Typhoid Mary Read Online Free PDF

to do your business in a chamber pot, then hurl it out the window; bury it in the garden, or in the privy. Next to the well.
         In the most elemental language, to prevent typhoid, modern health care professionals strongly suggest persons who prepare food for others use scrupulous care when washing their hands after using the bathroom.
         It is one thing to have typhoid bacteria wriggling around inside your alimentary canal. It is another to transfer those bacteria to another human being. Not washing your hands after a bowel movement is a good way to start. Using those same hands to prepare food which remains uncooked – like, say, salad, or peach ice cream – would be better. Who among us really washes their hands in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of food handling? Dr. John Marr of the New York State Health Department states flatly, ‘I don’t know anyone who washes their hands 100 per cent after going to the bathroom.’
         If you are the kind of person for whom washing your hands after a bathroom visit is an ordeal – and you allow your fingernails to grow to fashionable length – you can look forward to a real career in disease spreading. One has only to ask a health inspector to demonstrate, for instance, the proper method of hand washing for a manicured kitchen worker, then watch the professional mime furiously the scrubbing (with brush) of the undersides of the nails, top to bottom, finishing with an impressive hands-up doctor-style flourish, to get a cold chill down your spine. You’ll never eat a Caesar salad again.

Chapter Three
    The Conversation
    When informed that the woman he had been pursuing over the last months was indeed working only a few feet away from where he now stood in the anteway of the opulent Park Avenue home, Dr. Soper could hardly contain himself.
         But his enthusiasm, his bad judgment and his zeal worked against him. His first approach was clumsy:
     
    I had my first talk with Mary in the kitchen of (the) house. I suppose it was an unusual kind of interview, particularly when the place is taken into consideration. I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and that I wanted specimens of her urine, feces and blood.
     
         Soper tries to make excuses for getting ahead of himself, but after all, to his mind, Mary was a killer, at least of a kind, and he felt he had no other choice but to act with dispatch.
         Showing up at a cook’s place of work and attempting to interrogate her on such a sensitive subject in front of the other household employees and the housemistress was probably not a good idea. Demanding samples of ‘urine, feces and blood’ proved hardly an ideal icebreaker when attempting dialogue, especially given the fact that he and Mary had never been formally introduced.
         In any event, Mary balked in a most emphatic way at Soper’s suggestion that she give up her bodily fluids.
     
    She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. I passed rapidly down the long, narrow hall, through the tall iron gate, out through the area, and so to the sidewalk. I felt rather lucky to escape. I confessed to myself that I had made a bad start. Apparently Mary did not understand that I wanted to help her.
     
         Soper’s own accounts, given at various times in speeches, newspaper articles, and papers published in medical journals, vary as to how much was said at this first meeting. An early telling has him resuming the discussion – presumably at fork-point – outside the house on Park Avenue.
     
    She upbraided me for connecting her with outbreaks of typhoid fever in every household she had worked in  . . . The circumstances connected with the case were most pathetic. In the face of all this, Mary refused to submit herself to an examination and would not divulge a single fact about her past life, her relatives, her friends, in fact, she refused to say a thing to assist