78 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • NOVEMBER 2017 78 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 78 LONGISLANDPRESS.CO M • SEPTEMBER 201-----------TUTU111
REAR VIEW
Panic in Oyster Bay
Typhoid Mary’s deadly Gold Coast legacy
By ANNIE WILKINSON
Mary Mallon had spent most of
her life living in squalid housing
in the Lower East Side, but onAug.
4, 1906, she was escaping from all
that, seated in a Long Island Rail
Road car bound for Oyster Bay. The
train pulled into the elegant new
station that featured oyster shells
in the exterior cement. She was
looking forward to clean, cool, bay
breezes.
She had been hired as a cook by
Charles Henry Warren, the president
of Lincoln Bank in Manhattan
and banker to the Vanderbilts.
Warren had rented a large yellow
house with a wraparound porch at
the corner of McCouns Lane and
East Main Street. The mansion had
well-manicured grounds at the
edge of town sloping down to the
bay, near President Theodore Roosevelt’s
summer White House.
Mallon had come far since landing
on American soil in 1883 as
a 15-year-old from Ireland. The
only people she knew were her
aunt and uncle in New York City.
They took her in but died shortly
after. Mallon—also known as Mary
Malone—had to fend for herself, a
teenager with no family or friends,
forging her way in a foreign land
that was not entirely welcoming.
Earlier in the century in the mid-
1800s, Americans had accused
Irish immigrants of being rapists,
carrying disease, practicing an
un-American religion, and taking
jobs away from American
citizens—not unlike the anti-immigrant
arguments of today. But
by the late 19th century, those
suspicions had lessened. Like many
other immigrants, Mallon found
work as a trusted domestic. She was
a tall, blond, hard-working young
woman who craved independence.
She learned about cooking and became
known as a good, plain cook,
working for well-to-do Manhattan
families. By 1900, the 37-year-old
was, earning $45 per month, considered
good wages. But she kept to
herself and was seen as unsociable
by the other servants.
Her specialty was dessert, so one
night she made home-churned ice
cream with fresh-cut peaches for
the Warren household. Just weeks
later, more than half the people
served came down with typhoid
fever. Between Aug. 27 and Sept. 3,
six people fell ill. Three weeks after
the outbreak, Mallon left abruptly,
giving no notice.
Distrust and Denial
Typhoid attacked its victims with
high fevers, aching muscles, stomach
pains, exhaustion, and constipation
or diarrhea. Untreated, the
highly contagious infection could
kill one in five people; in 1900, it
killed 35,000 Americans. There was
no cure, antibiotics didn’t exist, and
a vaccine was not yet available.
Medical practitioners supported
the “filth theory” of contagion,
which held that typhoid was spread
by unsanitary surroundings and
people with poor hygiene and toilet
habits. Immigrants, assumed to live
in disease-ridden crowded housing,
became scapegoats.
But what about the upper-class
Warrens? None of them had associated
with infected people.
Previously, medical disease theory
of the 1850s embraced the “miasma
theory,” blaming vapors (foul air)
and environmental causes such
as contaminated water and poor
hygiene. In the late 1800s, doctors
found that the typhoid toxin was
transmitted through excrement and
that water contaminated by human
feces was responsible.
In 1900, researchers proved the
germ theory: Tiny organisms
invisible to the naked eye—like the
typhoid-causing Salmonella typhi—
could inhabit people and cause
disease. This discovery revolutionized
medicine.
But people remained suspicious
of the invisibility theory. They
couldn’t believe that things that
couldn’t be seen could sicken humans—
even in the best of homes.
When The New York Times covered
the Oyster Bay outbreak, the home’s
owner George Thompson panicked.
As a member of the Seawanhaka
Corinthian Yacht Club at Oyster
Bay, he had to protect his reputation.
Fearing the home would be
condemned and burned down by
the health department, in the winter
of 1906, Thompson hired epidemic
expert Dr. George A. Soper.
The New York City Health Department
sanitation engineer at first
blamed soft clams for the outbreak.
But after nearly a year, Soper
switched theories. He had learned
that Mallon had started working in
Oyster Bay on Aug. 4—about three
weeks before the outbreak. Soper
was the first to suggest the “healthy
carrier” theory of an asymptomatic
person—one who is healthy but
transmits disease.
Physicians of that era discovered
many facts about disease, but much
was still unknown. Also unknown
was that Mallon had survived a mild
case of typhoid fever as a child.
Give Me Your Urine
In 1907, 3,000 New Yorkers had
Salmonella typhi. Soper found that
during the previous 10 years, seven
of the eight households Mallon
worked in had come down with typhoid
cases; 22 people were infected,
and several died. In 1904, when
she was the cook at Henry Gilsey’s
Sands Point summer estate, four
servants became infected. People
would become ill within weeks of
her arrival, and she would vanish
soon after.
Soper suspected that Mallon’s body
was a typhoid breeding ground. We
now know that 5 percent of infected
people become chronic carriers,
excreting typhoid bacteria in their
feces for a year or more. Doctors
posited that Mallon didn’t wash her
hands thoroughly so she transmitted
germs when handling food—as
when cutting up raw peaches.
Soper had to test specimens to
prove his theory. While investigating
an outbreak at a Park Avenue
brownstone in March 1907, he
met the cook: It was Mallon. He
recalled in 1939, “I told her she
was spreading death and disease
through her cooking.” With a
less-than-compassionate bedside
manner, he insisted on taking
samples of feces, urine, and blood
for tests. Her reaction? “She seized
a carving fork and advanced in my
direction.” He quickly fled.
The George Thompson Oyster Bay house, site of a Typhoid outbreak attributed to
Mary Mallon. (Oyster Bay Historical Society)