Degrees of Separation: Part 2
By Anna Gaberscik
Anger and Frustration: Rebelling Against Social Distancing
First of all, where does the term “quarantine” come from?
Venice, fourteenth century. The institutionalized system of quarantine as we know it today is established around 1348. Many variations of quarantines have been employed already at this point, dating back to A.D 542, when a bubonic plague ravaged Constantinople during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian. In the fourteenth century, the spread of the Black Death pushed Venice to put into place legislation that required incoming ships to wait for a period of thirty days before being allowed to enter. This law eventually expanded from a period of thirty days, or “trentino”, to a period forty days of isolation “quaranta giorni.” Hence the birth of the term “quarantine.”
About 500 years later we find ourselves in the 1880s to meet the infamous Mary Mallon, also known an “Typhoid Mary.” Mary Mallon arrived in New York City from Ireland during this time, where she pursued a living cooking for wealthy families. In 1906, she was employed by wealthy banker Charles Henry Warren to cook for him and his family in their Long Island summer house. Over the course of the summer, six of the family members contracted typhoid fever; the first of numerous families that would suffer the same fate.
George Soper, sanitary engineer, was responsible for tracking the infections back to Mary Mallon and published his findings in 1907. He then tried to track Mary down, in an effort to bring her into a lab for testing. He was not successful in his attempts at first, describing Mary as uncooperative and claiming that on occasions she even chased him away. Eventually, the New York City Department of Health and the police department were called to support with the investigation and she obliged to testing, however only after 5 hours of refusal. Mary was then sent to North Brother Island, where she spent two years in isolation, after which she was released under the condition that she would not work as a cook again. Mary did exactly that. She worked as a cook at Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan , her cover being blown when an alarming number of typhoid fever cases sprang up. She was then banished once again to North Brother Island, this time until her death in 1938. Already during her life she was infamous as ‘Typhoid Mary,’ shunned and ridiculed. Mary Mallon was the first known case of an asymptomatic, or “healthy carrier” of typhoid fever in the United States.
Thirty-two years after he published his discovery of Mary Mallon’s case in the Journal of the American Medical Association, George Soper published his article “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary” in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary” is a candid account of his experiences with Mary. The following is a telling excerpt from the article:
On her release Mary promptly disappeared. She violated every detail of the pledge she had given to the Department of Health. She changed her name and went to cooking again. Under the name of Marie Breshof, and sometimes Mrs. Brown, she now cooked in hotels, restaurants and sanatoria. At one time she ran a cheap rooming house, but kept it so badly that it failed to pay. She tried ironing, but found cooking paid better. For five years Mary traveled about New York and its vicinity without restraint and without her identity being discovered by the authorities. I was not asked to find her again, but I think I could have done so. My official connection with the case ended when I cleared up the Oyster Bay outbreak in 1907 and turned Typhoid Mary over to the Health Department. Mary's history during these five years has never been traced in detail, but I know some of the places where she worked and some of the things that happened to her. The world was not very kind to Mary. She could not resume her cooking in rich private families, for practically all of them got their cooks through two agencies - Mrs. Stricker's and Mrs. Seeley's - and both knew Mary and were afraid to place her. She never had what might be called a permanent situation. She did not get on well with other servants and wanted to be moving about, anyway. One day Dr. Edward B. Cragin, head obstetrician and gynecologist at the Sloane Hospital for Women, telephoned me asking that I come at once to the hospital to see him about a matter of great importance. When I arrived there he said he had a typhoid epidemic of more than twenty cases on his hands. The other servants had jokingly nicknamed the cook "Typhoid Mary." She was out at the moment, but would I recognize her handwriting if she was really that woman? He handed me a letter from which I saw at once that the cook was indeed Mary Mallon, and I also identified her from his description. I advised that the Health Department be notified, and it was not long before Mary was again taken and sent to North Brother Island. On this occasion she made no struggle. Mary was on the island the second time for twenty-three years. During this long period she never once tried to escape. Did she want to regain her liberty after her second arrest? I believe she did not. Some think she had come to recognize her condition as inevitable and had become reconciled to a life of imprisonment. My belief is that a change had come over her - a change that was due largely to the passage of time. It was both mental and physical. She felt that she had been hounded because of typhoid fever. She did not admit that there was any typhoid about her, but since others said there was, she had not been allowed to go freely where she pleased and do what she wanted to do. As her lawyer had said, she had been advertised to the world as a dangerous person and had been treated worse than a criminal, and yet she had not been guilty of the least violence toward anybody. Mary was now about forty-eight years of age and a good deal heavier than she was when she slipped through a kitchen full of servants, jumped the back fence and put up a fight with strong young policemen. She was as strong as ever, but she had lost something of that remarkable energy and activity which had characterized her young days and urged her forward to meet undaunted whatever situation the world presented to her. In these eight years since she was first arrested, she had learned what it was to yield to other wills than her own and to know pain. In the last five years, although she had been free, there had been times when she had found it hard to fight her battles unaided.
Mary possessed a violent temper against which, when fully aroused, few persons had ever been willing to contend. I had had this weapon used against me three times, Dr. Baker had seen it in full force on the occasion of Mary's first arrest, and there is a story of it when an English health officer, neglecting a warning he had received, undertook to interview Mary and photograph her at her bungalow. Mary knew how to throw herself into a state of what Dr. John A. Cahill, Superintendent of Riverside Hospital, called, "almost pathological anger.” In the many years of her incarceration, Mary made good use of this personal weapon. Usually a look or a word gave sufficient warning of what might lie behind. When, on the basis of a long and friendly relation, the head of the laboratory asked Mary to tell her about her love affairs, Mary silenced her with a glare.
Here is a letter written my Mary Mallon herself, originally addressed to the editor of the The New York American, later re-addressing it to her lawyer George Francis O’Neill.
To the Editor of The American,
George Francis O’Neill,
In reply to Dr. Park of the Board of Health I will state that I am not segregated with the typhoid patients. There is nobody on this island that has typhoid. There was never any effort by the Board authority to do anything for me excepting to cast me on the island and keep me a prisoner without being sick nor needing medical treatment….
When in January (1908) they were about to discharge me, when the resident physician came to me and asked me where was I going when I got out of here, naturally I said to N.Y., so there was a stop put to my getting out of here. Then the supervising nurse told me I was a hopeless case, and if I’d write to Dr. Darlington and tell him I’d go to my sisters in Connecticut. Now I have no sister in that state or any other in the U.S. Then in April a friend of mine went to Dr. Darlington and asked him when I was to get away. He replied “That woman is all right now, and she is a very expensive woman, but I cannot let her go myself. The Board has to sit. Come around Saturday.” When he did, Dr. Darlington told this man “I’ve nothing more to do with this woman. Go to Dr. Studdiford.”
He went to that doctor, and he said “I cannot let that woman go, and all the people that she gave the typhoid to and so many deaths occurred in the families she was with.” Dr. Studdiford said to this man “Go and ask Mary Mallon and enveigle her to have an operation performed to have her gallbladder removed. I’ll have the best surgeon in town to do the cutting.” I said “No. No knife will be put on me. I’ve nothing the matter with my gallbladder.” Dr. Wilson asked me the very same question. I also told him no. Then he replied “It might not do you any good.” Also the supervising nurse asked me to have an operation performed. I also told her no, and she made the remark “Would it not be better for you to have it done than remain here?” I told her no.
There is a visiting doctor who came here in October. He did take quite an interest in me. He really thought I liked it here, that I did not care for my freedom. He asked me if I’d take some medicine if he brought it to me. I said I would, so he brought me some Anti Autotox and some pills then. Dr. Wilson had already ordered me brewer’s yeast. At first I would not take it, for I’m a little afraid of the people, and I have a good right for when I came to the Department they said they were in my tract. Later another said they were in the muscles of my bowels. And latterly they thought of the gallbladder.
I have been in fact a peep show for everybody. Even the interns had to come to see me and ask about the facts already known to the whole wide world. The tuberculosis men would say “There she is, the kidnapped woman.” Dr. Park has had me illustrated in Chicago. I wonder how the said Dr. William H. Park would like to be insulted and put in the Journal and call him or his wife Typhoid William Park.
– Mary Mallon
Perhaps she really didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, she may have seen her diagnosis as an inconvenience that she chose to ignore or deny. Mary’s case was an extreme and very public case of an individual who refused to comply with social isolation orders from health professionals. The lack of public knowledge on basic health matters combined with the lack of advances in the medical field on typhoid fever resulted in a generally suboptimal situation. Mary was a woman who approached many with suspicion and skepticism, she dared to ask questions, challenge whoever crossed her path or got in the way of her paycheck. She was headstrong about her freedom, even suing the New York City Department of Health in 1909 (unsuccessfully). However, the conditions of her existence were very precarious; and these conditions are mirrored during epidemics and pandemics time and time again. Mary perceived her life as having nothing to do with the lives of others. She was a woman who refused to be told what she may and may not do, and did not appreciate the way in which the New York City Health Department was infringing on rights that she had until then always enjoyed.
Her refusal to acknowledge the ways in which we are interconnected prevented her from accepting the importance of her, an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, adjusting the way she interacted with others for the sake of their health. Her lack of trust in medical institutions and skepticism went so far that she denied a great deal of medical treatment pertaining to her condition, including procedures that may have allowed her to live a more normal life.
The issue of privacy versus safety is not necessarily a new question, but the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to look at this debate differently. Mary fought against giving up her privacy, and for her that was synonymous with her freedom. The lines became blurred, however, once her privacy and freedom infringed on the safety of others. The feeling of not wanting to be caged in, limited to set confines, is one that may be very relatable at the moment.
Next we have an excerpt from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a collection of observations and first hand accounts of an outbreak of the plague that arrived in London in the 1660s. Defoe’s journal is painstakingly detailed on a private and public level; describing the goings-on on the streets along with official data and governmental orders issued to the public pertaining to the outbreak. In the journal, he seems to present to us many of the orders to showcase how they were being disobeyed, telling us about the disregard of the collective good that many of his fellow citizens expressed. In his account of a rambunctious group of men who refuse to adhere to a ban on drinking in pubs late at night, he attempts to talk some sense into them, to no avail. Today we see this kind of frustration expressed very publicly on social media: a Twitter or Facebook rant, a picture shaming people who seem to disobey orders, a grumpy window-watcher screaming down at some teenagers congregating below.
Here we have an official order, printed as so in his journal:
Tippling-houses.
‘That disorderly tippling in taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses, and cellars be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague. And that no company or person be suffered to remain or come into any tavern, ale-house, or coffee-house to drink after nine of the clock in the evening, according to the ancient law and custom of this city, upon the penalties ordained in that behalf.
‘SIR JOHN LAWRENCE, Lord Mayor.
SIR GEORGE WATERMAN
SIR CHARLES DOE, Sheriffs.’
And here we have Defoe’s account of the defiant and ‘sinful’ men who went against those orders.
It is with regret that I take notice of this tavern. The people were civil, mannerly, and an obliging sort of folks enough, and had till this time kept their house open and their trade going on, though not so very publicly as formerly: but there was a dreadful set of fellows that used their house, and who, in the middle of all this horror, met there every night, behaved with all the revelling and roaring extravagances as is usual for such people to do at other times, and, indeed, to such an offensive degree that the very master and mistress of the house grew first ashamed and then terrified at them.
They sat generally in a room next the street, and as they always kept late hours, so when the dead-cart came across the street-end to go into Houndsditch, which was in view of the tavern windows, they would frequently open the windows as soon as they heard the bell and look out at them; and as they might often hear sad lamentations of people in the streets or at their windows as the carts went along, they would make their impudent mocks and jeers at them, especially if they heard the poor people call upon God to have mercy upon them, as many would do at those times in their ordinary passing along the streets.
From Defoe’s account we see an example of ‘dangerous’ submission (potentially deadly to those around) rather than defiance. Their submission was a surrender to a fate they expected would come sooner or later. Their surrender of course, endangered those around them. The grim state of London at this time easily bred bleak and hopeless sentiments, which only made things worse as people saw no use in adhering to the most basic rules set for public safety. Many felt that there simply was no escaping the plague, it was just a question of when they would contract it.
In Mary Mallon’s case, however, we see ‘dangerous' defiance followed by ‘passive’ (not threatening to those around her) submission. The type of submission George Soper described Mary Mallon as having exhibited after her second arrest and thus life sentence to North Brother Island was less dangerous than the ‘drunkards’ in Defoe’s story because she submitted to her unfortunate isolation rather than to ‘death.’ She also had that option, because although she was infected, she was an asymptomatic carrier. Mary’s defiance started out as volatile as these mens’ submission, though, as she went about her life infecting unsuspecting people. Mary may not have accepted her isolation, but she submitted to it; cooperating in a way that didn’t allow her to endanger any more lives.
We see from these examples just some of the many ways in which people express their discontent with life when an outbreak dictates the daily order, when social distancing becomes a must and the normal freedoms of everyday existence are limited for the purpose of public safety. Important to note nonetheless, are the high stakes of any and all of our actions have during an epidemic or pandemic. Our actions don’t just affect us, but many of those around us; the web of interconnected links is always there. We must be conscious about what the purpose of various forms of rebellion are during an infectious outbreak, and what the goals are of such acts of disobedience. Acts of rebellion and civil disobedience might strive to disrupt the current political order or have certain voices be heard. Rebelling against social distancing and quarantine guidelines, however, don’t “stick it to the man” as much as puts innocent lives at risk more than they already are.
Let’s find healthy ways to express frustration.
In this edition of ‘Degrees of Separation,’ I invite you to write a letter in which you express your raw and honest frustrations about life with social distancing. In the spirit of Mary Mallon, the letter can be addressed to a person in power who you might want to express your demands to. The message can also be addressed to no one in particular. This letter should allow you to set your frustrations and anger towards social distancing free. Allow those feelings to be felt and acknowledged in a healthy and safe way. The letter does not have to be long! It can also be in the style of a tweet, a text message or an email.
Considering the following question as inspiration:
What are the most frustrating parts of social isolation, and which orders/restrictions do you find the most difficult to adhere to?
DEUTSCH: In dieser Ausgabe von "Grade der Trennung" lade ich dich ein, einen Brief zu schreiben, in dem du deine Frustrationen über das Leben mit sozialer Distanzierung zum Ausdruck bringen. Im Geiste von Mary Mallon kann der Brief an eine Person an der Macht gerichtet sein, an die du vielleicht deine Forderungen richten möchtest. Die Botschaft kann auch an niemanden Bestimmten gerichtet sein. Dieser Brief sollte es dir ermöglichen, deine Frustrationen und deinen Ärger über soziale Distanzierung frei zu setzen. Er sollte es dir ermöglichen, diese Gefühle auf gesunde und sichere Weise zu spüren und anzuerkennen. Der Brief muss nicht lang sein! Er kann auch in der Art eines Tweets, einer Textnachricht oder einer E-Mail verfasst sein.
Betrachte die folgende Frage als Inspiration: Was sind die frustrierendsten Teile der sozialen Isolation, und welche Ordnungen/Einschränkungen findest du am schwierigsten einzuhalten?
I look forward to your amazing responses! Please respond by clicking on this link and filling in the blanks:
If you can’t reply via GoogleForms, send an email to hq@jumpstar.love. If you send us your answers via email we kindly ask you to copy and paste the following statement into the text body: I hereby confirm the free transfer of the usage rights of these texts to "Brunnenpassage / Caritas " for the project Jump!Star. We will add the responses into a Jump!Star 'Time Capsule' document. -- Hiermit bestätige ich die kostenlose Übertragung der Nutzungsrechte der Texten an die "Brunnenpassage / Caritas" für das Projekt Jump!Star. Die Texte werden in einem Jump!Star 'Time Capsule' zusammengefügt. *
Sources
Brooks J. “The sad and tragic life of Typhoid Mary.” CMAJ. 1996;154:915–916.
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 1995. Retrieved March 20, 2020, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm.
Fanning WL. “Typhim Vitrade mark Vaccine.” J Travel Med. 1997;4:32–37.
Mallon, Mary. “LETTER FROM MARY MALLON: ON BEING ‘TYPHOID MARY” https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/letter-from-mary-mallon-on-being-typhoid-mary
Marineli, Filio et al. “Mary Mallon (1869-1938) and the history of typhoid fever.” Annals of gastroenterology vol. 26,2 (2013): 132-134.
Soper, G A. “The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 15,10 (1939): 698-712.
Strochlic, Nina. “Typhoid Mary's tragic tale exposed the health impacts of ‘super-spreaders’.”National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/typhoid-mary-tragic-tale-exposed-health-impacts-super-spreaders/