![]() Mallon refused to believe that she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, even after her release in 1910. Vilified as “Typhoid Mary” by the press, Mary Mallon was arrested as a public health threat in 1907. This is likely how Mallon spread the disease given that laboratory analyses of her feces showed pathogens aplenty, which suggested that none of her trips from the bathroom to the kitchen involved soap. ![]() Only humans are infected by and transmit the pathogen, usually through food and water contaminated with Salmonella-filled urine or feces. Untreated typhoid fever can be fatal in up to 30 percent of cases, and before the advent of antibiotics, it caused thousands of deaths in the United States each year. The disease is caused by the bacterium Salmonella typhi, which was well-described and identifiable with diagnostic tests by the 1890s. Typhoid fever has many symptoms, such as a prolonged high fever, headache and malaise, and Mallon had none of them. She didn’t deny her poor hand hygiene but also failed to see how she could have infected anyone. Mallon was arrested as a public health threat in 1907 after being identified as the source of seven household outbreaks of typhoid fever since 1900.Įpidemiological evidence suggested that she infected her clients by preparing their meals with unclean hands-a charge that Mallon rejected. The main target of the doctor’s ire was a private cook named Mary Mallon, the notorious “Typhoid Mary” of medical lore, who was serving a sentence of forced isolation on North Brother Island in New York City’s East River. “Until the HABIT is established of purifying the hands, both timely and properly, no lessening of this human misery seems possible under existing conditions,” Eccles declared. With ample ammunition from research in bacteriology, a field in its heyday by the close of the 19th century, he had scientific proof that uncleanliness could transform hands into petri dishes of pathogens. Causing more deaths than “bullets, poisons, railway accidents and earthquakes combined,” the human hand was a weapon of mass destruction that extinguished innocent lives by the hour, according to this Brooklyn-based doctor. In a seven-page rant titled “Dirty Hands,” published in the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette of New York City, Eccles blamed filthy fingers for the deadliest crimes of the age. “There is no act of life so dangerous to others,” fumed physician Robert Eccles in 1909, “as carelessness concerning the condition of our hands.”
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