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The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Greeny Boy, Chuck and Bryant and Jerry
0:17
Speaker 1: back in the his house. Now more guest producing. No,
0:22
Speaker 1: that was a rough week she was, but she's back. Hey, Jerry,
0:29
Speaker 1: did you hear that? Everybody? Probably not? Chuck? Yes, Jerry.
0:36
Speaker 1: Have you guys ever heard how much manure a horse
0:40
Speaker 1: produces in a day? I'm glad you went with this.
0:43
Speaker 1: I was never really occurred to me. Go ahead, pounds
0:48
Speaker 1: twenty five pounds of manure. Did you do the math?
0:51
Speaker 1: Because I did? Right? Will you come with that in
0:54
Speaker 1: a second? Okay? So, um, just go back with me
0:56
Speaker 1: a little bit, Chuck to the time when Daniel day
0:58
Speaker 1: Lewis was walking around New York with meat Cleaver overacting
1:01
Speaker 1: a little bit in my opinion. Um, And it's the
1:05
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century, and the horse is the u
1:11
Speaker 1: is the preferred mode of transportation for everything from the
1:15
Speaker 1: the most humble delivery cart to the greatest ambulance to
1:20
Speaker 1: you know, people who like to ride horses. Three musketeers,
1:23
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Everybody had a horse to the
1:26
Speaker 1: limit to the airport wherever. So there were about two
1:32
Speaker 1: hundred thousand horses in New York City in use in right, Yeah,
1:40
Speaker 1: multiply that times twenty five pounds of poop a day
1:44
Speaker 1: and what do you get chucked? Well? I did two
1:46
Speaker 1: thousand because I thought that was the number. Okay, so
1:49
Speaker 1: that's fine, We'll go with that. More than six point
1:51
Speaker 1: two million pounds of horse poop per day deposited on
1:55
Speaker 1: the streets of New York. Okay, Now, um, let's say
1:58
Speaker 1: that's okay, Um, there's that many horses. There's six point
2:03
Speaker 1: two million pounds of horsepoop every day. It's a lot
2:08
Speaker 1: of poop. But not only that, there was no one
2:10
Speaker 1: cleaning it up. It was not enough people cleaning it up.
2:13
Speaker 1: Let's say that for sure. It was just left there
2:16
Speaker 1: basically in a lot of cases, um to basically be
2:19
Speaker 1: ground into the cobble stone. And you know, it makes
2:23
Speaker 1: you think, like, I'll bet there's a substantial layer of
2:26
Speaker 1: horse manure under the streets of New York that make
2:30
Speaker 1: up like that initial stratum of of of Earth, the
2:35
Speaker 1: Poopa sphere. I think, oh wait, that would be an
2:37
Speaker 1: outer space. No, no, because the lithosphere is yes, so
2:41
Speaker 1: you were dead on. Thank you the popa sphere Um,
2:47
Speaker 1: things change a little bit. The New York Institute's a
2:50
Speaker 1: department of health and a group of basically an army
2:56
Speaker 1: of cleaning guys, very much like the the garbage man
3:01
Speaker 1: that Homer Simpson envisions in the in the It's the
3:06
Speaker 1: Garbage Commissioner episode. I can't remember which one it is. Uh, oh,
3:10
Speaker 1: the Loveday episode is what it is? Okay. Um, These guys,
3:14
Speaker 1: they're called white Wings. They are deployed to clean up
3:17
Speaker 1: the streets of New York and they do a heck
3:18
Speaker 1: of a job. And possibly the fact of the the episode,
3:23
Speaker 1: if I may take it please, this is where the
3:26
Speaker 1: term cleanliness is next to godliness is coined. Pretty cool
3:29
Speaker 1: the New York Department of Health slogan in downtown New York,
3:34
Speaker 1: Josh at the turn of the century. Back then was
3:37
Speaker 1: a disgusting, filthy place. And yet I love New York.
3:42
Speaker 1: I love the history of New York. We watched we
3:44
Speaker 1: both watched the same Nova video on Typhoid Mary today
3:47
Speaker 1: and they had photos of mountains of manure pushed to
3:52
Speaker 1: the sidewalks, and uh, sort of like if you've ever
3:55
Speaker 1: been in New York on garbage day. Imagine all those
3:57
Speaker 1: garbage bags is poop, Yeah, but not pooping bags, just
4:01
Speaker 1: mound poop. And they were dead animal carcasses. Did you
4:05
Speaker 1: see that. Probably it was like these boys playing in
4:07
Speaker 1: the street with just a dead horse right in the
4:09
Speaker 1: middle of their little stickball miamond I guess he was
4:12
Speaker 1: on base or something. And it was just a foul, disgusting, unclean,
4:18
Speaker 1: unsanitary place, which, like you said, led to the formation
4:21
Speaker 1: of the Department of Sanitation, Right, So the Department, the
4:24
Speaker 1: Department of Sanitation um was imbued with a lot of
4:29
Speaker 1: clout from the get Yeah. And as you said that,
4:33
Speaker 1: the Nova documentary on Typhoid Mary, it's called like the
4:39
Speaker 1: Most Dangerous Woman in America, but it's also on YouTube
4:42
Speaker 1: under Typhoid Mary Nova. That's good. It was um, but
4:47
Speaker 1: they had a lot of cloud. They could forcibly inoculate
4:49
Speaker 1: you with these new fangled inoculations. They could forcibly remove
4:55
Speaker 1: you to a quarantine island, and New York had a
4:57
Speaker 1: bunch of them. Yeah, that was popular at the time.
5:00
Speaker 1: But basically, your civil liberties could be entirely suspended without
5:04
Speaker 1: any sort of due process of law. Um. And you
5:08
Speaker 1: if you were considered sick. And a lot of this
5:12
Speaker 1: was based on this new understanding of science of germ
5:16
Speaker 1: theory thanks to our buddy Louis past year bacteriology yep. Um.
5:21
Speaker 1: So the problem was science reporting hadn't been established yet.
5:26
Speaker 1: So all of the people who were in charge understood
5:28
Speaker 1: what was going on. They understood germ theory, they understood innoculations,
5:31
Speaker 1: they understood force quarantine, but no one had explained it
5:34
Speaker 1: to the public fully right, So it's a recipe for disaster.
5:40
Speaker 1: So there's this thing called typhus or typhoid, I'm sorry,
5:43
Speaker 1: And apparently they were one and the same until the
5:45
Speaker 1: nineteenth centuries. About this time, typhus and typhoid typhoid fever
5:50
Speaker 1: were separated. But typhoid fever fever, which is the star
5:54
Speaker 1: of this co star of this episode. Um. It's particularly asked,
6:00
Speaker 1: isn't it it is? Josh, we're talking not just ordinary diarrhea,
6:05
Speaker 1: but doubled over cramping, painful diarrhea. I think you'd call
6:09
Speaker 1: that violent diarrhea, violent diarrhea, high fever, red rashes, sleeplessness,
6:15
Speaker 1: death if you don't treat it. A lot of people
6:18
Speaker 1: through history have been stricken with it, including Mary Todd Lincoln,
6:23
Speaker 1: Georgia O'Keefe, Rabbi Shankar I really uh, Frank McCourt author,
6:30
Speaker 1: and Wilbur Wright actually of the Wright Brothers fame died
6:34
Speaker 1: from typhoid fever. Wow, pretty sad And that was I mean,
6:37
Speaker 1: that's a scant uh sampling from a long, long list
6:41
Speaker 1: of famous people that have Those are the people who
6:43
Speaker 1: count who had typhois. I think Lincoln's son actually died
6:46
Speaker 1: from it as well, but I don't think Mary Todd
6:48
Speaker 1: Lincoln died from it. Yeah, but you can know she
6:51
Speaker 1: died of um or something like that is what they
6:55
Speaker 1: would have called abraham hysterics, right, okay, nice. Um. So,
7:00
Speaker 1: before we started to get a handle on typhoid fever,
7:02
Speaker 1: it's by the way, it's a um it's caused by
7:05
Speaker 1: the bacterium Salmonella TYPEE. It's a type of Salmonella UM.
7:10
Speaker 1: And before we got a handle on it with antibiotics,
7:14
Speaker 1: apparently twelve percent of people died from typhoid. So it
7:18
Speaker 1: was a big public health problem. Yeah, New York especially
7:21
Speaker 1: there were four thousand new cases per year and killed
7:24
Speaker 1: one in ten people at the time or one And
7:32
Speaker 1: remember that that nationwide. Uh yeah, as I understand it
7:37
Speaker 1: before antibiotic, so um, let's even just say tem percent.
7:42
Speaker 1: That's a big public health problem. And because it's spread
7:44
Speaker 1: by the bacterium salmonella. Did that come out weird because
7:49
Speaker 1: it did in my head slightly a little bit of
7:51
Speaker 1: the lazy tongue there, because because of because it's spread
7:54
Speaker 1: through salmonella, or because it's a result of salmonella, it's
7:58
Speaker 1: very very easily spread from handling your own poop e g.
8:04
Speaker 1: Using the bathroom, not washing your hands, and then handling food,
8:09
Speaker 1: uncooked food specifically. Yeah, it was normally considered to be
8:14
Speaker 1: like a disease of the lower classes. Yeah, until nineteen
8:19
Speaker 1: oh six. Was it chuck the summer of nineteen oh
8:22
Speaker 1: six in a in a wealthy quarter of the United
8:25
Speaker 1: States on Long Island called Oyster Bay. Billy Joels film,
8:29
Speaker 1: I believe it's neither here nor there. Still, that's one
8:35
Speaker 1: extra fact you just gave everybody. That's true. Uh yeah.
8:39
Speaker 1: When it when it happened in Oyster Bay, it was
8:41
Speaker 1: a much bigger deal because it was more closely associated
8:45
Speaker 1: with let's say, the Lower east Side tenement housing the
8:48
Speaker 1: filth of Lower Manhattan at the time they've cleaned all
8:51
Speaker 1: that up. Now, um, it's expense. What you get though,
8:55
Speaker 1: when you're in Oyster Bay is you get wealthy families
8:58
Speaker 1: who can spend a little money, and that's what you had.
9:00
Speaker 1: In the case of the Thompson family, they were afraid
9:03
Speaker 1: that they would not be able to rent out the
9:05
Speaker 1: house that they were living in because uh, people were
9:08
Speaker 1: getting sick in that house over and over and over
9:10
Speaker 1: and they couldn't figure it out. They decided to hire
9:13
Speaker 1: an investigator who turned out to be a very prominent
9:17
Speaker 1: figure in this case name Dr George Soper, a sanitation
9:21
Speaker 1: engineer and UH epidemiologists, one of the first epidemiologists really
9:26
Speaker 1: looking to make his career well, he already had out
9:29
Speaker 1: he had a reputation um of of you know, being
9:35
Speaker 1: able to track any illness back to his source. So
9:38
Speaker 1: this family, the Thompson family, is that the one who
9:41
Speaker 1: owned the house or the one who's who got sick.
9:43
Speaker 1: They owned the house, and I believe some family members
9:46
Speaker 1: had also gotten sick. Okay, so but there was a
9:48
Speaker 1: family that rented it originally that's where the typhoid outbreak
9:51
Speaker 1: first happened. So maybe maybe they were just the homeowners.
9:54
Speaker 1: The Thompson family hired Soaper I believe, yeah yeah, and said, hey,
9:59
Speaker 1: we can't this house anymore because people are dying from typhoid. Concerned, right, yeah.
10:05
Speaker 1: So Soaper gets on the case, starts some finds the
10:08
Speaker 1: family where the typhoid outbreak occurred, and starts interviewing the
10:13
Speaker 1: heck out of him, and he's stumped. He can't figure
10:17
Speaker 1: it out, like, where did this thing come from? There?
10:19
Speaker 1: These are clearly patient zeros right here, like nobody else
10:23
Speaker 1: on know Weyster Bay had it before then they didn't
10:26
Speaker 1: bring it with them from the city. There's somebody missing,
10:29
Speaker 1: there's something missing. And he finally says, have I talked
10:32
Speaker 1: to everybody who was in this house in the summer
10:35
Speaker 1: of nineteen o six and they said you should talk
10:37
Speaker 1: to typhoid Mary, I don't know. I didn't think of that.
10:42
Speaker 1: He goes what you know, what he did was he
10:45
Speaker 1: interviewed kitchen staff and it turns out that there was
10:48
Speaker 1: a former employee that was no longer there, Mary Mallon,
10:53
Speaker 1: and he said, wait a minute, you know, maybe I
10:55
Speaker 1: should check this lady out. Turns out she loved to
10:58
Speaker 1: serve this ice cream and fresh peaches. Which is uncooked.
11:02
Speaker 1: That was her, I guess her. She was noted for
11:04
Speaker 1: that dessert, right, But even more incriminating than the dessert
11:08
Speaker 1: is the idea that when he looked into her history,
11:13
Speaker 1: she'd worked for eight families in ten years, and six
11:15
Speaker 1: of those families said had typhoid outbreaks. So he began
11:39
Speaker 1: to think that there was something special about Mary mallon
11:43
Speaker 1: and and that she was what's called a healthy carrier
11:46
Speaker 1: meaning um and and I'm just gonna paraphrase this awesome
11:49
Speaker 1: way that Nova doc put it right. When you get
11:54
Speaker 1: typhoid fever, there's almost always a clear winner. If the
11:58
Speaker 1: bacteria wins, you doe, and if you if you win,
12:02
Speaker 1: if your immune system wins, the bacteria dies. But there's
12:05
Speaker 1: sometimes where there's a stalemate where your immune system continues
12:08
Speaker 1: to function and you live, and the bacteria continues to
12:11
Speaker 1: live in your system, which means you're healthy, but you're
12:14
Speaker 1: also extremely contagious. And that's what Soaper came to believe
12:18
Speaker 1: Mary Mallen was. So she was technically she actually had
12:21
Speaker 1: typhoid fever, but her immune system was able to suppress
12:26
Speaker 1: all of it except the killing of all the bacteria part.
12:30
Speaker 1: So pretty cool, souper cool but interesting because this is
12:35
Speaker 1: brand new. Yeah, and as guy's on the cutting edge
12:37
Speaker 1: of this kind of thinking. Yeah, and he knew like,
12:40
Speaker 1: potentially she could be the face of bacteriology. The first
12:45
Speaker 1: bacteriology lab had just set up in New York City
12:48
Speaker 1: and it was a burgeoning, uh not industry but science.
12:52
Speaker 1: So he was like, man, this is really gonna put
12:54
Speaker 1: me on the map if I can probably prove this
12:56
Speaker 1: at least. So he he didn't have any training in
12:59
Speaker 1: science reporting either, though, did he He didn't have training
13:02
Speaker 1: in people skills studently either. He goes to her and
13:04
Speaker 1: he's like, I finally found you. I believe you're infected
13:08
Speaker 1: with typhoid. So I need samples of your stool, your
13:11
Speaker 1: urine and your blood. By the way, my name is
13:13
Speaker 1: George Soper. Good to me And she's like, oh, no,
13:16
Speaker 1: you're not. Yeah. So it's about this time that that
13:19
Speaker 1: Mary Mallen. We should describe who she is at least,
13:22
Speaker 1: go ahead. Mary Mallen was Irish. She or Irish, came
13:26
Speaker 1: over as a teenager by herself. She was born in
13:29
Speaker 1: the poorest town county in Ireland, and Ireland at that time,
13:35
Speaker 1: especially in the poorest County not a great place to
13:37
Speaker 1: be no, also dirty, also lots of death and dying
13:41
Speaker 1: in filth and disease. And she was born in eighteen
13:44
Speaker 1: sixty nine, so I think that's on the heels of
13:46
Speaker 1: the Potato famine, if not still in the middle of it.
13:50
Speaker 1: So she comes over as a teenager, lives with her
13:51
Speaker 1: aunt and her uncle who passed away, and then is
13:53
Speaker 1: basically on her own in New York. And by all accounts,
13:58
Speaker 1: as a result of how she grew up in Thanto
14:00
Speaker 1: being on her in New York, she was very, very tough,
14:03
Speaker 1: in fiery and independent and resourceful. Like had it been
14:08
Speaker 1: anyone else, this might not have gone down like this.
14:11
Speaker 1: They picked, literally not picked. But as it turns out,
14:13
Speaker 1: it sounds like she was the toughest, most obstinate, stubborn,
14:17
Speaker 1: fiery woman in New York City, right. And but she
14:20
Speaker 1: was also good at what she did. She worked her
14:21
Speaker 1: way up in the domestic servant classes to the pinnacle
14:26
Speaker 1: of it. A cook in that era in the domestic
14:29
Speaker 1: in domestic service, and sort of manager of the kitchen staff. Well,
14:32
Speaker 1: not just that, almost the whole house, basically the all
14:36
Speaker 1: of the servants. The cook was pretty much at the top,
14:38
Speaker 1: maybe tied with the butler, depending on the house. But um,
14:42
Speaker 1: she was a cook for all these these families, and
14:44
Speaker 1: not just you know, families that could afford a cook,
14:47
Speaker 1: but like very wealthy families. Um, really well at her
14:52
Speaker 1: at her job. But she took no guff from any man.
14:56
Speaker 1: And when Soaper came and told her that he wanted
14:59
Speaker 1: her feces, she chased him off with a carving fork. Supposedly,
15:04
Speaker 1: that's how Super reported it. Yeah, and you know, we'll
15:09
Speaker 1: get into her specifics later, and she got a real
15:12
Speaker 1: bad rap, but at the time there was, like you said,
15:15
Speaker 1: there was no understanding on the public's behalf of this.
15:19
Speaker 1: This whole zero I'm sorry, healthy carrier is not even
15:23
Speaker 1: proven yet. So I mean, what is she supposed to do?
15:26
Speaker 1: Just say, like, sure, I'll go with you stranger, take
15:29
Speaker 1: my poop and and put me in a quarantine. Yeah,
15:32
Speaker 1: So she fought it like she probably had every right
15:35
Speaker 1: to right most initial though wouldn't normally, you know, brain
15:39
Speaker 1: to a fork, a carving fork on somebody. But again
15:43
Speaker 1: it's lost to history whether she really did do that
15:45
Speaker 1: or not. It's a good story. So Super takes off
15:48
Speaker 1: and he's not one to let his career just kind
15:51
Speaker 1: of slip through his fingers, and he goes to the
15:55
Speaker 1: New York Commissioner of Health, Herman Biggs. So Biggs was
16:00
Speaker 1: he was the one. He was the first one, and
16:02
Speaker 1: he was the one who was like, oh, by the way,
16:05
Speaker 1: we can come into your house and forcibly inoculate you
16:07
Speaker 1: and your children if we want, and we will do
16:09
Speaker 1: that too if we if we think that it's in
16:11
Speaker 1: the interests of the public health. So Biggs was very
16:15
Speaker 1: sympathetic to Soaper's description of the story of this crazy
16:18
Speaker 1: Irish woman who was just patient zero and more than
16:21
Speaker 1: one outbreak um and basically needed to be dealt with.
16:27
Speaker 1: So he ordered a one of his case workers, a
16:31
Speaker 1: few a few cops in an ambulance out to where
16:35
Speaker 1: Mary lived a tenement. Yeah, Josephine Baker was the inspector
16:39
Speaker 1: and not the dancer. No, but she apparently was pretty
16:42
Speaker 1: tough lady as well. She started her own rainbow family.
16:45
Speaker 1: Oh really yeah. Oh, and you know, we should also
16:48
Speaker 1: point out one of the reasons that Mallon was so
16:50
Speaker 1: upset initially was that she got the feeling that were
16:55
Speaker 1: essentially calling her dirty an unsanit here because he explained
16:59
Speaker 1: to her, like, oh, you go poop and then you
17:01
Speaker 1: get poop in your hands and you handle peaches that
17:04
Speaker 1: you feed people, and so she was very uh, she
17:07
Speaker 1: was upset that they felt like she they were picking
17:09
Speaker 1: on her cleanliness, like just a dirty Irish and mcgrinners exactly.
17:14
Speaker 1: They were, you know, dirty drunks and causing problems and
17:17
Speaker 1: that was just the stereotype at the time and she
17:20
Speaker 1: wasn't like that, she said, right, so, um, soaper goes
17:25
Speaker 1: to Biggs. Biggs orders some people out. They used their
17:30
Speaker 1: power and grab Mary. Well, she hides out in the
17:33
Speaker 1: house for a while though okay, like it took three
17:35
Speaker 1: hours to find her. Well when they finally did, apparently
17:38
Speaker 1: it took all either three or four cops to drag
17:41
Speaker 1: her to the ambulance and then the the female case
17:45
Speaker 1: workers sat on her for the whole ride to this hospital,
17:48
Speaker 1: this quarantine hospital, where she was kept for a while.
17:52
Speaker 1: And like you said, it's it just happened to work
17:55
Speaker 1: out that the person who was who was tie Foyd
18:00
Speaker 1: Mary was this very stubborn, obstinate, self assertive woman from Ireland,
18:06
Speaker 1: and she came about at a time where there's a
18:10
Speaker 1: big question about public health, like you know, where do
18:14
Speaker 1: an individual, civil rights and public the greater public good begin.
18:19
Speaker 1: That's still going on, it still is. But she forced this,
18:23
Speaker 1: this conversation into the national spotlight starting about now. So
18:28
Speaker 1: they keep her. They test her. They they're like, you
18:30
Speaker 1: need to poop into this bag right now, and she
18:34
Speaker 1: did um and they tested it and they said, well,
18:37
Speaker 1: thing's lousy with typhoid. They called her stool a factory
18:41
Speaker 1: for typhoid. Yeah. And what they did was they said,
18:44
Speaker 1: here's a deal. Give up cooking because that's how you're
18:49
Speaker 1: transmitting this, and we'll let you go. And so did
18:53
Speaker 1: they say that immediately from the article, but not necessarily
18:56
Speaker 1: from the document. I think they initially offered her that
18:58
Speaker 1: deal that she refused stwhich was one reason why she
19:02
Speaker 1: was you know, lambasted in the in the public later
19:04
Speaker 1: on in newspapers. But again, at the time, she had
19:08
Speaker 1: managed to climb up out of the uh, you know,
19:12
Speaker 1: poor conditions that she was living in an Ireland and
19:14
Speaker 1: get a really good job and one that she was
19:16
Speaker 1: good at and she didn't want to have to learn
19:19
Speaker 1: something new and start over again. So at the time,
19:22
Speaker 1: you know, like later on I can doll out some
19:26
Speaker 1: of the blame on her, but early on she still
19:28
Speaker 1: feels well, It's like, I'm not sick. This doesn't make
19:31
Speaker 1: any sense. What does this healthy carrier thing? Yes, yeah,
19:34
Speaker 1: she was not buying it at all, and she basically
19:37
Speaker 1: came to believe that the public Health department had a
19:40
Speaker 1: vendetta against her personally and felt quite persecuted. Um So
19:45
Speaker 1: when she said no, she wasn't going to stop cooking,
19:47
Speaker 1: they said, okay, well we're gonna take you to a
19:49
Speaker 1: nice little island called North Brother Island. It's not a
19:52
Speaker 1: nice island. Seven. They took her there in quarantine her.
19:55
Speaker 1: Their North Brother Island is a or it was a
19:58
Speaker 1: tuberculosis hospital, old quarantine quarantine hospital, i should say. And
20:03
Speaker 1: she didn't have tuberculosis, and she wasn't even sick, she
20:07
Speaker 1: didn't have any symptoms, and yet she was being kept
20:09
Speaker 1: here against her will on North Brother Island, which you
20:12
Speaker 1: sent a killer urban exploration photo spread that I want
20:17
Speaker 1: everybody to go check out. It's creepy. It's on Gothamist
20:21
Speaker 1: dot com and the g O T H A M
20:25
Speaker 1: I S T. And it's titled a Trip to the
20:27
Speaker 1: Abandoned North Brother Island. It is so cool. Yeah. Located
20:31
Speaker 1: there was a Riverside hospital and initially there was nothing
20:34
Speaker 1: there and they said, hey, the idea of island quarantines
20:39
Speaker 1: was pretty popular at the time, so we should build
20:40
Speaker 1: a hospital there so we can treat these people. But UM,
20:44
Speaker 1: North Brother Island sort of gained a reputation over the
20:47
Speaker 1: years because one it was I mean, it was much
20:50
Speaker 1: more than tuberculosis. It was like later on it was
20:53
Speaker 1: like heroin junkies were treated their syphilis like any kind
20:56
Speaker 1: of nasty disease or addiction. They would dump you on
21:00
Speaker 1: at Riverside Hospital. It was an asylum basically was it
21:03
Speaker 1: was sort of like, uh, what's the DiCaprio, Shutter Island,
21:06
Speaker 1: shutter Rock Island, um. But they had a hard time
21:09
Speaker 1: staffing it with real doctors for a while because doctors
21:12
Speaker 1: understandably didn't want to work there, so they had nurses
21:15
Speaker 1: only for a time. Eventually there was a public campaign
21:19
Speaker 1: to clean it up and to build better buildings and
21:22
Speaker 1: change his rep which sort of worked, sort of didn't.
21:25
Speaker 1: But UM in New York City at the time, especially
21:29
Speaker 1: on the Lowery Side and where poor people lived, it
21:32
Speaker 1: had a very bad reputation as you don't want to
21:35
Speaker 1: go there, because you go there and you don't come back.
21:37
Speaker 1: People were afraid of it. So that's where they send
21:40
Speaker 1: this Mary Malin off to so and when she gets there, Um,
21:44
Speaker 1: she starts trying to get out. She hired a escaping
21:49
Speaker 1: right now, using legal channels, she um. She she hired
21:54
Speaker 1: a lab, a private lab, and started sending them samples
21:58
Speaker 1: of her stool and they were testing it and they
22:00
Speaker 1: were not getting the same result. Her boyfriend would sneak
22:03
Speaker 1: her poop to the lab and they weren't getting the
22:05
Speaker 1: same results that the Public Health Department said that they
22:08
Speaker 1: were getting. UM. As far as her being a factory
22:11
Speaker 1: for typhoid, which could have been a false negative, right,
22:15
Speaker 1: it could have been because they said that you don't
22:16
Speaker 1: always find it in the testing, and that what they
22:19
Speaker 1: said in the documentary. I believe so. But there was
22:22
Speaker 1: a discrepancy and it was enough for her to get
22:24
Speaker 1: her day in court New York Supreme Court. So she
22:28
Speaker 1: makes her way. She's allowed to um to leave the
22:31
Speaker 1: island to go for her court date. And basically the
22:34
Speaker 1: Public Health Department was like, look, she's a she's a
22:37
Speaker 1: healthy carrier, and she's a public health and Mary's like
22:42
Speaker 1: these people are holding me against my will, and the
22:44
Speaker 1: New York Supreme Court said you're a public health threat.
22:47
Speaker 1: Go back to North Brother Island. Yeah. And around the
22:49
Speaker 1: same time it started getting newspaper coverage courtesy of William
22:52
Speaker 1: Randolph Hurst, who may have financed her um law. That's crazy,
22:57
Speaker 1: her legal expenses. Imagine it was. It was great for papers.
23:00
Speaker 1: So yeah, I could see him throwing a little money
23:02
Speaker 1: towards it. But that's where she was dubbed typhoid Mary,
23:05
Speaker 1: and that's where the public cement really swung, because she
23:08
Speaker 1: was painted as someone who was willingly giving people typhoid fever. Well, no,
23:14
Speaker 1: she was. She was called typhoid Mary because they were
23:16
Speaker 1: protecting her um her identity as well. That didn't work
23:20
Speaker 1: too well. No, So Mary Um goes back to North
23:24
Speaker 1: Brother Island and is there um for another Well, she
23:28
Speaker 1: was there for three years total, I believe, and on
23:32
Speaker 1: in the third year, New York City got a new
23:34
Speaker 1: health commissioner and he was not about basically squashing people's
23:41
Speaker 1: civil rights letterly so he not. He not only freed her,
23:46
Speaker 1: he got her job. Yeah, and a lot of people
23:48
Speaker 1: while she was incarcerated, and it wasn't incarceration I guess
23:52
Speaker 1: um there were a lot of people that did cry
23:54
Speaker 1: out for her release at times, um public officials even,
23:58
Speaker 1: but the Department of Health, basically it was such a
24:01
Speaker 1: unique case they wanted to experiment on her and said,
24:04
Speaker 1: now we're gonna test do some tests on her and
24:07
Speaker 1: not let her out. Well, they did do some tests
24:10
Speaker 1: on or They thought that perhaps the gall block her
24:13
Speaker 1: gallbladder was the culprit. So they were like, we're gonna
24:16
Speaker 1: take your gallbladder out, and she's like, nobody's touching me.
24:19
Speaker 1: She's afraid they're gonna kill her, but it could have to.
24:22
Speaker 1: They did forcibly um medicate her. They tried some stuff out,
24:26
Speaker 1: and she said that she wrote in a diary that
24:28
Speaker 1: she if they keep this up for much longer, she'll
24:30
Speaker 1: surely die because it's just such a side effects were
24:34
Speaker 1: so horrid. So it wasn't just like, hey, stay in
24:37
Speaker 1: this cottage, there's a nice view of the water. It
24:40
Speaker 1: was it was rough for her. In addition to the
24:42
Speaker 1: civil liberties being squashed exactly. And so, as you pointed out,
24:47
Speaker 1: the new commission comes in letterly of public health and
24:51
Speaker 1: a bit more sympathetic, Like he said, he found her
24:53
Speaker 1: a job and laundry, which apparently was the bottom of
24:57
Speaker 1: the barrel for for a woman a woman's career aspirations
25:01
Speaker 1: and in domestic servant like no money, like the lowest pay,
25:05
Speaker 1: the worst work. And she was like this sucks. I
25:09
Speaker 1: don't want to do this, right, I don't want to
25:11
Speaker 1: work in the laundry. Did you know that Atlanta has
25:14
Speaker 1: one of the taxi drivers in Atlanta? Um is a
25:17
Speaker 1: Ghanese king? Now? Why, that's what I thought of when
25:21
Speaker 1: I UM, when I when I was reading about that.
25:24
Speaker 1: When when she got a job in the laundry, It's
25:26
Speaker 1: like she worked her way past that. She's way past that.
25:30
Speaker 1: Is he? Really there's a Ghanese king coming to America
25:32
Speaker 1: who operates a cab here in Atlanta. Ain't none but
25:36
Speaker 1: ltraperm Yeah, that was a good movie. I could quote
25:40
Speaker 1: it from heart, I think in full. Let's start, okay,
25:47
Speaker 1: barking like a dog. Oh alright, So back to Mary.
26:11
Speaker 1: Where are we here? She's just been released or he
26:15
Speaker 1: offered her the job, right, yeah, and she's out and
26:17
Speaker 1: she's yeah, but she's making contact with the health department there,
26:23
Speaker 1: like we need to be able to keep up with
26:25
Speaker 1: you and make sure we know what you're doing and everything,
26:27
Speaker 1: and then they're they're like, we know where she is,
26:30
Speaker 1: we know what she's doing. We talked to her every day,
26:32
Speaker 1: and Okay, we lost her. Yeah, we don't know where
26:35
Speaker 1: she is anymore. Yeah, it's pretty cool at the time.
26:36
Speaker 1: You could disappear and if you don't leave afarding address
26:39
Speaker 1: or it's like oh no Google searching going on there,
26:43
Speaker 1: you could disappear into the folds of Daniel day Lewis
26:47
Speaker 1: is overacting. So a few years after this, Josh, after
26:50
Speaker 1: they had lost her, Uh, Dr Soapers brought in again
26:54
Speaker 1: to investigate another typhoid outbreak at the upscale hospital, Sloane Hospital,
27:01
Speaker 1: and I think it was a baby birth in hospital
27:04
Speaker 1: at the time, maternity hospital. And uh what they discovered
27:10
Speaker 1: was Mary was cooking in the kitchen at the hospital. Yeah,
27:16
Speaker 1: under an assumed name. Doctors and nurses were sick, and
27:20
Speaker 1: I believe two of them died and they said, you know, um,
27:26
Speaker 1: you're in big trouble this time. Yeah. But not only
27:29
Speaker 1: did they discover it was Soaper himself was called into
27:32
Speaker 1: the case. This is like Lama's rob and he exactly,
27:35
Speaker 1: it is very much like that, Um, and he comes
27:37
Speaker 1: to the hospital and he recognizes Mary by sight as
27:41
Speaker 1: one of the cooking staffs, Like you were kidding me.
27:44
Speaker 1: She's whipping up her ice cream and beaches and just
27:47
Speaker 1: stops like amid stroke, like um, her hands awkward. So um.
27:54
Speaker 1: This time she goes willingly. She knows that that it's
27:57
Speaker 1: it's over, it's done. She still doesn't believe that she
28:00
Speaker 1: is the um this a carrier or the problem, but
28:04
Speaker 1: she knows that they think she is, and that she's
28:08
Speaker 1: broken some sort of horrendous loss. It was kind of
28:11
Speaker 1: sad at that point from the way it was described
28:13
Speaker 1: in the documentary. She was just sort of like, I mean,
28:16
Speaker 1: all the fight of this fiery woman was gone, and
28:19
Speaker 1: she's just like, I just can't fight this anymore. Take me.
28:21
Speaker 1: And part of it, also, I imagine, was public opinion
28:24
Speaker 1: turned against her. Like you said, the first time she
28:26
Speaker 1: was incarcerated at UM North Brother Island, there was a
28:29
Speaker 1: lot of public outcry. This time there's a lot of
28:32
Speaker 1: public outcry, but it was against her because she had
28:35
Speaker 1: willfully and knowingly gone back into cooking UM and had
28:40
Speaker 1: gotten more people sick. Yeah, and I think fifty something
28:45
Speaker 1: cases were attributed to her in three deaths. Yeah, I
28:48
Speaker 1: think fifty two is what I read. Um, And you know,
28:52
Speaker 1: we gotta say, like, I'm defending her in a lot
28:54
Speaker 1: of ways. But she they gave her a few pretty
28:56
Speaker 1: good deals along the way that she did not take,
28:58
Speaker 1: which was a to give up cooking be um. I
29:02
Speaker 1: think at one point they said, why don't you just
29:04
Speaker 1: move to Connecticut with your sister? And she was like,
29:07
Speaker 1: I don't have a sister, and they're like, sure you do, Jane,
29:11
Speaker 1: She's like, wait, are you having a stroke? Exactly? So
29:14
Speaker 1: she didn't take him up on that offer, and um,
29:17
Speaker 1: soaper promised her of the profits of a book that
29:22
Speaker 1: he would write about her and about the situation, and
29:25
Speaker 1: she was like, no, no, no, it wasn't that weird.
29:29
Speaker 1: Anthony Bourdain is one of the experts in that Nova
29:32
Speaker 1: documentary A little odd. Yeah, I guess he knows it's
29:35
Speaker 1: typhoid Mary. He lives on Oyster Bay. I guess with
29:40
Speaker 1: Billy Joel. So the legacy um of typhoid Mary is
29:45
Speaker 1: this great debate over how much civil liberty, how many
29:49
Speaker 1: how many civil rights does a person get to keep
29:52
Speaker 1: when they pose some sort of public health threat. And
29:56
Speaker 1: I guess the answer to that is contagion yes, have
30:01
Speaker 1: you seen it? I have not. You did the other night, right,
30:03
Speaker 1: it was good? Frightening? No, it was definitely like I
30:08
Speaker 1: don't my back was tense the whole time. It wasn't frightening,
30:11
Speaker 1: but it was. Kid. That was a really good editorial
30:13
Speaker 1: piece too that I read I sent you. Um, we're
30:16
Speaker 1: basically this could have gone down in so many different ways.
30:19
Speaker 1: It was sort of like the perfect storm of headstrong woman, uh,
30:24
Speaker 1: healthy guy that didn't have a lot of people skills.
30:26
Speaker 1: They said, if that or his opinion was, if that
30:29
Speaker 1: initial meeting had have gone down differently, the whole history
30:33
Speaker 1: might be rewritten. But it went down as them butting
30:36
Speaker 1: heads and just got worse from there. Pretty interesting. So
30:40
Speaker 1: typhoid Mary, was she a bad person? Josh, I can't.
30:46
Speaker 1: I reserved judgment on historical figures. Okay, I don't. I
30:50
Speaker 1: don't know enough about him. Yeah, I think you can
30:52
Speaker 1: only judge your contemporaries. Really, all right, what about me?
30:58
Speaker 1: I reserved judgment on on podcasters? Yeah. So, Um, if
31:03
Speaker 1: you want to know more about typeoid Mary, you can
31:06
Speaker 1: watch Nova's excellent documentary The Most Dangerous Woman in America. Um,
31:10
Speaker 1: if you want to know the origin of the word quarantine.
31:14
Speaker 1: You should go back and listen to our Black Death episode.
31:17
Speaker 1: But if you haven't heard it before and you've read,
31:22
Speaker 1: don't bother emailing in. I know already, I know, I know,
31:26
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. You can also look up the how stuff
31:30
Speaker 1: works article who was typhoid mary T Y P H
31:33
Speaker 1: O I D space M A R Y question mark?
31:37
Speaker 1: You want to type that into the search bar at
31:38
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com And that means it's time
31:41
Speaker 1: for a listener mail. They should do a good movie
31:50
Speaker 1: about that. I can't believe they haven't. Yeah, this is
31:52
Speaker 1: like great. At the very least, there has to be
31:54
Speaker 1: a book on Soper, Like this is the kind of
31:57
Speaker 1: thing that the public eating up right now, you know,
31:59
Speaker 1: thanks of this um Stars, thanks to this economic collapse.
32:04
Speaker 1: You know the Stars Guard Stars Guard. Did you ever
32:06
Speaker 1: see that doing that live skit? It was during the
32:09
Speaker 1: Stars outbreak and Uh Stars Guard. The actor what's his name, Peter,
32:14
Speaker 1: he was on their pitching. It was like a little
32:16
Speaker 1: infomercial and he's pitching the Stars Guard Stars cards. Awesome. Alrighty, Josh,
32:22
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this, uh Moon smack down, the Nicest Moon,
32:27
Speaker 1: the Nicest Moons back down, we got all right, because
32:30
Speaker 1: we got a lot of and this guy was actually
32:31
Speaker 1: really really over behind about it. Guys love the podcast.
32:35
Speaker 1: I listened as I ride my bike to and from
32:37
Speaker 1: work past the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on
32:39
Speaker 1: my way to the Moon. Learning interesting facts makes my
32:42
Speaker 1: day a little better. However, I had to send a
32:44
Speaker 1: note about a couple of mistakes in the Moon podcast.
32:47
Speaker 1: You got the current theories about the formation of the
32:50
Speaker 1: moon and how it affects Earth's precession right as far
32:52
Speaker 1: as I know, and those are really the hardest things
32:55
Speaker 1: to understand. So well done. Yeah, but you did perpetuate
32:58
Speaker 1: a few mints. Number one, the Moon doesn't rotate and
33:02
Speaker 1: is dragged along by the Earth. Well sort of. The
33:05
Speaker 1: Moon is held in place by the Earth's gravity, but
33:07
Speaker 1: it does rotate. The reason it doesn't appear to rotate,
33:10
Speaker 1: which is what we were trying to say, uh, is
33:13
Speaker 1: because its period of rotation is exactly the same as
33:16
Speaker 1: its period of revolution around the Earth about twenty nine days.
33:19
Speaker 1: It's tidally locked, which brings me to point number two.
33:23
Speaker 1: The moon has a quote dark side that is never illuminated.
33:26
Speaker 1: Not true. I don't remember saying that, did we say
33:29
Speaker 1: that we must have because everyone said that we did.
33:32
Speaker 1: Maybe we didn't say this. Okay, we've just let people
33:35
Speaker 1: believe that we don't know it, all right. The Moon
33:37
Speaker 1: has one face we never see from Earth, but is
33:40
Speaker 1: not permanently in darkness. That's known as the far side
33:43
Speaker 1: of the Moon. So it's Gary Larson, not dark Vader.
33:46
Speaker 1: Huh uh. Number three, we have tides because the moon
33:51
Speaker 1: quote pulls up on the water on the Earth and
33:54
Speaker 1: pulls up on the Earth underneath as well. Definitely not true.
33:58
Speaker 1: While the Moon's gravity does pull the Earth and its water,
34:01
Speaker 1: the effect is minuscule compared to the Earth's one gravity.
34:04
Speaker 1: It's the horizontal differential in the Moon's gravity across the
34:07
Speaker 1: Earth that causes the water to slide towards and away
34:11
Speaker 1: the direction of the Moon. So the water slide sideways,
34:14
Speaker 1: not up. Wow, that's pretty cool. And that is from
34:18
Speaker 1: Chris By and he he was very cool about it.
34:20
Speaker 1: Um and he says, ps, I'm a little worried about
34:22
Speaker 1: going back and listening to the Sun podcast because the
34:25
Speaker 1: Sun is way more complicated than the Moon than Chris.
34:29
Speaker 1: Don't do it. Don't do it, just skip it, brother, Yeah,
34:32
Speaker 1: go listen to cannonball run. Yeah, that's a good one,
34:35
Speaker 1: no mistakes. That's a great, great one. Or Twinkies that
34:39
Speaker 1: was pretty good too. Yeah, muppets, Yeah, anything but the sun,
34:42
Speaker 1: anything but that. Um. I guess if you have a correction,
34:46
Speaker 1: we want to hear it. Um. We we have. We've
34:48
Speaker 1: been reading him again now lately. I think that's a
34:51
Speaker 1: good chuck. I forgot all about him, I forgot about
34:53
Speaker 1: being wrong. Well, we were right for a good stretch.
34:56
Speaker 1: Well we weren't doing ones like on the moon or whatever. Yeah,
35:00
Speaker 1: these tough ones are hard, Yes they are. If you
35:03
Speaker 1: have a correction, you can tweet it to us at
35:06
Speaker 1: s Y s K podcast. You can um see us
35:09
Speaker 1: on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash stuff you should Know,
35:13
Speaker 1: and you can send us a plain old fashion email
35:15
Speaker 1: at Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For
35:25
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
35:27
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com