In Her Own Words Notes

O'Neill
Mallon originally wrote this letter to the editor of the New York American, which had first identified her as Typhoid Mary in a two-page spread on June 20, 1909. But she redirected it to O'Neill, her lawyer, to be used in his petition of June 28 before the New York Supreme Court to have her released from quarantine.

Park
William H. Park, head of the New York Department of Health's bacteriology lab, was in charge of collecting stool and urine samples from Mallon to be tested for salmonella typhi, the bacillus that causes typhoid.

island
Beginning in March 1907, when health authorities apprehended her, Mallon was quarantined in her own cottage on North Brother Island, an islet in the East River near Rikers Island. Most of the other quarantined patients on the island suffered from tuberculosis; no one else there at the time had typhoid.

sick
Mallon had typhoid microbes in her system and could pass them to others, making them ill with the disease. She claimed that she had never had typhoid fever herself, though she must have had at least a mild, flu-like case of it to become a carrier. The idea that one could be a healthy carrier was new in the early 20th century, and one that Mallon never accepted throughout her life.

record
Between March 1907 and June 1909, Park's lab collected 163 stool samples from Mallon, an average of more than one a week. More than a quarter of those samples—and all urine samples—tested negative for typhoid, fueling Mallon's skepticism of the procedure. But no expert today doubts that she carried and could spread typhoid bacteria.

Wilson
Robert J. Wilson, superintendent of hospitals for the Department of Health, began overseeing Mallon's case in December 1907.

urotropin
Urotropin, a uninary tract antiseptic, was one of a number of treatments Wilson and other Department of Health specialists prescribed in their ultimately futile attempts to rid Mallon's body of salmonella typhi. Antibiotics that would do so would not appear until about a decade after Mallon's death in 1938.

Darlington
Thomas Darlington was the city's health commissioner at the time.

sister
Born in Ireland in 1869, Mallon had immigrated alone to America at age 14. Initially she lived with an aunt and uncle, but when they died, she was left with no family in the States. By the time she was apprehended in 1907, she had been working as a cook in upper-class New York homes for some years, unwittingly infecting people through her cooking.

friend
The friend was Albert Briehof, the man with whom Mallon was living before her quarantine.

Studdiford
William H. Studdiford was a gynecologist at Bellevue Hospital who consulted on female patients quarantined on North Brother Island.

deaths
Before her quarantine began, Mallon is believed to have infected at least 22 people with typhoid fever, one of whom died. Tragically, those numbers would later more than double.

gallbladder
Typhoid microbes can lodge in the gallbladder, but even at the time it was known that removing that organ was no guarantee of ridding someone of typhoid. And at the time, dangerous infections often followed abdominal operations, so Mallon had good reason to refuse the procedure.

Chicago
In June, 1908, at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, William Park had presented a paper on typhoid carriers in which he described Mallon's case, though he did not name her.