeah.

SEAN: Just be careful where you step.

SEAN: On one end, there are all of these medical, former medical buildings, including a giant hospital where they isolated tuberculosis patients. So big, brick, stately building. And then on the other side of the island, there's smaller wooden buildings that are crushed.

SEAN: This may be where her cottage is.

SEAN: Where her cottage would be if it was still standing, but it's not standing anymore.

JUDY LEVITT: Well, it was one room. One room. It had a kitchen. It had a, I guess a sleeping area and a sitting area. It probably wasn't so bad if you didn't have to stay there. You know, any place is—that you're not free to leave becomes like a prison.

SEAN: So we're marching around and then Lynn says to me, "Hey, look at the view." And ...

SEAN: Holy moly! It's right there.

SEAN: That's when it really hit me.

SEAN: If this is where her cabin was, then one window of it looked exactly onto Manhattan.

LYNN: She could have seen where she used to live.

SEAN: You can see the traffic on the streets.

SEAN: This was like the most horrible seaside vacation.

JUDY LEVITT: Almost the whole time they had her incarcerated, they took feces three times a week, which is, you know, it's not pleasant to have to do that. And sometimes she was negative and sometimes she was positive.

JAD: Wait, what?

SEAN: So that's—that's another thing that they were figuring out at the time. So she was probably an intermittent carrier.

JAD: What does that mean?

SEAN: The disease is always in her, but sometimes she excretes it and sometimes she doesn't.

JAD: Oh, that must have been confusing for her.

LYNN: "When I first came here, I was so nervous and almost prostrated with grief and trouble. My eyes began to twitch."

SEAN: This is from a letter that Mary wrote from the island.

LYNN: "I have, in fact, been a peep show for everybody."

SEAN: But if you keep reading it, and in fact, it's addressed to a lawyer, it's clear that she was fighting this. And she had been sending her own feces samples herself to a private lab in Manhattan. And each one of those was negative.

JAD: Really?

LYNN: "The tuberculosis man would say, 'There she is, the kidnapped woman.'"

SEAN: Yeah, that is poison ivy.

SEAN: She sues the city and loses. Still, there are all of these questions as to whether any of this is legal. I mean, even George Soper, the guy who hunted her down said it was contrary to the Constitution of the United States to hold her under the circumstance.

JAD: And how long was she on this island for?

SEAN: Three years.

JAD: Wow!

SEAN: And then what changed was a new health commissioner took over.

JUDY LEVITT: And so he says it's just not right that we keep a healthy woman locked up like this. She was not dangerous to anybody if she didn't cook.

SEAN: He lets her go.

ROBERT: He lets her go?

SEAN: Yeah, back to Manhattan. But he makes her promise.

JUDY LEVITT: She did promise. She signed an affidavit ...

SEAN: Saying she'll never cook again. And she was released. They gave—they set her up with a job as a laundress and they went, "Here you go, Mary." And then, you know, they kept track of her for a while.

JAD: Hmm.

SEAN: And then at a certain point they kind of stopped keeping track of her.

JAD: [laughs]

SEAN: [laughs]

ROBERT: Dun dun dun dun! So how many years will go by?

SEAN: Five.

ROBERT: Five.

JAD: What happens next?

SEAN: There's an outbreak of typhoid.

ROBERT: Oh, boy.

JAD: Where?

ROBERT: Where?

SEAN: At a maternity hospital.

ROBERT: Oh, you're kidding!

JAD: Oh, wow!

SEAN: Josephine Baker who sat on her in the ambulance before, she says that she goes and pays a visit and walks into the kitchen. And she says the first person that she encountered was Typhoid Mary Mallon. George Soper did some legwork on where Mary had been, and it turned out she had worked at a restaurant, two hotels, an inn and a sanatorium, as well as the hospital. And at least according to his account, two of the people that she made sick during those couple years were children.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: She was now a woman who could not claim innocence. She was known willfully and deliberately to have taken desperate chances with human life. She had abused her privilege. She had broken her parole.]

JUDY LEVITT: So then they put her back on North Brother Island, back in her bungalow. And there she sits.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly.]

ROBERT: Absolutely. She's broke—broke her promise.

JAD: Yeah, I totally agree.

ROBERT: She made a deal and she didn't keep the deal.

SEAN: But the thing is is that at the time she was sent back to the island, there were hundreds of other healthy carriers identified all over New York, and some of them were cooks.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Really?

SEAN: Mostly men, by the way. And ...

JAD: And they were cooking?

SEAN: Well, they were barred from cooking, but not all of them always listened. And yet Mary was the only one who they isolated in this way.

JAD: Why? Why only her?

SEAN: I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe.

SEAN: Oh look out for this stair. It's all crumbled.

SEAN: She was what we needed at the time.

SEAN: We're in the hospital where the tuberculosis patients were quarantined.

SEAN: This was towards the end of Lynn and my visit to the island.

SEAN: Yeah, these must be the wards.

LYNN: Definitely.

SEAN: Yeah.

LYNN: So when was she here?

SEAN: This is where they brought her after she had a stroke. And this is where she was for the last six years of her life.

LYNN: Did she die in here?

SEAN: Yeah. Yeah

[DAVID ROSNER: Hi, this is David Rosner.]

[JUDY LEVITT: This is Judy Levitt.]

[DAVID ROSNER: Reading this message. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[JUDY LEVITT: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology.]

[DAVID ROSNER: Science and technology in the modern world.]

[JUDY LEVITT: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[DAVID ROSNER: Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[JUDY LEVITT: Okay, that's it. Thanks. Bye.]

-30-

 

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