All in the name of public health

But tell that to Mary Mallon aka Typhoid Mary.

I’ve had two recently published books about Mary on my to-read pile for a while and finally got to them over the holidays.  (Not the most chipper reading, for sure, but entirely fascinating, nonetheless.)

 The two books are:

Fatal fever: tracking down Typhoid Mary by Gail Jarrow

Terrible Typhoid Mary: a true story of the deadliest cook inAmerica by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.

Both books cover pretty much the same content: an outbreak of typhoid that is tracked down by a vigilant and somewhat obsessive sanitary engineer, Dr. George Soper to a household cook, Mary Mallon.

Mary is identified as a healthy carrier of the typhoid bacteria. She is able to contaminate raw food when she prepares it for the families she works for, making them sick and killing a couple of them over a period of years. She is eventually apprehended, tested and quarantined at a hospital on an island in the East River between Queens and the Bronx. She lives there for three years until the health department releases her when she promises not to cook for other people. She struggles for a few years doing other types of work but eventually returns to cooking at a hospital only to infect newborn babies and mothers. She is returned to North Brother Island where she lives until 1938.

The tension in the story is the balance between personal rights and liberty and public health.

The most interesting part of this for me was reading the two books back-to-back. Starting with Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s book, Terrible Typhoid Mary, (I have found her books about the KKK and Hitler Youth fascinating), I anticipated a strongly told narrative about Mary Mallon’s trials and tribulations. The book attempts to make Mary a real person and tries to get us to empathize with her. And I did get there in part. Bartoletti doesn’t down play that Mary created some of her own problems. Mary knowingly went back to cooking for others knowing the consequences.  Nevertheless, a good part of her life was lived fairly isolated.

It wasn’t until I read the second book, Fatal Fever, that I realized that Bartoletti’s book, Terrible Typhoid Mary, had gone further in suggesting that Mary Mallon, despite her noncompliance and resistance to testing, had not been treated fairly.  Other healthy carriers had been identified but not incarcerated and isolated like Mary.

In Terrible Typhoid Mary, it is also suggested that she was given experimental medical treatments to see if she could be cured, whereas other carriers were not experimented on. In Bartoletti’s book, Soper comes across as especially diligent and perhaps biased against Mary describing her more like a man than a woman because of her fiery temper (she threatened him with a sharp carving fork when he asked to test her blood, urine and feces), her strength, and use of rough language saying “her mind had a distinctly masculine character” (p.45). Because Mary didn’t fit society’s or Soper’s ideal of a woman, this may have biased him against her.

Bartoletti also emphasizes that by identifying the first healthy carrier of the typhoid bacteria he had an opportunity to make a name for himself.  After Mary was quarantined and living on North Brother Island, he spoke at public engagements and published works about Mary’s case.

In Fatal Fever, aspects of Soper’s work are framed differently by not including the information about his perceptions about Mary and down playing his seeming desire for public fame. His passion for finding people like Mary was for the benefit of public health.

Both books are referenced in-depth, with footnotes, bibliographies and indexes. Bartoletti’s book also includes a timeline.  I liked the layout of Jarrow’s Fatal Fever and think students will find it a little more appealing because of interspersed illustrations and photographs and white space framing the text. Bartoletti’s book has the pictures mostly grouped into a section at the back of the book.

Still the question remains: how far in the interests of public health should an individual’s right be protected when others can be placed in jeopardy?

I recommend both books be used together to compare the way the same information is used but framed differently.  Both books would be suitable for grades 7 and up.

Walking in someone else’s shoes

John Marsden can certainly set a scene that makes you think – “What would I do if this happened to me?”

With so much in the news about Syrian refugees, Home and Away by John Marsden is a book that’s timely to post about.  His book really brings home the ‘me’ part of my question.  What would I do if this was happening to me and my family?

This is not an easy book with a happy ending. 

We are introduced to a typical Australian family (though there’s little that identifies them as specifically Australian) Mom, Dad, Claire, Toby, Grandma (who lives next door) and an unnamed narrator.

Initially, our narrator documents briefly a few defining things about each family member so we can get a sense of who they are, their hopes and dreams and includes a family picture. We get a glimpse of a typical day of everyone busy with their work or school day.

And then the war starts.

Within a couple of months food becomes desperately difficult to find.  A few weeks later, Toby becomes sick, Claire doesn’t speak and Mom and Grandma are shadows of themselves.  They are reduced to eating roadkill and scavenging in abandoned gardens.

By the fifth month, Dad has made arrangements, at great expense, to get the family out and to a country where they’ll be safe with plenty of food and medical care. Escaping their war torn home means taking a leaky boat filled with strangers to a distant place called Hollania.  They spend 11 days seemingly adrift with few resources where even a few scraps of fish can cost a life. When they see another boat they think they will be rescued but that is not the case.  The naval vessel is there to drive them away but because the boat is in such bad shape they are allowed to land and are taken to an isolated camp in the middle of a desert. The government doesn’t want to encourage more illegal immigrants from coming so provides minimal care. Others say that these people aren’t really desperate refugees and are there to make money.  And then there are those who do provide the detainees with some help and kindness. People die including some of the family members we’ve gotten to know at every stage of this drama.

Sound familiar?

None of this is new.  We’re reading about people like this in the news right now. What is different is the family is from a country like our own.  The author and illustrator have made this narrative where we can easily place ourselves. The illustrations are often dark and bleak.  Some of them are drawn in crayon as if by five-year old Toby and show us what he sees if not how he’s making sense of it all; lots of planes flying overhead, explosions and dead bodies.

The diary entries are brief and intermittent bringing us up-to-date about what’s happening in a very matter-of-fact way.  Being so matter-of-fact made reading the story bearable. I was adding my own layers of emotion and understanding as I read through the book.  I kept going back over the timeline to see how quickly normal life breaks down when all our conveniences are taken away. Life quickly becomes very basic – food, water, safety.  Also, this story shows just how tenuous life really is and how much we take for granted. I’m having a difficult time imagining losing a father in the manner described in this story. The mental toll that this situation takes on everyone: Toby’s conviction that he’s done something bad (killed everyone) and that’s the reason he’s living in prison and Claire’s confinement in a psychiatric ward keeps coming back to me. 

So, the question is what would you do if this happened to you?

I’m recommending this as a terrific, powerful and difficult classroom resource for grades 5 or 6 and up.