Typhoid Mary (10 page)

     She was a cook. Who saw herself, as many cooks do, as slightly better than everybody else. Not higher on the evolutionary scale, nor better in the social sense of the word. Just harder-working, more skillful, more righteous. And she was, after all, a martyr of sorts. Identified in the press as the notorious Typhoid Mary, she was the subject of ribbing and gossip and speculation. She had little else to do with her time but stare out at the river, watch the world going on without her and recount the outrages committed against her good name and person. She had a lot of time to think – and was aggrieved and angry, and she did what any modern-day citizen with a gripe would do: she got herself a lawyer.

     How Counselor George Francis O’Neill became involved in the case is unclear. He was a shrewd choice. Twice a Republican candidate for the state senate, prominent in Irish affairs, he had been, prior to taking the bar exam, a customs inspector, a man well versed in public health issues. There have been suggestions that the hidden hand of William Randolph Hearst is visible at this point in the story of Mary Mallon. Hearst, not unlike the quasi-portrait of him in the film
Citizen Kane
, had swept back into town by storm in 1895. In 1887, after a short stint working at
The New York World
, young William had convinced his dad, George, to buy him the
San Francisco Examiner
. When George kicked off in 1891, he left 17 million bucks to his wife, William’s mother, and William, already jacked on newspapers, immediately hit mom up for some dough – wanting desperately to return to New York and carve himself out some territory in the highly competitive newspaper business. Obligingly, mom sold off 7.5 million dollars worth of Anaconda Copper shares and gave the proceeds to her son. For the bargain price of 180,000 dollars, William Randolph Hearst bought himself the
Morning Journal
in 1895.

     The early episodes of
Citizen Kane
, in spirit at least, portray pretty closely the real-life Hearst’s stint in New York. He wanted things. A lot of things. Among them was to be president of the United States. He set himself up as the advocate for the working man, the underdog, the downtrodden and the unfortunate, railing (at times fearlessly) against Tammany Hall politicians, social injustices, corruption, and inequity as he saw it. And he behaved, in public at least, with rectitude – never swearing, avoiding alcohol and tobacco.

     There was one principal obstacle, however, one other pretender to the throne of Spokesperson for the Masses and Champion of Virtue; Joseph Pulitzer, whose own newspaper, the
World
, proudly crowed that
it
was the champion of the downtrodden. Hearst quickly began an energetic, no-holds-barred circulation war between his paper and Pulitzer’s, positioning himself, unashamedly, as the voice of the nation. His involvement in Cuban exile politics and his fomenting of war with Spain is well known. He was not, for instance, beyond fabricating alleged Spanish atrocities. Even Pulitzer saw a war with Spain as too good to miss out on and joined the fray, only ratcheting up the stakes. In the end, Hearst spent 7 million dollars trying to knock his rival out of the game, lavishing money on foreign correspondents, cables, and innumerable extra editions, most of which were returned for rebates. But in the end, both papers ended up with a circulation of about a million and a quarter. Hearst’s
Journal
swallowed up the
World
and William got at least most of what he wanted, a loud and influential voice, a presence in national journalism and politics – and he used both assets with vigor.

     He was sympathetic to the Irish, certainly. This was both tactically wise and seemingly heartfelt. Any imagined constituency would be largely Irish working class and have to, by necessity, include and appeal to the large numbers of public servants, politicians, Irish organization members, eating clubs and wardheelers who made the day-to-day of New York politics run smoothly and profitably. An editorial in the
Journal-American
on St. Patrick’s Day reveals a near-militant admiration for the cause of Irish republicanism and goes on to excoriate Americans for their relative gutlessness and compliance in the face of adversity and inequity.

     And
Journal-American
coverage of the Mallon case was relatively restrained – even actively empathetic.

     Did Hearst hire George O’Neill for Mary? Did Hearst see a continuing legal battle – pitting a hardworking Irish woman on one hand, and the monolithic Health Department with all their loosely defined powers to incarcerate and evict and restrain on the other – as a good thing for circulation?
Somebody
was being awfully nice. Or was it O’Neill himself – working pro bono perhaps? Hearst had provided lawyers for subjects of articles before – or helped organize fundraising for legal defense – and the Hearst papers’ coverage and access could certainly indicate a closeness to the case which other papers seem not to have enjoyed.
Someone
was paying for the services of the Ferguson labs.

     In any case, Mary Mallon found herself with a distinguished advocate. Over the next few years, while she never
won
a motion or a case, she clearly either wore the opposition down or, at the very least, scared them mightily.

     After two years on North Brother Island, Mary Mallon, with George Francis O’Neill at her side, appeared before Justice Erlanger, claiming that there was no law on the books to justify her continued detention. By now, June 29, 1909, there had been a few developments in her favor: fifty additional persons had been identified as typhoid carriers in New York State alone and yet none of them had been confined to North Brother Island or to jail. The ‘health menace’ she had represented two years earlier had faded somewhat in the public’s memory.

     The spin on the news story had changed. Even some of her jailers began to sound sympathetic and troubled by the implications of her case.

Chapter Nine

Habeas Corpus

There’s a fingerprint smudge on the handwritten affidavit of Mary Mallon aka Typhoid Mary, dated April 12, 1909, where she seems to have attempted to rub away an extra consonant in the word ‘anything’. The penmanship is excellent – classic Palmer method, with nice loops and valleys – and the spacing is neat, for the first few pages. But as the impassioned, and at times angry account proceeds, the writing gets sloppier, the text takes on a downhill slant, the content becomes less diplomatic. It’s a fascinating peek inside the head of a very angry cook and it’s almost all we’ve got to remember her by. In her answer to the affidavit of Dr. Park of the Board of Health, Mary speaks in her own words:

I am not segregated with the typhoid patients  . . . there is nobody on this island that has typhoid  . . . there was never any effort by the Board authorities to do anything for me excepting to cash [
sic
] me on the island and keep me a prisoner without being sick nor needing medical treatment  . . . when I first came here [
Mary did not bother with punctuation or caps – unless referring to names and titles
]  . . . they took two blood cultures and feces  . . . [then] three times a week say Monday Wednesday and Friday respectfully until the latter part of June  . . . after that they only got the feces once a week which was on Wednesday  . . . now they have given me a record for nearly a year for three times a week(!!)

     Mary is here referring to a document submitted by the Corporation Counsel, representing the Department of Health in response to a writ of habeas corpus from her lawyer, O’Neill. The paper chronicles the ‘bacteriological results of the examination of feces from Mary Mallon’ from dates beginning March 20, 1907 and ending June 16, 1909. And she’s half-right: scrupulous, three-time-a-week sampling continues until December of 1907, at which time things change – from three times a week to five times a month, then four times a month, sometimes three. It must have been puzzling, even suspicious, to Mary, who, like any patient who has heard troubling news, was looking for reason – any reason – to hope. Maddening also were the results. ‘No typhoid found’ for weeks in a row, followed by ‘typhoid found’ for a few days, followed by ‘no typhoid found’ and back again. Her friend Breihof, apparently, had been forgiven for his snitching, and remained devoted. He now shuttled Mary’s stool samples to the privately engaged Ferguson Laboratory for analysis in the hope of disputing the Department’s data – and there do appear to have been incongruities. The Ferguson results, without exception, found no typhoid, perhaps because Ferguson was telling the client what they wanted to hear, or maybe because Breihof was not conveying the samples in a timely fashion and they had degraded, perhaps while he enjoyed a few libations. Mary, at least, seems to have put some stock in them. The court did not.

     This part of the story is troubling because at this point, Mary seems to have begun to put stock in
somebody’s
laboratory analysis. She is no longer sweepingly condemning
all
medical science – particularly when they’re telling her what she wants to hear. She’s selectively believing what
some
doctors and nurses are telling her – lifting bits of what they’ve said and what she’s overheard, and winnowing out that which she sees as useful to her case.

‘When I first came here I was so nervous and almost prostrated with grief and trouble my eyes began to twitch and the left eye lid became Paralyzed  . . . remained in that condition for six months  . . . there was an eye Specialist visited the Island three or four times a week and he was never asked to visit me I did not even get a cover for my eye  . . . had to hold my hand on it whilst going about at night  . . . when Dr. Wilson took charge he came to me and I told him about it  . . . he said that was news to him and that he would send me his electrick [
sic
] battery
he never did such
  . . . However my eye got better thanks to the
Almighty God
and no thanks  . . .

     Here she thinks better of what she was about to write, and scratches out the ‘and no thanks.’

     The affidavit moves on to describe some of the medical ‘expedients’ and ‘strategies’ her warders have been using to rid Mary’s system of typhoid.

In spite of the medical staff Dr. Wilson ordered me Urotropin  . . . I got that on and off for a year  . . . sometimes he had it and sometimes he did not  . . . I took Urotropin for about 3 months all told during the whole
year
  . . . if I should have continued it would certainly have killed me for it was very Severe. Every one knows who is acquainted in any kind of medicine what what it’s used for
Kidney trouble
?

     Mary, evidently, was listening to the nurses, comparing what the various doctors told her, and forming her own opinions about treatment. She had, a year before filing her habeas corpus, engaged another lab to do their own testing – and she had willingly provided samples for them. She was becoming something of a jailhouse doctor and the seemingly haphazard testing, treatments and results were obviously frustrating and provocative – suggestive of sinister motives and incompetence. What O’Neill and Breihof were telling her, culled from their own information gathering efforts, and what she had gleaned from her limited contacts on North Brother, must have offered maddening little anomalies and rays of hope which she clung to fiercely, believing those things which might reflect positively and rejecting the negative.

When in January they were about to discharge me when the resident Physician came to me and asked me where I was going when I got out of here  . . . naturally I said to NY  . . . so there was a stop put to my getting out of here  . . . the supervising nurse told me I was a hopeless case and if I’d write to Dr. Darlington and tell him I’d go to my Sisters in Connecticut. Now I have no sister in that state or any other in the US  . . .

     Were the doctors and Health Department functionaries of the State of New York trying to unload the Mary Mallon problem on another state? The head nurse seemed to be doing just that. All Mary Mallon had to do was lie – tell them that she was
not
going to remain a New York problem – that she was going off to live with a notional sister out of state. It’s a telling detail that she refused to play ball here. And that rather than take that offer and play that game, she instead, rather stubbornly, used this episode as evidence of duplicity in her affidavit.

Then in April a friend [
surely Breihof
] went to Dr. Darlington and asked him where I was to go away  . . . he replied that woman is all right now and she is a very Expensive woman but I cannot let her go my self  . . . the Board has to sit  . . . come around Saturday  . . . when he did Dr. Darlington told this man I’ve nothing more to do with this woman  . . . go to Dr. Studiford  . . . he went to that Doctor and he said I cannot let that woman go and all the people that she gave the typhoid fever and so many deaths occurred in the families she was with  . . . Dr. Studiford said to this man go and ask Mary Mallon and inveigle her to have an operation performed to have her Gall Bladder removed.