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I love how Leavitt approaches her argument. She lays out her goals before the reader very clearly, and although I have not read the entire book, from what I have read, I think she does what she planned to do well.
Leavitt explains well in the last chapter how many other Typhoid carriers took the same course of action that she did in dealing with her disease. I want to caution alroberts in making sure that, although Mary’s situation and course of action made her a prime scapegoat for a major epidemic, many other people were just as culpable as she was, and many of these people comprised the lower class. It was not her class status or her situation that made her unique; it was how the public reacted to her that made her unique.
In the last chapter, Leavitt explains many different theatrical and artistic interpretations of Mary Mallon’s story, and many of these interpretations had very different sentiments toward Mary. Some made her the victim, while others made her the villain and everywhere in between. This approach executes Leavitt’s plan to present many different perspectives of the story well.
In the last line of the book before the conclusion, Leavitt says, “Danger lurks in the most unsuspecting places, and we are now a society on guard against it Is there any way out? What should we do next?” (230). When I first read this line, I thought, ‘why in the world would Leavitt relate this story to danger?’. Then, I realized that this line is a great way to sum up how we deal with natural disasters (one could argue whether or not sickness outbreak is a disaster), and I became much more satisfied with the line in a broader context.
Also, I just wanted to say that Dr. Wertheimer’s class (and CT) has done excellent, extensive research on how juries were composed in South Carolina in the Jim Crow era. If you didn’t get to go to the presentation, you should ask CT how jury selection exercised white supremacy within the south during the era, and how it is still a (not quite as prevalent) problem today.