Leavitt – American Disasters

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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.

I chose to read the first chapter of Typhoid Mary, “The Rigorous Spirit of Science: The Triumph of Bacteriology,” in addition to the introduction, for a myriad of reasons. Firstly, I hate picking up a book mid-way through, and having to figure out for myself what went on in the previous chapters. More importantly for my research, this chapter dealt with the larger ideas and views of disease in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. While this predates my research on the Spanish Influenza, it provides vital information about the state of public health infrastructure leading up to the pandemic.

The Rigorous Spirit, chapter one of Leavitt’s book, traces the development of science, bacteriology, and the way that disease was handled at the turn of the 20^th century. She outlines the development of the germ theory of disease and the way that it affected the way that public health was addressed in the US, notably by a shift away from physical duties (street cleaning, sewage systems) and to a system centered on laboratory research (trying to isolate and find cures for various diseases). She goes on to outline in broad terms the life of Mary Mallon, the so-called ‘Typhoid Mary’ of popular culture today.

Leavitt’s book opens much like Gina Kolata’s Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it, a book a reviewed earlier in the semester for this class. This similar opening of both books encourages a discourse between them, which upon closer inspection are strikingly similar: they focus on a medical disaster and society’s attempt to contain and explain it. What other links can we draw between these two disasters, less then 15 years apart, and what can we learn from these links?

AJ’s post is thought provoking. Looking at the items offered for sale at the auction, I can’t help but think about the people behind them, and the tragedy that made a piece of wood worth $100,000. We can find out so much about the Titanic passengers from these items, and this value is lost when they are put in private collections, away from public view.

Tag: Leavitt

Leavitt’s motives and Wertheimer’s Legal History Presentation

The Rigorous Spirit of Science