Woman Forced To Spend 30 Years In Isolation After Ignoring A Common Hygiene Practice
In the early 1900s, no one knew the dangerous truth about household cook Mary Mallon — not even Mary herself. So when she placed her peaches and ice cream in front of her employers, they dug in, excited to once again taste her famous dish. What followed was a deadly mystery that took decades to fully unravel. "Typhoid Mary" turned out to be one of history’s biggest social pariahs, and all because of a bowl of ice cream.
Mary Mallon
Like most New Yorkers in the early 1900s, Mary Mallon was an immigrant. She arrived in New York from Ireland in 1883, and she sought work doing the one thing she enjoyed: cooking. It wasn’t long, though, before she started to notice a worrying trend.
Sudden Illnesses
Weeks into every cooking job, the family she worked for would be struck by concerning symptoms: high fevers, splitting headaches, and terrible digestive woes that left them weak and exhausted. But Mary, curiously, never got sick.
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Ice Cream with Peaches
She hopped from house to house, which is how she started working for the Warren family. Days after they ate Mary's ice cream with peaches, it happened again: Each member of the family got sick. This time, however, Mary’s employer didn’t chalk it up to fate.
Struck By Typhoid
Instead, Mr. Warren hired an investigator to find out why his family was suddenly suffering from typhoid, an uncommon disease for their part of Oyster Bay, Long Island. George Soper, the investigator, slowly tracked the illness’ path.
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An Irish Cook
In each household affected by typhoid, there was a common thread: an Irish cook. The problem was, as Soper searched for the cook, he learned something alarming about her history. This mysterious Irish cook, it turned out, had a habit of skipping town.
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Mary's Secret
Mary Mallon always left her employment as soon as a case of typhoid fever broke out, often conveniently forgetting to leave a forwarding address. By the time Soper found her working in the household of another family, he realized something terrible about Mary.
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How Did It Spread?
Soper didn’t yet have proof, but time would prove his hunch right: Mary Mallon was the first asymptomatic carrier of typhoid to be identified in the United States, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out how she spread it to countless people.
Wash Your Hands
Typhoid usually spreads because the carrier didn’t take the right hygienic precautions, such as washing their hands after going to the bathroom. When a cook, who touches the food of every household member, neglects to wash their hands, the results are messy...
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Fatefully Bad Decision
And that’s exactly what happened with Mary. Whether it was because of her own exhaustion as an overworked cook or plain carelessness, it’s likely that Mary didn’t wash her hands before making meals for her employers — a fatefully bad decision.
Cold Food Spreads Bacteria
Soper deduced that Mary’s employers couldn’t have contracted typhoid from her hot meals, because the high cooking temperatures would’ve killed the deadly bacteria. That’s when they identified the real source: Mary’s famous ice cream served with peaches.
Going Downtown
Soper gave Mary the cold, hard facts. All seven families she’d worked for had contracted typhoid fever, and one little girl died. Even with this knowledge, Mary refused to be tested for typhoid ... until the police showed up at her door.
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Forced to Give Samples
The cook was shoved into an ambulance and taken to Willard Parker Hospital. For the next four days, a restrained Mary was forced to provide urine and stool samples, which yielded scary results: She was filled with typhoid bacteria.
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Born With Typhoid
While in the hospital, the dirty truth about Mary’s typhoid was finally pieced together. She was probably born with typhoid and had unknowingly transmitted it to countless people throughout her life. There was no telling how many more people she'd infect…
She Never Washed Her Hands
Unless the doctors were able to cut it off at the pass, that is. When Mary admitted that she hardly ever washed her hands, the authorities sentenced Mary to a short quarantine on North Brother Island.
Forced Quarantine
While in quarantine, Mary refused to have her gallbladder removed, even though it was probably the source of her typhoid. She also refused to stop working as a cook if and when she returned to the mainland. With that, Mary earned herself a very unflattering nickname.
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"Typhoid Mary"
To the public, she became known as “Typhoid Mary." Everyone was content to have her safely quarantined on North Brother Island, but Mary herself was miserable. She suffered from a nervous breakdown and complained that the doctors treated her like a “guinea pig."
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Mary in Denial
All the while, Mary never believed that she was the reason all those people got sick. Despite this stubbornness, after two years on North Brother Island, the New York Commissioner of Health told Mary she could return to society on one condition.
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Return To Society
He forced Mary to sign an affidavit promising that she would never work as a cook again. She agreed and returned to New York City, where she successfully faded into the crowd...until, a few years later, a group of hospital workers suddenly fell ill.
Mysterious Irish Cook Returns
Various restaurants, hotels, and spas also reported outbreaks of typhoid. It didn’t take long for Soper to notice a common thread with each outbreak: an Irish cook, sometimes named Mary Brown or Mary Breshof, always left a string of illness in her wake.
Caught In The Act
In 1915, Soper found Mary cooking for Sloane Hospital for Women, where 25 people were infected and 2 died of typhoid. With that, Mary was taken into custody and forced back to North Brother Island. This time, though, it was an extended stay.
Lifelong Quarantine
This extended stay ended up lasting Mary for the rest of her life. For 23 years, she lived alone in a cottage on North Brother Island, where she could cook all she wanted without hurting others. By the time she died in 1938, there were big changes on the mainland.
50 Potential Deaths
By then, other asymptomatic typhoid carriers had been identified, making Mary’s forced confinement the subject of controversy to this day. Some estimate that Mary may have caused — whether intentionally or not — 50 deaths. And to think, it all started with a bowl of ice cream...
A Sinister Nurse
It's possible that despite her nickname, "Typhoid Mary" never really grasped how dangerous she was to the public. The same can't be said for Julia Lyons, a woman who used the 1918 Flu pandemic to her advantage. She's one of the most sinister nurses in history...
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Julia Lyons
At the time, though, most people didn’t know that Julia Lyons, “a woman of diamonds and furs” and “silken ankles," wasn’t who she claimed to be. In September of 1918, she’d been arrested after posing as a Department of Justice representative and cashing stolen checks.
Hatching A Plan
But Julia, Chicago authorities soon learned, was more clever than they gave her credit for. When their heads were turned, she escaped from custody and disappeared into the city. She needed a way to blend in...and she knew the perfect way to do so.
Becoming A "Nurse"
Julia looked around and noticed how panicked everyone was about the flu. The way she saw it, people were so desperate for nurses that no one would notice if she, say, donned one of the thousands of nurse’s uniforms laying around the city.
A Criminal At Heart
That’s how Julia Lyons became Nurse Julia (she also went by various aliases, including Marie Walker, Ruth Hicks, and Mrs. H.J. Behrens). She started working as a “nurse” in a handful of households, but couldn’t contain her scheming ways for long.
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Ulterior Motives
As if caring for sick, innocent patients without any kind of medical knowledge wasn’t bad enough, Julia decided that she wanted to get more out of being a nurse...and by “more,” we mean money. She was no Florence Nightingale.
Tricking Her Own Patients
Whenever she picked up prescriptions for her patients, she lied to them about how much the medicine cost. Once, according to the Chicago Tribune, she charged a patient $63 for a dose of oxygen that was actually worth about $5.
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Once A Crook...
Her usual plan went like this: She would go to the houses of sick people, posing as a nurse from an agency. She’d gain their trust, overcharge them for prescriptions, and later flee the property with all the jewelry, clothing, and valuables she could carry.
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Heart Of Stone
All the while, her patients had no clue that their lives were in the hands of a phony. As one story goes, a 9-year-old once begged Julia to help care for his brother, who was “out of his head with illness.” Her response was characteristically callous.
Kindly Nurse...
“Oh, let him rave,” she reportedly said. “He’s used to raving.” The sick boy died, not that Julia seemed to care. Still, no one caught on to the act: With her “rose-lipped smile and pearly teeth,” it was hard to believe that Julia had anything but good intentions...
Web Of Lies
Julia preyed on her patients' vulnerability. When one patient started to grow suspicious of his less-than-capable nurse, she won him over by sweetly saying, “Don’t you remember me? Why, when I was a little girl I used to hitch on your wagons!”
...Always A Crook
This lie arrived just in time. A detective was on Julia's tail until the sick man, who assumed he had simply forgotten Julia since her childhood days, vouched for Julia’s credibility. When she disappeared soon after with his watch and other valuables, the man was stunned.
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Conniving Cohorts
“By golly, I guess I was wrong,” he told the Tribune. It seemed like Julia would go on scheming and robbing the weak forever...but even she couldn’t outrun the law. Detectives linked Julia to two women from the “shady world,” Eva Jacobs and “Suicide Bess” Davis.
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"Flu Julia"
After spying on them, police found out that Julia intended to marry a restaurant owner named Charlie the Greek. It was through this connection that they finally located who the Tribune called “Flu Julia” — but she wasn’t going to be arrested without a fight.
Unhappy Honeymoon
“The wedding’s all bust up!” Julia reportedly screeched as she was being arrested. According to some accounts, Charlie the Greek stood there as his bride was carted away, confused about the woman he’d known for a whopping ten days. “I thought I knew her,” he said.
Something Up Her Sleeve
Still, just because Julia was in police custody didn’t mean her scheming days were behind her. On the contrary; even the police could tell that Julia had something up her sleeve. “Be careful, she’s pretty slick,” Deputy Sheriff John Hickey was warned.
So Far, So Good...
It was Hickey’s job to transport Julia to court, a job he took lightly. “Oh, she won’t get away from me,” he allegedly told the other detectives. In a way, he was right: He did get Julia to the courthouse, where 50 victims testified against her.
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Julia's Great Escape
The trouble came 90 minutes later, when an “excited” Hickey called the police with his tail between his legs. Julia, he claimed, had escaped from the moving vehicle and into a getaway car, which Hickey had been unable to chase down the street.
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Crooked Police
It was pretty obvious to his fellow police officers that Hickey was lying about how Julia escaped. Hickey was eventually suspended for accepting a bribe from Julia, but the truth still hurt. Julia Lyons had once again escaped and was now at large...
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Something's Fishy
This time, however, the police were more careful. They scanned through page after page of nurses’ registries until they found a possible lead. There was a Mrs. James working as a nurse on Fullerton Boulevard, and something about her story seemed suspicious.
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Caught In The Act
For one, she was new to the household, and her physical description fit that of Julia. Sure enough, when they arrived at the flu-ridden household, they found Julia, perfectly healthy and very unhappy to see them.
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"Slicker Julia"
“Mrs. M.S. James, née Flu Julia, née Slicker Julia, who walked away one November day from former Deputy Sheriff John Hickey, walked back into custody, involuntarily,” the Chicago Tribune reported on March 21st, 1919. This time, Julia had no one to help her escape.
Pleading Insanity
During her lengthy trial, she first claimed that she had been forced into her life of crime by a “band of thieves,” and when no one believed her, she pleaded insanity. By this point, though, everyone knew not to trust Julia Lyons. She was found guilty of larceny and served up to a decade in prison for her crimes.
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