Typhoid Mary Read Online Free PDF Page B

me.
     
         In another recounting (and Soper dined out on this story quite a lot), he added that Mary denied ever having typhoid fever, asserting that she could not possibly be the cause of it – either at her current employer’s home or anywhere else.
         Whatever words passed between them during that initial exchange, the outcome was clear. Dr. Soper went away empty-handed, and Mary Mallon went away angry, frightened, paranoid, and suspicious.
         The result of that first meeting between hunter and prey was that Mary was put on the defensive. Her hackles went up and she fully staked out her position. Not guilty. Period! To get her to climb down from that particular tree would be difficult if not impossible. Soper was disappointed. Whether he knew it or not, he’d blown it. However cognizant of his own failing as interrogator he might have been, he was also, to his discredit, personally offended. It seems to have come to him as a complete surprise that the rudely ambushed cook had responded neither favorably nor agreeably to his suggestions, and this confused Soper and made him somewhat indignant.
     
    It mattered not that I told her if she would answer my questions and give me the specimens, I would see that she got good medical attention, in case that was called for, and without cost to her.
        As a matter of fact, I did not need the specimens in order to prove that Mary was a focus of typhoid germs. My epidemiological evidence had proved that. (!) Laboriously, I had worked out every one of seven outbreaks and I was positive that Mary had produced them all. I felt a good deal of responsibility about the case.
     
         Soper was bitter that the subject of his interest was not eager to accept his offer of free ‘good medical attention’. That ‘medical attention’ of any kind might have a bad connotation for her, might have sounded attractive to her only if she deemed herself sick or was feeling physical pain (she wasn’t), does not appear to have occurred to him. He came away from the encounter with his position as entrenched as Mary’s. She was now, in his opinion, a ‘proven menace to society’.
     
    Under suitable conditions, Mary might precipitate a great epidemic. You can well imagine what havoc she would have wrought if her work had taken her to poor families, where sanitation and cleanliness are put in the background.
     
         Already painting himself as a savior of peoples from all walks of life – both rich and poor – Soper returned a few days later to take up where he had left off, but Mary would have none of it.
         It is a measure of the completeness of her denial that she had returned to work. Many would have been in the wind after the initial encounter. But Mary continued to work at the house on Park Avenue. That her employers did not immediately throw her out into the street is curious as well, signifying great indulgence on their part – or remarkable cooking prowess on Mary’s.
         One night, after Mary finished work, George Soper, waiting for her in hiding, followed her through the streets, shadowing her to her destination, a seedy rooming house at Thirty-third Street and Third Avenue, under the rumbling elevated train tracks and around the corner from the Willow Tree Inn and Sig Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop, where she appeared to be sharing rooms with a man called Breihof.
         One imagines the sanitary engineer turned private dick, lurking under the Third Avenue el, spying on Mary from the shadows as she entered the rooming house. The excitement, the thrill of the chase, of sneaking around, must have been electrifying. A far cry from gazing at bacteria under a microscope, or comparing columns of statistics.
     
    She was spending her evenings with a disreputable looking man who had a room on the top floor and to whom she was taking food. His headquarters during the day was in a saloon on the corner.
     
         Unsatisfied with mere surveillance,