She finally receives a letter from one who is prepared to take on her case, with no expectation of payment, and so begins a campaign to prove her innocence. With the Government unjustly enforcing her exile, as well as constantly being hounded to undergo an operation to remove her gall bladder, Mary, quite rightly, begins to feeling victimised and seeks the advice of various lawyers through postal communication, without much success. Not forgetting her long-time partner, Alfred, a man who loves her intensely but who is a hopeless drunk frequently adding to his status of unemployment, Mary engages in correspondence to him but the intervals between letters become longer and the writing less.
She was eventually moved to a little cottage on the island which was built especially for her and, whilst enjoying the solitude of her own quarters, befriends one of the minor characters, the institution’s gardener.
On incarceration at North Brother Island, Mary was subjected to sharing quarters with Tuberculosis patients and, coming from South Africa, a country which has an extremely high incidence of TB, I am most surprised that she, too, didn’t contract this debilitating communicable disease which, even by today’s medical standards, is sometimes fatal. Whilst not much was known about the disease at the turn of the century, Dr Soper played an integral part in researching this disease and while I found his singling out of Mary to be a bit unfair and unjust, which had me seething at times (after all, there were other carriers out there), I guess it was a necessary evil for further research to be carried out, even though not much regard was had to her rights but rather that of the larger community. Enter Dr George Soper, the sanitary engineer who played a large role in the arrest of Mary. Through her work as a cook for a host of wealthy families, Irish immigrant Mary was arrested in 1907 at the age of forty after being accused of spreading this dangerous disease which then, had a high incidence of mortality and morbidity.
This novel, albeit fictional, is based on historical fact, and gives a plausible account focusing mainly on the Mary’s life before her first incarceration until her voluntary re-institutionalisation which continued until her death. Having heard of the disease Typhoid, but possibly because I am not an avid follower of American history, I was astounded to learn that the disease had a face – Mary Mallon - which leads me to that all-important question, do you wash your hands before preparing food?īorn in September 1869, Mary Mallon was the first known person in the United States to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the bacilli associated with Typhoid Fever.
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