Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Who Was Typhoid Mary?

Transcript

Who Was Typhoid Mary? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

0:06
SPEAKER_02: Hello, everybody.
0:09
SPEAKER_02: That was a little short.
0:10
SPEAKER_02: No, that was a little short.
0:11
SPEAKER_02: I can't I can't lie.
0:13
SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, yeah.
0:13
SPEAKER_03: It seems like you're you couldn't hold your breath longer or you couldn't hold that.
0:18
SPEAKER_03: Just want to get right into it.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
0:20
SPEAKER_03: That was the abbreviated.
0:22
SPEAKER_03: That was almost like hi instead of hello.
0:24
SPEAKER_03: Oh, hello.
0:25
SPEAKER_02: Hello.
0:25
SPEAKER_02: Hi everybody.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: Hello.
0:27
SPEAKER_02: Um I have a good one today.
0:29
SPEAKER_02: I have a good one today that I think you're gonna enjoy.
0:31
SPEAKER_02: This is kind of in um my wheelhouse of um quirky.
0:36
SPEAKER_03: 20th century quirky.
0:38
SPEAKER_02: Um the early 20th century.
0:41
SPEAKER_02: Early, early, early 20th century.
0:43
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, 20th century.
0:45
SPEAKER_02: I would say this person's a definitely, if you make a list of all the important people in the 20th century, she is on the list.
0:54
SPEAKER_03: A lady on the list, hmm, early 20th century.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: But I would also say that this person is more infamous than famous.
1:07
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: So you you're familiar with infamy.
1:10
SPEAKER_02: We haven't had a ton of people on the list that were infamous, and let you know Henry VIII was famous too.
1:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
1:19
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I mean, aside from the person you're doing, who else would be an example of somebody that's infamous?
1:24
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I guess Hitler was infamous.
1:26
SPEAKER_02: Is that oh, you mean the just in general?
1:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, there's lots of bad people that you know, and people that we've stayed away from.
1:34
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you could is the definition of infamous.
1:37
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I sort of know what it means, but is the definition like being famous for bad reasons?
1:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:44
SPEAKER_03: Being famous for the wrong reasons.
1:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: You don't want to be infamous.
1:50
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, I think I, you know, we're not gonna come on this show and do the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: You know, that's not interesting to us.
1:59
SPEAKER_02: You know, interesting dead people is one thing, but we we tend to go towards people that we either like or maybe we're misjudged, or maybe they're they're so significant we just have to talk about them.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: So so we we tend to skew famous instead of infamous, usually.
2:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:17
SPEAKER_02: And the person I want to talk about today, she was infamous for sure, and I want to see your reaction to kind of how she how I'm gonna tell you her story and then figure out like how she reads today.
2:33
SPEAKER_02: Betsy Ross was somebody I was trying to turn from famous to infamous, right?
2:38
SPEAKER_02: By outing her as a fraud.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: But um, if you if you haven't listened to that one, that was probably uh 4th of July 2023, maybe two, 2023.
2:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:48
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:48
SPEAKER_03: She Betsy Ross, though, I don't feel like yeah, I don't feel like what happened was really her fault.
2:54
SPEAKER_03: I don't think she actually, you know, is the one that was taking undue credit.
2:59
SPEAKER_02: Well, the lady I'm talking about today, uh, I guess the clue that I'll give you is that while she wasn't a doctor or a nurse, she probably helped us figure out a lot in the medical field, especially in the world of medical ethics.
3:21
SPEAKER_03: Medical ethics, and it's it's a common name, huh?
3:24
SPEAKER_03: It's somebody that that's oh yeah, you would have heard this.
3:27
SPEAKER_02: Is right in our lane of you've heard of her but know nothing about her, probably.
3:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I I I keep thinking of Madame Marie Curie, but I know Right.
3:39
SPEAKER_02: So she wasn't a smart woman, really.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: She wasn't uh an educated woman, she didn't she didn't uh do science or anything like that.
3:48
SPEAKER_03: Um but Florence Nightingale.
3:51
SPEAKER_02: So Florence Nightingale would have helped treat this person because she was kind of a patient, she was kind of a patient, um, and she was um an Irish woman that lived in New York.
4:04
SPEAKER_02: She was born in 1869 in Ireland, in Cook's uh County Tyrone, in Ireland, and died in 1938 on North Brother Island in New York City.
4:19
SPEAKER_02: Oh in quarantine.
4:21
SPEAKER_03: Was that a place where they had um like leprosy colonies or something?
4:26
SPEAKER_03: Close.
4:27
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she died in quarantine.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm trying to think of what else.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: Smallpox?
4:34
SPEAKER_02: I'll even tell you her name.
4:35
SPEAKER_02: Her name was Mary Mallon.
4:39
SPEAKER_02: Mary Mallon.
4:41
SPEAKER_02: Uh otherwise known as Bloody Mary?
4:46
SPEAKER_02: Typhoid Mary.
4:48
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
4:50
SPEAKER_02: Typhoid Mary?
4:52
SPEAKER_02: Maybe.
4:52
SPEAKER_02: Well, settle in.
4:54
SPEAKER_02: I've got a good story for you.
4:55
SPEAKER_02: This is a this is a inju really interesting story.
4:57
SPEAKER_03: So, like I said, Typhoid Mary.
4:59
SPEAKER_02: She was born in uh 1869, died in 1938, and buried in the the Bronx.
5:06
SPEAKER_02: So typhoid Mary was probably born, she was probably born with something called typhoid fever.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: It's different than cat scratch fever, it's different than um dance fever.
5:20
SPEAKER_02: Dance fever.
5:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh typhoid fever used to be something that was pretty nasty, and she pro she was probably born with it because her mother probably had it when she was pregnant with her.
5:32
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
5:32
SPEAKER_03: So so I don't know anything about I've heard the name typhoid before, and and uh so is typhoid and typhoid fever the same thing?
5:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think there's also something called typhus, but that's something different.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: But typhoid, yeah, typhoid fever.
5:47
SPEAKER_02: So typhoid fever is a disease that's caused by a bacteria, right?
5:53
SPEAKER_02: So these days that's not a big deal because we have antibiotics, right?
5:57
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
5:58
SPEAKER_02: And that that bacteria would grow in your intestines, it'd grow in your lymph nodes, it could grow in your liver, you could go in your gallbladder, it could even grow in your blood.
6:07
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
6:07
SPEAKER_02: And you start getting the symptoms like six, but even as up to like 30 days after you're exposed, because it's because it's like it just takes root in your body, and then it's really nasty.
6:20
SPEAKER_02: It gives you a high fever, abdominal pains, vomiting, diarrhea, all that nasty stuff.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes people get a rash or get confused, and it can last weeks or even months if you don't have treatment.
6:33
SPEAKER_02: But here's the here's the key is that some people, just like what we were found with with COVID in the early days, some people can carry typhoid fever without symptoms, and they can be contagious and and a word that we just learned a few years ago, asymptomatic, right?
6:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
6:52
SPEAKER_02: Or that we maybe didn't learn, but we we were we were throwing it around a lot a few years ago, right?
6:57
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
6:58
SPEAKER_02: So this woman was born with typhoid fever because as her mom probably had it when she was pregnant, but was not sick, did not present as sick, was not uh, was not somebody that was in and out of hospital.
7:10
SPEAKER_02: She was perfectly healthy, but she was contagious and had this thing called typhoid fever.
7:17
SPEAKER_02: Now, the good news, even if you were lived with somebody today with typhoid fever, the good news is it's even though it's contagious, it's pretty much only spread by eating or drinking food or water that's contaminated by the feces of an infected person.
7:34
SPEAKER_02: Oh, we're gonna get a little nasty here, by the way.
7:37
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, that that doesn't sound good.
7:39
SPEAKER_03: So so so typhoid typhoid Mary had the typhoid, she was born with it, and then you said she lived until she was like, I don't know, 16 years old.
7:49
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, almost 70.
7:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
7:51
SPEAKER_03: So I guess of it, died of pneumonia.
7:54
SPEAKER_03: Like it didn't affect her, she was just a carrier of it.
7:57
SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay, okay.
7:59
SPEAKER_03: So she didn't have symptoms, she was asymptomatic.
8:01
SPEAKER_02: Yep, and didn't really probably even have like she was a carrier.
8:05
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if technically you could say she had typhoid fever.
8:09
SPEAKER_02: Um, certainly if you tested her and they did lots, um, she would come up positive, but she never had any symptoms and and it didn't kill her.
8:18
SPEAKER_03: And she went around uh pooping in people's food so they would get it.
8:21
SPEAKER_02: This is a this is a good story here.
8:23
SPEAKER_02: I don't just just just hang up.
8:27
SPEAKER_02: Now, a vaccine for typhoid fever came out in like 1896.
8:31
SPEAKER_02: It was even updated in 2018.
8:34
SPEAKER_02: You pretty much only need that vaccine if you're going, if you're traveling to a place that has bad sanitation.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: Um antibiotics, but if you do get it these days, antibiotics can help.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: But I'll tell you what helps.
8:46
SPEAKER_02: The reason most of us don't get typhoid fever is because of hand washing.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: Now, back when typhoid mary was around, the germ theory was still not it was controversial.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: Some science, some there were some medical journals that had put out the uh idea of germ theory, but it wasn't uh accepted by everybody, even in the medical community.
9:11
SPEAKER_02: And the idea, and we definitely didn't know that washing hands could prevent we didn't know anything about germs much.
9:19
SPEAKER_02: We were at the early stage, even the people that were putting forth germ theory didn't really know about washing with soap and water, and that that could get rid of all these uh all these things.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: So um, and by the 1940s in the developed world, typhoid fever kind of went away.
9:38
SPEAKER_02: Today you would find typhoid fever maybe in India and mostly among children in places that are are just have really poor sanitation, right?
9:48
SPEAKER_02: And it's spread the same way as it was back then.
9:50
SPEAKER_02: So let's talk a little about hand washing.
9:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let's do.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: I wash my hands a lot, Kelly.
9:56
SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm not obsessive about it.
9:57
SPEAKER_02: I I I I I'm not um you know someone who's washing their hands when I don't need to, but I never skip a hand wash when I do need to.
10:07
SPEAKER_02: I wash my hands probably 10, 15 times a day, maybe.
10:13
SPEAKER_03: Oh, maybe that is a lot.
10:15
SPEAKER_03: That is a lot.
10:15
SPEAKER_03: So you're you're awake maybe out out of a typical day, you're awake maybe 16 hours of the day.
10:22
SPEAKER_03: I would say I'm washing my hands about once an hour.
10:24
SPEAKER_03: Once an hour, okay.
10:26
unknown: Yeah.
10:26
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
10:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:27
SPEAKER_02: And I don't have a problem with that.
10:28
SPEAKER_02: I like the feeling of freshly washed hands.
10:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:32
SPEAKER_02: And when I when I touch something, when I shake a hand, uh, when I definitely before and after I eat, definitely before and after I'm in the bathroom, I'm always washing my hands.
10:43
SPEAKER_02: And I think I uh I think I'm healthy because of it.
10:47
SPEAKER_03: That's uh well, you know, they say that, and I think also your oral your oral um like teeth uh health also is very related to the rest of your body.
10:59
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:00
SPEAKER_03: Um I in terms of washing hands, I did develop a habit similar to that, probably not that many times a day, but during COVID, oh yeah, I would wash my hands a lot.
11:12
SPEAKER_03: Did they get chapped?
11:13
SPEAKER_03: Did they get chapped?
11:15
SPEAKER_03: No, no, I didn't I didn't really have that issue, but I actually have filmed some surgeries uh in the past, and I've been in the OR uh during surgery, but also watching doctors scrub up before they before they go in.
11:29
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you've ever seen a doctor scrub up before they go into surgery.
11:33
SPEAKER_03: Yes, they wash all the way up.
11:36
SPEAKER_03: And and they they like do this thing in between their fingers, and I mean they just wash their hands like that.
11:42
SPEAKER_03: And I found when I wash my hands, I do tend to do it for longer than what probably most people do.
11:49
SPEAKER_03: You know, I'll get the soap and I'll I'll get in between the fingers, and I'll just really I'm like, okay, if I'm gonna wash my hands, I'm gonna get every surface I can.
11:57
SPEAKER_03: That is great to hand that is great to hear.
12:00
SPEAKER_03: And and yeah, during COVID, I think I did increase my hand washing, and I'd say it's probably fallen back off since then.
12:08
SPEAKER_03: But yeah, maybe I do it half as many times as you in a day.
12:11
SPEAKER_02: Maybe, maybe after today you'll do it more.
12:14
SPEAKER_02: One a single one gram of feces.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: Again, we're gonna get a little nasty.
12:19
SPEAKER_02: One gram.
12:19
SPEAKER_02: One gram of so that's about the weight of a paper clip.
12:22
SPEAKER_02: One gram of feces contains a trillion germs.
12:26
SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
12:27
SPEAKER_02: And when you don't wash your hands, you're spreading it to your eyes and your nose and your mouth and your food and your drink and the handrails and the elevator buttons and the drinking fountains and the tabletops and the toys.
12:40
SPEAKER_02: You get the picture, right?
12:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: Now you can't just rinse your hands, you gotta use soap.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: This is one thing we learned with germ theory is that we gotta we gotta use soap.
12:49
SPEAKER_02: Now it doesn't matter if you use warm water or cold water.
12:52
SPEAKER_02: If you've ever heard that that's an old wives tale, probably, um, about having to use hot water or cold water.
12:59
SPEAKER_02: I think I've heard both.
13:00
SPEAKER_02: Doesn't matter.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you should what that you're supposed to do, according to the CDC, is um uh rinse your hands, then put soap, lather up, turn water off, then lather up, then but that's I think that's more to save water than anything.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
13:18
SPEAKER_02: And then um, and then and you're supposed to do it for 15 to 30 seconds.
13:24
SPEAKER_03: Do you ever watch or read those little instructions in like the bathroom at a restaurant?
13:29
SPEAKER_02: Like sing happy birthday twice, you know.
13:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's guides.
13:35
SPEAKER_02: I do read those, um, which is indicates that I'm washing my hands, you know.
13:40
SPEAKER_03: You're making sure you're doing it right.
13:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
13:42
SPEAKER_03: Uh according to according to Olive Garden, you're washing your hands right.
13:47
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
13:48
SPEAKER_02: The according to the Center for Disease Control, they ask estimate that the global rate of hand washing after you use the toilet is 19% worldwide.
14:02
SPEAKER_03: 19% do it or don't do it?
14:04
SPEAKER_03: Do it.
14:05
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
14:05
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
14:06
SPEAKER_03: Um so so using the toilet, are you talking number one and number two, or are you just talking number two?
14:15
SPEAKER_02: They were they weren't specific.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: They said, uh, are you you're asking me or the CDC?
14:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm asking both.
14:21
SPEAKER_03: Uh I don't have a distinction, man.
14:24
SPEAKER_03: You you um but I mean, you're not really gonna spread feces from doing number one unless you've done it really wrong.
14:34
SPEAKER_02: It's there's you're denying there's still germs.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: There's of course germs.
14:38
SPEAKER_03: No, no, of course there's germs.
14:39
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm not saying it's right or wrong.
14:41
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm not saying that you shouldn't have.
14:42
SPEAKER_03: I'm just telling you that if your reasoning is the spread of feces, um, you know, it's also kind of weird because I've seen some of these commercials for um different products like bidets, but then also um, well, there is a product uh that is like a wet wipe for adults, you know, to keep keep you fresh, etc.
15:04
SPEAKER_03: And their point, and it's a good point, honestly, is if you if you had um if you pooped on the floor or you pooped on the um rug or whatever, you wouldn't just use a paper towel and just wipe it up and call it good, right?
15:22
SPEAKER_03: And so they're saying you gotta get some you gotta get some other things in there like uh you know, like a wet wipe or a bidet or something to really to really get clean.
15:31
SPEAKER_02: I'm not even talking about that, I'm just talking about your hands.
15:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, I know, but but um, but then by using your hands with toilet paper, you're you're exposing them, right?
15:41
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
15:42
SPEAKER_03: And then that's where that's where what you were just talking about, the spread of one gram of feces can happen.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: Every every restroom has a sink, right?
15:52
SPEAKER_02: And soap.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: Most have soap, some don't.
15:55
SPEAKER_02: Um sometimes you get the little powder soap, like in a high school uh gym, like you get the little powder, but whatever you got.
16:02
SPEAKER_02: Now, uh the CDC also studied antibacterial soap, and they found that that really isn't a thing.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: I don't even think it's legal anymore to sell a soap called antibacterial soap because it's kind of misleading, but you don't need that.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: All you need is regular old soap.
16:17
SPEAKER_03: So it's a soap is a um a base, right?
16:21
SPEAKER_03: Um in other words, like between acidic and base.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a surfactant, right?
16:27
SPEAKER_02: And you need that friction to rub your hands together.
16:29
SPEAKER_02: You couldn't just you shouldn't just rinse them or dunk them in a soapy pail.
16:34
SPEAKER_02: That wouldn't really work.
16:35
SPEAKER_02: You need the friction of rubbing them together.
16:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, rinsing your hands probably isn't gonna do anything.
16:41
SPEAKER_03: Well, while while we're on the topic, um have you used the hand washing thing at Rudy's barbecue?
16:50
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
16:50
SPEAKER_02: What is that?
16:52
SPEAKER_03: Oh, Alex, Alex, I've got the experience for you.
16:56
SPEAKER_03: So Rudy's has a hand washing device, and you walk in and it's at the front of the line.
17:02
SPEAKER_03: Like there's like a little um stanched off line to go through if you're gonna order food or whatever.
17:07
SPEAKER_02: But not in the restroom.
17:08
SPEAKER_03: This is just in the this is this is in the rest, this is in the restaurant, not the restroom.
17:12
SPEAKER_03: The restroom just has regular sinks.
17:14
SPEAKER_03: Um, so have you eaten at Rudy's before?
17:16
SPEAKER_03: Rudy's barbecue?
17:18
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
17:18
SPEAKER_03: So I don't know if this is just this one, but the one by our house has this.
17:22
SPEAKER_03: And when you go up to it, it has two holes.
17:26
SPEAKER_03: They're round holes, kind of like uh pipes, like slightly bigger than your hand.
17:31
SPEAKER_03: And you put your hands in it, and then it has these jets of water that sprinkle warm water around your hands in a circle.
17:38
SPEAKER_03: They kind of like they spin and they and they rinse your hand off, and then it does soap, and then it does uh more rinse.
17:45
SPEAKER_03: Like a car wash.
17:46
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's like a car wash for your hands, and like it's the perfect temperature, it feels fantastic, and then there is a roll of stickers right up uh above it that says I have clean hands, and you peel one off and you put it on your shirt just like the i voted sticker, and you get it, you get your barbecue.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: I love that.
18:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love that.
18:04
SPEAKER_03: We got to go do that.
18:05
SPEAKER_02: No typhoid fever going on at Rudy's barbecue for sure.
18:09
SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, unless you skip it.
18:10
SPEAKER_03: It's it's always amazing to me that like that is the first thing I want to do when I go to Rudy's, is is uh and so many people like like yourself have never tried it.
18:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm gonna I'll have to check it out.
18:21
SPEAKER_03: Maybe you wash your hands so well in the bathroom that you don't need the hand wash.
18:24
SPEAKER_03: No, it's still it sounds like a very enjoyable experience.
18:28
SPEAKER_03: It is, it's like a spa for your fingers.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: So now that we know about typhoid fever and we've discussed hand washing, let me tell you about uh our uh our girl, Mary.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:38
SPEAKER_02: And uh she didn't surprise me.
18:41
SPEAKER_02: She did not like to be called typhoid Mary, by the way.
18:44
SPEAKER_03: She oh, but oh, so but but she was called that during her life.
18:47
SPEAKER_03: That wasn't a posthumous thing for her.
18:49
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:50
SPEAKER_02: I'll t I'll tell you all about it.
18:52
SPEAKER_02: So she, like I said, she was born in Ireland and came to the U.S.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: at the age of 15, like a lot of people from Ireland did uh during the uh 18, late 1800s.
19:04
SPEAKER_02: And the best way to make money for her at the time was to be a cook for rich people.
19:10
SPEAKER_02: So she was in New York, there was a lot of wealthy folks, like your Rockefellers and other friends, and uh, she didn't cook for the Rockefellers, but all those rich types that we've talked about before.
19:21
SPEAKER_03: Rich people who like potatoes and hoggus?
19:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure.
19:25
SPEAKER_02: So in 1900, she worked for a family, and I'll I'm gonna be using a lot of uh New York uh city locations that I don't know how familiar you are with that, but she worked for a family in Mamarinek.
19:39
SPEAKER_02: Do you know where Mamarinek?
19:41
SPEAKER_02: Mamarinek.
19:42
SPEAKER_02: No, I don't.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: Well, so in 1900, she went to work for a rich family in Mamarinek, and within two weeks, people got typhoid fever.
19:52
SPEAKER_02: Uh-oh.
19:54
SPEAKER_02: 1901, she goes on to Manhattan, and she works for a rich family, and the whole family got fevers and diarrhea.
20:03
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
20:04
SPEAKER_02: Then she went to work for a lawyer, and seven of the eight people in the family got typhoid.
20:10
SPEAKER_02: Now, typhoid wasn't that common in New York at the time.
20:13
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't like it was running rampant.
20:15
SPEAKER_02: It was a pretty is it will it kill you?
20:19
SPEAKER_02: It can.
20:19
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
20:21
SPEAKER_02: So it uh so it wasn't like typhoid was everywhere, and especially not um in New York City.
20:29
SPEAKER_02: It was kind of a rare thing even then, but it was it was more common than it is today.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: But um, again, people didn't know about the germ theory either.
20:38
SPEAKER_02: So 1904, she goes to work for another lawyer, and that one there's a separate house for the family and for the staff.
20:46
SPEAKER_02: So the family didn't get it, but four of the servants got it, and um, nobody in the family got it.
20:53
SPEAKER_02: Uh, then she went on to a place called Tuxedo Park in New York.
20:56
SPEAKER_02: By the way, what a great name for a place like.
20:59
SPEAKER_03: I live in Tuxedo Park.
21:01
SPEAKER_02: Like, if you're rich, you gotta live in Tuxedo Park, right?
21:04
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
21:05
SPEAKER_02: Uh two weeks after she got there, the laundry worker died of typhoid fever.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: Oh, Mary.
21:12
SPEAKER_02: 1906, she goes on to Oyster Bay on Long Island and worked for a banker.
21:19
SPEAKER_02: And six of the 11 people in that family got it.
21:23
SPEAKER_02: And so that that guy was uh um a banker, and he had a lot of money, and he said, Um, I need to find out like why did half my family get typhoid fever?
21:34
SPEAKER_02: So he hired um these um people to come and take water samples in all the all the pipes and every place in the house that they they could possibly do that, and they all came back negative.
21:46
SPEAKER_02: There was no typhoid running through the house.
21:49
SPEAKER_02: So it was all still kind of a mystery.
21:51
SPEAKER_02: So then he hired an investigator named George Soper.
21:55
SPEAKER_02: George Soper is the only other real character in this story.
21:58
SPEAKER_02: And what a what a good
22:00
SPEAKER_03: Great name for an investigator of typhoid, right?
22:03
SPEAKER_02: Soper, yeah.
22:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:05
SPEAKER_02: And he was he wasn't an epidemiologist, is what we call these uh medical kind of medical um detectives now, but he was just a simple investigator.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: And he they hired him to find out, and and he had heard about these other stories, and he really his principal question was why are only rich people getting typhoid fever?
22:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what's the common thread here?
22:28
SPEAKER_02: What's going on?
22:29
SPEAKER_02: Usually you would find typhoid in in poor parts of the country that didn't have good sanitation, but it seemed like in New York City only the rich people were getting typhoid whenever it would come.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: And again, it wasn't a lot, but it was enough to to be curious.
22:45
SPEAKER_02: So initially he was doing his investigation.
22:48
SPEAKER_02: Initially, they thought it was the clams.
22:51
SPEAKER_03: Okay, yeah, blame it on the clams.
22:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's nothing like uh open and shut case of a uh, you know, when you have bad clams, that's it's kind of there's probably nothing worse than, you know.
23:03
SPEAKER_03: I see your problem here.
23:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, clams have been sitting out on the counter all day or something.
23:08
SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah.
23:09
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've ever had bad clams, but yeah, that'll that'll do a number on you.
23:13
SPEAKER_03: I've never had bad clams, no.
23:15
SPEAKER_03: Have you ever had good clams?
23:17
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I've ever had.
23:19
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I've had I've had oysters for sure.
23:22
SPEAKER_03: Um clams are more like they kind of stick to the inside of the shell and you pull them out with a fork.
23:27
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think I feel like I have had clams.
23:29
SPEAKER_02: And this one's in Oyster Bay, actually.
23:30
SPEAKER_03: So and they and they they're cooked, right?
23:33
SPEAKER_03: They're steamed.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't know how Mary cooked them, but um she she apparently and involved she first of all, she rubbed herself.
23:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right.
23:43
SPEAKER_03: Where's the toilet paper?
23:44
SPEAKER_03: Hold on.
23:45
SPEAKER_02: Through her fingers uh first.
23:48
SPEAKER_02: I don't know how she prepared them, but I had a feeling it it involved touching them.
23:52
SPEAKER_02: Um but not everyone in the family had eaten the clams.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: So Soper uh said, Well, it can't be the clams.
24:00
SPEAKER_02: And so after looking at all these different cases, he did discover that every one of them said, Well, we did have this Irish cook lady who's not here anymore.
24:09
SPEAKER_02: Because every time somebody got sick, she would bounce, she would not stick around.
24:13
SPEAKER_02: So she knew she was causing it.
24:15
SPEAKER_02: Well, no.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: We don't know.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: This is the this is the question we're gonna keep asking throughout the rest of this story.
24:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, and she would always leave and leave no forwarding address.
24:26
SPEAKER_02: So they were like, uh, we we just have this Irish cook and we don't anymore, and I don't know how to get a hold of her.
24:32
SPEAKER_02: And every place was kind of given the same story.
24:35
SPEAKER_02: He finally found her on Park Avenue, penthouse in a penthouse on Park Avenue, and Soper came up and confronted uh Mary.
24:45
SPEAKER_02: Now he's this, you know, big New York investigator, she's this poor Irish lady.
24:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so when he confronted her, I'm gonna give you two choices of what happened as a result of that.
24:58
SPEAKER_02: A, did she apologize, thank him, and say she would never do it again?
25:03
SPEAKER_02: Or B, did she threaten him with a carving fork?
25:07
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna go with B because it's a lot more interesting.
25:09
SPEAKER_02: That's exactly what Mary did.
25:11
SPEAKER_02: She chased him uh down the hall with a carving fork and told him covered in a gram of feces.
25:19
SPEAKER_02: She said, Oh man, well, he'll learn you.
25:22
SPEAKER_02: He also asked her to give her um feces and urine samples.
25:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, not a great resume builder.
25:29
SPEAKER_02: Right.
25:30
SPEAKER_02: So uh she instead of that, he said, Well, just tell me where you've worked.
25:35
SPEAKER_02: And she told him all the places she'd worked.
25:38
SPEAKER_02: And it turned out that seven of the eight families she had worked for had gotten typhoid fever within the last six years.
25:45
SPEAKER_02: And so at the time, most healthcare workers knew that typhoid came from contaminated food and water, but they didn't really understand that it could come from asymptomatic um people, healthy asymptomatic people that never looked sick.
26:02
SPEAKER_02: The idea that a person who wasn't sick could get somebody sick was pretty out there and would that that just didn't seem possible, right?
26:13
SPEAKER_02: So you could see how she, who had never really been sick ever, would take offense to this, right?
26:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
26:20
SPEAKER_03: She didn't.
26:20
SPEAKER_03: I feel fine.
26:21
SPEAKER_02: Why are you blaming me?
26:22
SPEAKER_02: Now, when I say healthcare workers didn't know that, I think there was science did know that it just wasn't really out there.
26:30
SPEAKER_02: I don't really have a sense of how prevalent that notion was.
26:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't think the everyday person did it, but the health department did know it.
26:38
SPEAKER_02: And they realized that she was a carrier of this, and they didn't want to take any chances.
26:44
SPEAKER_02: So in 1907, they arrested Mary and uh as a public health threat, put her in an ambulance, restrained her, and by restrained I mean they sat on her, and um and they took her to jail and they made her give uh or like a hospital jail.
27:03
SPEAKER_03: Wait, when you say an ambulance too, this was probably horse-drawn at the time.
27:07
SPEAKER_03: No, no, 1907?
27:09
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's I think uh driven driven by Disney.
27:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think we had ambulance drivers.
27:15
SPEAKER_02: Everybody that went to World uh World War One start, yeah, World War I would start as an ambulance driver.
27:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, I think it was a legit.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: I think there was uh police like five police had to throw her in this.
27:27
SPEAKER_02: She was not a willing participant.
27:30
SPEAKER_02: And then for four days, she wasn't allowed to use the bathroom on her own because they wanted to get samples from her to see if she had typhoid fever so they could determine if she was indeed a carrier.
27:41
SPEAKER_02: Well, she had so much typhoid in her stool.
27:44
SPEAKER_02: There's another funny word, I think.
27:46
SPEAKER_03: Uh uh Well you remember remember Henry VIII.
27:49
SPEAKER_03: We talked about why they call it a stool.
27:51
SPEAKER_03: Because the because that's what they sat on was a stool with a hole.
27:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and what was the call that uh the groom of the stool?
27:59
SPEAKER_03: He he he was in charge of the king's bowel movements.
28:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, in charge of.
28:04
SPEAKER_03: Um, I like to be in charge of my own.
28:07
SPEAKER_03: That's just me.
28:08
SPEAKER_03: Um and Mary wanted to be in charge of her own, but apparently that was uh she wasn't.
28:13
SPEAKER_03: The law was the long arm of the law.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: So the long gloved arm of the law.
28:20
SPEAKER_02: So she uh let's hope it was gloved.
28:23
SPEAKER_02: She had so much typhoid in her stool that they decided that it was probably uh deep in her gallbladder, this infection, this this typhoid infection.
28:31
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
28:32
SPEAKER_02: Now, during questioning, they asked her all these questions and they asked her, Do you ever wash your hands?
28:38
SPEAKER_02: And she said, No, I almost never wash my hands.
28:42
SPEAKER_02: So I don't know why they asked her that, but that was a pretty good clue there that uh something was going on.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't unusual back then for people to not wash their hands.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: Uh or not even bathe.
28:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was gonna say nobody was really doing anything on the hygiene front back then.
28:59
SPEAKER_02: They just hygiene wasn't a thing, as we learned.
29:02
SPEAKER_03: It was all all wigs and powder.
29:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that was the rich people, I'm sure.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: For um people that were I mean, Mary was really poor, even though she was working for rich families, she was making about 50 bucks a week, I think.
29:16
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
29:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, so the germ theory was still controversial, but they did get the information that she almost never washed her hands.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: So they decided what to do with her.
29:28
SPEAKER_02: They they decided to sentence her to quarantine on this place called North Brother Island.
29:35
SPEAKER_02: It's over kind of like by Rikers Island, you know, the the the jail in uh New York.
29:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:41
SPEAKER_02: So it's this island all by itself, and there was like a hospital there, and they would they would um she had to give urine and stool samples three times a week.
29:51
SPEAKER_02: Now, they wouldn't all come back positive, but I think they did it about 160 times and about 120 times it came back positive for typhoid, which was again weird because she wasn't sick and never had been sick.
30:04
SPEAKER_02: And they said, Well, let's just take your gallbladder out then.
30:08
SPEAKER_02: Now, back then that was a pretty major surgery, and a lot of people died when they got their gallbladder taken out.
30:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's pretty dangerous, and she so she refused to get her gallbladder taken.
30:21
SPEAKER_02: I don't think they could have forcibly done that, even though she was a public health threat.
30:25
SPEAKER_02: That was maybe a bridge too far.
30:27
SPEAKER_02: But um, and she didn't believe it, she didn't believe anything they were telling them.
30:32
SPEAKER_02: You know, this idea that you have typhoid fever, even though you're not sick.
30:37
SPEAKER_02: You carry typhoid fever.
30:39
SPEAKER_02: Right.
30:40
SPEAKER_02: You carry this thing and you're getting people sick, and you are a menace to society.
30:45
SPEAKER_02: And um not in a good way, right?
30:49
SPEAKER_02: And um they also said, All right, well, you can get out of this quarantine if you take your gallbladder, if you get your gallbladder taken out, or if you stop being a cook.
31:01
SPEAKER_02: And she said, No, I can't do that because it pays well.
31:04
SPEAKER_02: So she was very stubborn, though.
31:07
SPEAKER_02: She was poor, and there was only so many things, probably uh uh woman of her education, she was an immigrant.
31:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, she could probably only be like a cook or a laundry person, um, um, maybe a maid.
31:23
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
31:24
SPEAKER_03: Lunch lady.
31:26
SPEAKER_03: Not even, not even.
31:27
SPEAKER_03: I mean, imagine that how many kids she would have gotten sick.
31:31
SPEAKER_03: That would have been terrible.
31:32
SPEAKER_03: Although I think lunch ladies wear gloves.
31:35
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, and hair nuts.
31:37
SPEAKER_02: Now, but but back then they probably didn't because they didn't know about the germ theory.
31:41
SPEAKER_02: So by this time she was starting to get famous, though, and the name Typhoid Mary was was kind of penned, and uh she was being referred to, and there was our newspaper articles written about typhoid Mary, and um and she did not like that name, obviously, who would?
31:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and um Soper told her that he would write a book about this and give her some of the royalties, and um she said no and she locked herself in the bathroom until he left.
32:13
SPEAKER_02: Like she was a very stubborn woman, yeah, even though she needed money, that I feel like that would have solved a lot of the problems.
32:20
SPEAKER_02: Don't be a cook, I'll give you some book money, and we won't have to take your gallbladder out.
32:25
SPEAKER_02: But she was very stubborn and didn't believe anything anyone was telling her.
32:29
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
32:30
SPEAKER_02: So in 1910, the the new state health commissioner decided that nobody should really be quarantined anymore.
32:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh that was pretty awful thing to do.
32:41
SPEAKER_02: So he would release her if she would just not be a cook anymore.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: So she agreed to that.
32:46
SPEAKER_02: So she she went back into the city and became a laundry worker, but then she got hurt, she got like an arm injury, and then her arm got infected, and then she couldn't work for like six months, and laundry workers only got paid like 20 bucks a week.
33:02
SPEAKER_02: So she started cooking again.
33:05
SPEAKER_02: Now it sounds like I'm talking about Walter White or somebody from the world.
33:09
SPEAKER_02: She started cooking again, and we all know how dangerous that is.
33:12
SPEAKER_02: Uh, she started cooking under fake names.
33:15
SPEAKER_02: Uh and obviously soper was on to her, so she couldn't work for any families because they'd have to register who their cook was.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: So um uh I'm I'm influenza Mary, not typhoid Mary.
33:30
SPEAKER_02: She started working in like restaurants and hotels, and you can imagine that's not a good thing, right?
33:35
SPEAKER_02: And spas everywhere she worked, people would get typhoid.
33:39
SPEAKER_02: Um and so it was like a cat and mouse game with her and Soper that a hotel, everybody would get typhoid, and then Soper would show up and oh, she just you just missed her.
33:49
SPEAKER_02: She just left, you know, and she's got a fake name, and she's he's trying to, she's always one step behind her, you know, and she knows that he's chasing her.
33:57
SPEAKER_02: She worked at a women's hospital in New York City, and 25 people got sick in this hospital at once.
34:04
SPEAKER_02: And Soper finally uh ID'd her by her handwriting, actually.
34:08
SPEAKER_02: He said, Um, show me, you know, her, you know, pay pay stub or whatever.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: And it was, he said, I recognized that handwriting, and they said, Oh, she just ran away.
34:18
SPEAKER_02: They finally found her, they arrested her again, and they quarantined her again.
34:23
SPEAKER_02: Um, there must have been a different health commissioner.
34:25
SPEAKER_02: Um, they put her back on North Brother Island in 1915.
34:31
SPEAKER_02: She stayed there for the next 23 years, or the rest of her life, basically.
34:34
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
34:35
SPEAKER_02: She's she stayed there.
34:36
SPEAKER_02: They they got her a little private cottage, and there was also a there was a lab, like a scientific lab, and one of the interns uh kind of uh uh out there kind of got to be friends with her and gave her a job working in the lab, just kind of like washing out beakers.
34:55
SPEAKER_02: And I would think that's a terrible job for Typhoon.
34:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
34:58
SPEAKER_03: I was about to say uh anything where she's touching something with her hands and um she was a lab tech, you know.
35:05
SPEAKER_02: See so, but like I said, she died of pneumonia in 1938.
35:09
SPEAKER_02: Nine people attended the funeral, which when you think about it, she was quarantined her whole life practically, and all her family was probably dead by the time she died, and she probably didn't know anybody else.
35:21
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it was she wasn't married, she didn't have any children, uh nothing like that.
35:27
SPEAKER_02: Pretty tragic life that her whole life she was just trying to earn a living, and she had soaper always trying to to uh trying to soaper.
35:38
SPEAKER_02: Well, um, they say in her lifetime she probably infected 122 people, at least at least that's the number of people we know about, and and at least five dead, but maybe as many as 50 people uh dead.
35:56
SPEAKER_03: I would think the numbers would be a lot higher, like because it there must have been a lot that we didn't know about.
36:03
SPEAKER_02: Well, it depends if she was making finger food or not, right?
36:07
SPEAKER_02: Seriously, like if she's if she's like there's some things that you could prepare that don't require touching them, right?
36:14
SPEAKER_03: So if you're just sauteing something and you're using oil and chicken, making soup, you that's probably fine.
36:20
SPEAKER_02: Clams, clams are deadly, yeah.
36:23
SPEAKER_02: And and that is back when finger food wasn't as prevalent as it is today.
36:27
SPEAKER_03: But if she was making some of the things we eat now, like nachos or oh yeah, hot dogs, or um that'd be that'd be a great uh Halloween uh uh dish is typhoid marry nachos.
36:41
SPEAKER_03: And you and you make it with like brown brown beans, like like runny, runny brown beans.
36:49
SPEAKER_02: So I want to talk about the public reception of her.
36:52
SPEAKER_02: The public, you know, at first people hated her.
36:55
SPEAKER_02: She was she was kind of portrayed by the state of New York as um as a uh a threat, menace, yeah, menace to society, and then people kind of felt sorry for her, and they said, Well, her germs were to blame, and she can't do anything about this.
37:11
SPEAKER_02: Is before we knew about hand washing practices.
37:14
SPEAKER_02: They said, Well, you can't do anything about your germs.
37:16
SPEAKER_02: She was just dealt a bad deck, and her germs were to blame, so why should we hate on her?
37:23
SPEAKER_02: And some people say that Soper didn't handle it very well.
37:27
SPEAKER_02: I mean, he shows up the first time he met her and says uh urine feces tests.
37:33
SPEAKER_02: He says, You are spreading death and disease through with your cooking, and I want samples of your feces and urine.
37:40
SPEAKER_02: That's pretty, pretty harsh, man.
37:42
SPEAKER_03: And it's all about how you say it, right?
37:44
SPEAKER_03: I mean, if he had if he had read Dale Carnegie, he probably could have said it in a more uh good point.
37:49
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
37:49
SPEAKER_02: And I think today, if we were dealt with the same type of individual, I think we would try to make her understand, make her understand germ theory, make her understand.
38:00
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we know about hand washing now, but uh and and they would probably try to find her a suitable job, you know?
38:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
38:07
SPEAKER_02: Instead, they treated her like a lab rat, they called her a menace, they wanted to lock her up, and then they wanted to, you know, constantly take samples from her.
38:15
SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't know why they needed so many samples either.
38:18
SPEAKER_02: Like you'd think after the first 10 samples and eight of them come back positive, you kind of know what you know.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: I don't know why she would have to give three, four samples a day.
38:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, that just seems kind of excessive and maybe a little cruel.
38:34
SPEAKER_03: If you're a doctor or a lab technician out there listening and you know why they took a hundred and something samples from Typhoid Mary, let us know.
38:43
SPEAKER_03: Not at dirtnepcity.com.
38:45
SPEAKER_03: We'd we'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
38:47
SPEAKER_02: My guess, Kelly, is the the reason is they just didn't know what was going on.
38:53
SPEAKER_02: You have this healthy person here that's spreading, and they just have to know like, does this stuff come and go?
38:59
SPEAKER_02: Does it come?
38:59
SPEAKER_02: Maybe they were they were thinking maybe it had something to do with her cycle, or maybe it had something to do with the moon, or something.
39:05
SPEAKER_02: I who knows what they were trying to find something to correlate with with why all these rich people were getting sick.
39:14
SPEAKER_02: My take on her though, I really am fascinated with her stubbornness.
39:19
SPEAKER_02: So I don't know if you've ever heard me say this, but I frequently talk about stubbornness and how stubbornness is, in my opinion, is probably the number one cause of death.
39:29
SPEAKER_02: It's probably the number one cause of divorce.
39:31
SPEAKER_02: It's probably the number one cause of people getting fired.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: When you boil it down to a people, when they're stubborn, when they have information and don't do anything with that information, when they're getting feedback and not doing with it, thinking they know better, right?
39:46
SPEAKER_02: So you know something's bad for you, you do it anyways.
39:49
SPEAKER_02: You know something irritates somebody and you do it anyways.
39:52
SPEAKER_02: You know that you this is against the rules or against the law, but you do it anyways.
39:56
SPEAKER_02: That to me is stubbornness.
39:58
SPEAKER_02: And to me, her stubbornness, because she didn't believe in germs, she had never been sick.
40:03
SPEAKER_02: How should we be a carrier?
40:05
SPEAKER_02: She wasn't trying to hear anything new about this, she wasn't absorbing all this information that these health officials were telling her to her.
40:13
SPEAKER_02: It was it was maybe her stubbornness was a defense mechanism also because she was felt threatened.
40:20
SPEAKER_02: But she really was, it was her stubbornness that got her into all this mess.
40:24
SPEAKER_02: They just said if you just stop cooking, you know, and maybe today they would find her a job that made as much as a cook, or maybe it would have been cost effective to just pay her to not cook, you know.
40:36
SPEAKER_02: That's maybe what we would do today is just pay you a cook salary not to cook.
40:41
SPEAKER_02: Well, you'd go in disability.
40:43
SPEAKER_02: Like she would be on disability today, and and and and she would be able to survive.
40:50
SPEAKER_02: And maybe, you know, well, today she'd probably be a blogger and a podcaster as well.
40:55
SPEAKER_02: Right.
40:55
SPEAKER_02: Um and um, because those are pretty lucrative jobs, we know that.
41:00
unknown: Right.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, she was I I think today, obviously, a hundred years later, we would have treated her differently.
41:08
SPEAKER_02: But here's the question I want to ask you.
41:10
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: You know, at first she was naive.
41:15
SPEAKER_02: At some point, after all these health officials are quarantin, going to the trouble of quarantining you, at some point they're telling you that your actions are making people sick.
41:26
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if your ignorance, like I say, or stubbornness or whatever, can be a defense for very long.
41:32
SPEAKER_02: At some point, doesn't she become a murderer?
41:36
SPEAKER_03: When she actively knows that she that she shouldn't be cooking for people, but does it anyway?
41:43
SPEAKER_02: Seven of the last eight families you cook for got typhoid and some of them died, and then you go out and you keep cooking for families.
41:50
SPEAKER_02: Even do you have to actually believe in the science to be the murderer?
41:54
SPEAKER_02: Or look the fact that this thing keeps happening and you keep doing it, at some point, aren't you culpable, responsible for some of that?
42:04
SPEAKER_03: Um I I think she is responsible, but the question isn't whether or not she is a murderer, because she is a she is she is a murderer, but it's whether it's intentional or not.
42:16
SPEAKER_02: She's you know, sure.
42:17
SPEAKER_02: You could get her on manslaughter, but not murder, maybe, right?
42:19
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
42:20
SPEAKER_03: If you're if you're saying that she killed people, her actions killed people, then yes, her actions did kill people, but if it was intentional and it was actually murder, that's a different story.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I certainly I I waffle back and forth between having empathy for people like that because she was in a spot where she had to make a living.
42:40
SPEAKER_03: She only had one way that she knew of to do it.
42:43
SPEAKER_03: You know, this was this was an era where you kind of stayed in your lane professionally.
42:48
SPEAKER_03: You know, there wasn't a lot of upward mobility for somebody, especially a woman who was an immigrant at that time.
42:53
SPEAKER_03: And so she saw cooking as her one thing she could do that could make her a decent living, or maybe not even a decent living, and she kind of just dug her heels in.
43:03
SPEAKER_03: But you said earlier, um, you know, you you mentioned about her stubbornness.
43:08
SPEAKER_03: I kind of think that stubbornness is a synonym for ego, right?
43:12
SPEAKER_03: And that ego and stubbornness go hand in hand, and that maybe ego or stubbornness is a symptom of the ego, and that when you are able to realize, okay, I could be wrong, and the people telling me this are telling it to me for my good and for the good of people around me, maybe I instead of arguing with them, I should actually listen to them kind of thing, you know.
43:36
SPEAKER_03: But but emotional maturity wasn't something a lot of people had back then, I don't think.
43:40
SPEAKER_02: No, and I I think about what if this was a drunk driver that thought I drive better when I'm drunk, I'm not gonna listen to those people and just habitually was going out, killing people.
43:52
SPEAKER_03: I think they I think those people existed.
43:54
SPEAKER_03: I think there's people that that you know that did do that back in the day.
43:57
SPEAKER_03: Maybe still, maybe still do.
43:59
SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, I think the the laws and the penalties and the social stigma of it has gotten a lot stronger today.
44:05
SPEAKER_03: And and the thing is too there wasn't really at least at first there probably wasn't a lot of social stigma because people didn't even really know what was going on.
44:15
SPEAKER_03: It wasn't like they could say definitively until she got those uh until she got those tests done and then they saw oh okay I clearly see the correlation here of what's going on.
44:25
SPEAKER_03: And she wasn't buying it then she didn't understand how these little bugs yeah that's the point at which but she couldn't see them with her own eyes.
44:33
SPEAKER_02: You know I don't know if they ever put her eyes up to the microscope and let her look at them but you know no in fact I think she said just that she said I don't understand how you're telling me invisible bugs that I have in my gallbladder are making people sick.
44:48
SPEAKER_03: I don't I don't understand you're telling me something invisible is making making people sick she was born in she was born in the 1800s in Ireland right and and uh so I I could see where that would be her stance.
45:01
SPEAKER_03: Sure, sure so you are saying she's not a murderer uh I don't think she was a murderer but I do think um that she should have been held responsible and that probably putting her in quarantine like that after she refused to comply was the smart thing to do.
45:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah it's pretty they they still use her case in um medical school and nursing school as a good case study in medical ethics because it just does have a lot of meat on the bone about how we treat people um or or a lot of bacteria on the poop as it might be.
45:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah no she wasn't the only one uh there was a guy named Tony Labella an Italian immigrant that um that was doing similar some similar stuff there was a guy named typhoid john who was who was uh uh he was like a mountain guide in the Adirondack Mountains also in New York right um but he was like a mountain guide that was making people sick there was uh guy Alphonse Cotils was was another restaurant owner I think uh worse job for a typhoid carrier typhoid Jenny in Chicago uh was doing she was um she wasn't a restaurant tour um I forget what it was she did but uh she was making people sick it turns out there was 400 other people just in New York that were asymptomatic carriers of typhoid but she was the only one treated like this they were tossing into into the stuff and probably because she got rich people sick.
46:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah maybe that's a good point.
46:39
SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say maybe because Soper like he like that was his you know it was like uh Elliot messing alcohol out of you well but yeah but also um it's one thing to get you know the the average citizen sick it's another to get the the hoy piloy you know the the who's who of New York uh that's a great point if she was if she was getting um get the sick or if she was working in soup kitchens would she have been considered a menace to society or you know and and infecting fifty to a hundred people at a time or a family of eight that were really rich.
47:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
47:17
SPEAKER_02: But on the other hand, because these people were rich they had the resources to hire detectives and actually figure out what was going on.
47:24
SPEAKER_02: If she hadn't then this might have continued for a while.
47:29
SPEAKER_02: I mean it really advanced our thinking in terms of germ theory and like now we see oh this is taken to its extreme this is what can happen to you um but I just uh I just kind of I I'm kind of obsessed with this story because of all the stuff that it entails and and it's a it's a you know I love looking at things you know a hundred years later and seeing if we made the right call um and I think this is right in that lane because clearly people back then everybody was operating with different information than we have now so now we can look at it with hindsight and say they were all behaving badly soaper could have done better Mary definitely could have done better the um but I feel bad for the poor people that just just hired a cook just wanted some Irish uh food yeah yeah and uh ended up with the ultimate hangover oh man so keep washing your hands my friends yes um if you want to send us a picture of yourself washing your hands we'll send you a dirt nap city uh sticker yeah yeah a hundred percent instead of the my hands are clean um we'll send you a dirt nap city sticker which will look really nice next to it if you're washing your hands at Rudy's we might send you two stickers yes Mary cooked the clowns with her hands so fair rich folks never knew deceased she bear this in her heart she just did her part leaves behind a song in a haunting heart I find Mary smiles with those hands of doom beauty hides her well in the kitchen each employer fell to a fade unseen Mary's cure spring the other touch uncle no one saw her cry in the gleam of woe Mary's silent danced over home