Typhoid Mary – American Disasters

April 16, 2014December 16, 2020

Leavitt’s motives and Wertheimer’s Legal History Presentation

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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.

April 16, 2014December 16, 2020

Disease: a Multifaceted Disaster

The first chapter in Typhoid Mary highlights mankind’s tendency to find a scapegoat for society’s problems. It also points out the lower class’s vulnerability to man’s hunt for someone to blame. Leavitt notes that many stereotyped the lower classes as “dirtier than their employers” as an explanation for the higher rates of typhoid in the working class (Leavitt 18). This kind of stereotype made lower classes more vulnerable to social isolation.

Leavitt suggests that “as a society, we have become masters of stigmatizing the sick and the contagious; we label them as separate from the mainstream” (3). Society tends to dehumanize people with diseases such as AIDs, making them vulnerable to isolation. This narrative fits into Leavitt’s broader argument that disease is a disaster in a multitude of ways. She argues “it is imperative that we learn to consider the full range of contexts in which disease ravages” (3).

This argument ties neatly into her other central arguments of the text, specifically the social consequences of disease control and the inherently subjective nature of historical interpretation.

It is difficult to tell from only reading one chapter whether Leavitt is successful with her argument. However, her sensitivity to the “various ways to tell Mary Mallon’s story” and the “relevan[cy]” of each narrative seems reasonably convincing (5). Moreover, her argument in chapter one about society’s growing “scientific optimism” seems consistent with her goal to isolate each type of narrative. Jeremiah rightly points out that Leavitt’s argument and the case of Mary Mallon have a broader impact than one woman’s fate. The vulnerability of the lower classes and society’s tendency to label and ostracize diseased individual’s are two such impacts that society needs to keep in mind.

April 16, 2014December 16, 2020

What is a “good” quarantine?

I chose to read “Extraordinary and Even Arbitrary Powers” because I was looking to compare and contrast the dialogue of quarantine and public health policies with my own research. I have been looking into federal and state responses to the Yellow Fever Outbreak in the Mississippi River Valley of 1878 and found striking parallels as well as contrasts between the two.

At Mary Mallon’s time, state and national health boards were still in their early formation stages (more so in the South than the North). But a lot still remained unclear about jurisdiction, funding, and research roles of the boards. It was a time of anxiety in the public health world and policy makers, businessmen, and health officials alike were still sorting out their place in the field. New York’s board, however, as Leavitt writes, had been frontrunner in forming policies since it gained legitimate authority in 1866. She writes, “The local board soon became the nation’s leader in terms of defining municipal programs to promote health and prevent disease, and its accomplishments were adopted as models across the country” (40).

And yet, one of the most established boards in the country couldn’t quite figure out what to do with little Mary Mallon. After the yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, state and federal officials blamed the poor sanitation conditions for the epidemic. However, New York was doing fairly well in that regards. They needed to find another way to take action, so they put Mary Mallon in quarantine? “Why was quarantine the first response of the New York officials instead of last resort?” (47)

John wrote that “Mary Mallon’s capture and subsequent isolation can be viewed as a manifestation of the belief that it was possible for humankind to conquer disease” and I agree with that to a certain extent. However, there was also just a sense that people did not know what to do with her. And this raises a whole host of ethical questions that Leavitt discusses in this chapter, “Was it necessary to restrain even one person’s individual liberty in order to achieve health?” (69) And yet, there are records that officials believed that their capturing of Mallon was reasonable. And while I agree with Molly when she wrote, “The real disaster, was not the outbreak of typhoid, but Mary’s treatment and the public’s reaction to it”, there was no protocol for dealing with cases like silent-carriers. What is our value criteria for dealing with such sensitive subjects like quarantine? Public officials didn’t really have a good rubric back then – and even today we are still having similar discussions about the spread of HIV and tuberculosis. What is “good” quarantine?

April 16, 2014December 16, 2020

Does Liberty Have A Boundary?

So, in the introduction of Judith Walzer Leavitt’s work on Mary Mallon and the public’s perception of her legacy and the impact her story continues to have on public health, she explores the meanings of Mary Mallon’s experiences early in the twentieth century and examines how American society, as a nation and as individuals, has approached taking away the liberty of someone who is sick or a carrier of sickness in the name of protecting the public’s health. (Typhoid Mary, 3) By examining the life of Mary Mallon, the situation she was put in, how officials handled it and the resulting influence her case had on the American public, Judith Leavitt ends up poses a very interesting question that I myself haven’t really considered and don’t necessarily have an answer to. She asks how we have weighted the two values of health and liberty when they come into conflict and address what might be at risk in the balancing. (4)

The issue at hand is the value Americans place on individual liberty and the public health of its citizens. We can all understand the extremely high priority Americans put on our individual freedom from our constitution and the laws that reflect it, however, how high is the value we put on public health? We certainly do not agree with most situations that deprive us of our liberty but this issue is immediately confronted in situations that involve public health and safety. Our society demands the government to always protect our liberty but does it come before our public health? Mary Mallon’s situation is a great case study and should start some serious class discussion with this question. Which one is valued more? Can they be interchangeable? Do we sacrifice the liberty of one to save the whole or does that ruin the constitutional system we created? Does the difference in how people value the human life matter? Leavitt opens the door to a whole bunch of debate without answering the question because she doesn’t even know when the line should be crossed or where. The answer is not black and white. This question deems a very blurry grey line which is perfect for our class discussion. Is the health of our citizens overshadowing the beliefs we built our country on? John Marsh in his blog post also brings up a good point to consider, he wrote, “It informs an understanding of Gilded Age culture’s conduciveness to disaster. More specifically, the isolation of Mary Mallon, if considered a disaster, demonstrates the pitfalls of the Gilded Age belief in the infallibility of science, or scientific method, to solve any problem.” This must all be put in the discussion. Does our unwavering belief in science effect how we decipher the value of human life?

April 9, 2014December 16, 2020

The Rigorous Spirit of Science

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.