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I chose to read “Extraordinary and Even Arbitrary Powers: Public Health Policy” because I hoped it would parallel my own research on health policies in schools during the Spanish Flu. Although I did not find any direct parallels to my project, this chapter in Judith Walzer Leavitt’s Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health did give me a few new sources I would like to check out. I would like to research Charles Chapin and Milton Rosenau who wrote on public health issues. Even if their works focus on typhoid, it would be helpful to understand the public health climate of the time regarding other diseases to see if and how Spanish Flu was treated any differently, particularly in schools.
In this chapter, Leavitt primarily focuses on how public health policy makers justified permanently isolating Mary Mallon and no others. Leavitt points to the facts that Mallon was the first carrier identified, she reacted violently to authorities, she resumed cooking under a fake name after her first stint at isolation, she was foreign, and she was not a “breadwinner” as possible explanations. However, Leavitt explains there were other foreigners, other single women, other cooks, and other resisters to the Health Department who were not sent to an island to live in isolation. Leavitt argues, therefore, that it was public health policy makers’ desire to make an example of Mallon that landed the cook on North Brother Island.
As John points out, policy makers like Biggs, Soper, and Baker were determined to prove that “Public Health was purchasable.” The real disaster, was not the outbreak of typhoid, but Mary’s treatment and the public’s reaction to it. The deaths caused by typhoid were enough to make Americans in large cities anxious; the public health office’s response had the potential to fuel the national debate about the limits of the government’s authority. Although many supported the government’s decision to isolate carriers because they did not wish to be infected themselves, many others may have become disillusioned with U.S. policy makers because, according to protesters, they used the disaster to increase their powers.