During her two-year confinement, health officials analyzed Mary's stool samples once a week. The samples came back mostly positive. However, Mary also sent her stool samples to a private lab where all her tests proved negative for the typhoid bacteria which made her think now more than ever she was the victim of unfair persecution.
However, in a new health commissioner decided that Mary could be released from quarantine as long as she never worked with food again. Finally, the Tyrone woman was allowed to walk free. She began working in a laundry but soon after became tired of the poor wages in comparison to when she was a cook. Mary then still believing that she posed no risk to anyone changed her name to Mary Brown and once again took up a paid position as a cook.
The cycle started again. Nearly five years after her release when an outbreak of typhoid fever in the Sloane Maternity Hospital occurred it was discovered they had recently hired a new cook called Mrs Brown.
Any sympathy she had from people after her release quickly disappeared when they discovered that she had wittingly caused pain and suffering to those who were infected.
Once again she was sent back to North Brother Island to live in the same isolated cottage. Details of her life on the island are scant but it is known that she helped around the hospital.
She suffered a large stroke in that left her paralyzed. She was then transferred to the children's wing of the hospital where she spent the following six years of life until her death on November 11, , aged This argumentative woman from Tyrone was the first healthy typhoid carrier to be identified by medical science.
She became famous after giving rise to the most famous outbreaks of carrier-borne disease in medical history. North Brother Island on New York's east river where Mary spent a large part of her life has been abandoned and some say her ghost still roams the derelict hospital corridors. Love Irish history? Share your favorite stories with other history buffs in the IrishCentral History Facebook group.
Contact us at letters time. Illustration of 'Typhoid Mary' also known as Mary Mallon breaking skulls into a skillet, circa By Jennifer Latson. Related Stories. Later, he returned, and after evading authorities for five hours Mallon was betrayed by a scrap of her dress, caught in the door of her hiding place.
When she tested positive for typhoid bacteria, the Department of Health forcibly moved her to North Brother Island, a dot of land in the East River just off the Bronx that housed a quarantine facility.
Five years later, she was found working in the kitchen at a hospital where a typhoid outbreak was underway. This month marks years since Typhoid Mary was apprehended for the second and final time, living the next 23 years—the rest of her life—under quarantine. The typhoid bacterium can live in cold food but is destroyed by cooking. If she had taken a special pride in her apple pie perhaps we would never have heard of Typhoid Mary.
Image source, Getty Images. Mary Mallon, here in the foreground, never contracted typhoid herself but was responsible for spreading the disease. Irish cook with a signature dish.
Killer disease stalked New York. And that's part of the problem with Mary. This illustration from around shows Typhoid Mary breaking skulls into a skillet. What is typhoid fever? Typhoid fever is caused by highly contagious Salmonella Typhi bacteria and spread through contaminated food and water It is most common in countries with poor sanitation and a lack of clean water An estimated million people get sick each year, and between , and , people die There are two vaccines to prevent typhoid; it can be treated with antibiotics although resistance to antibiotics is making treatment harder Bacteria can be shed by chronic carriers who show no symptoms, in some cases even for decades; Mary Mallon was the most famous.
Typhoid vaccine 'works fantastically well' The typhoid outbreak that hit Aberdeen in Image source, Alamy. Mary Mallon is pictured here, fourth from R, in quarantine. How newspaper baron Hearst took up Typhoid Mary's cause.
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