The woman who carried infection: Popular panic that cost them eternal quarantine

Mary Mellen was a super-disproportion of disease before the term existed, a host of diseases so well known that she even got her nickname: Typhoid Mary.

This woman had no symptoms but was infected with typhids and had caused several epidemics in New York [New York] at the beginning of the 20th century.

She was a chef in a wealthy family, and in every country where she had gone after her and the bacterial infection, having a family disease, writes The Guardian, translates Periscope.

In 1907 a medical researcher followed her and realized that Mary carried viruses that led to her forced quarantine for the rest of her life in North Brother Island, a place of control on the East River of New York.

She died in 1938, at the age of 69, vilified by people like the most dangerous woman in America “, the zero patient who had to be isolated and closed, a prisoner and a facto, until death.

Today's experts take Mellin, the Irish immigrant, as a victim of public hysteria and official fraud, a woman who did not commit any crime but ended up imprisoned and dehumanized as a metaphor for infectious diseases.

It's very difficult for Americans who are healthy and good at thinking themselves in their role whose freedoms and rights are threatened in an effort to protect the health of the community --” said Judith Leavet, historian, in her book dedicated to this woman.

Melley was born in 1869 in Cuxtown [Cookstown], County Tyrone. She emigrated to the United States as teenagers, and from 1900 she began working as a cook for the wealthy families of New York City.

Mellon, first woman with a camera view

A pattern of spreading the disease was released. Her employers and members of the interior staff were sick some with typhoid, some fatally, while Melley, busy with kitchen chores, remained fat. Not knowing she had an infection, she would move from family to family.

In 1906 she would cook for the family of banker Charles Henry Warren [Charles Henry Warren]. When six of the eleven people in the family got sick, owners hired George Soper [George Soper] to investigate the case.

The investigation found that seven of the eight families she had worked on were infected, and Mellen was arrested by five police officers refusing to submit to tests. The official who had to sit in an ambulance compared him to an angry lion.

After three years, in 1910, she had been released on the condition that she stop cooking. And she was back in the company working in the laundry, but the fee was so weak that she had to change her name to Mary Brown to keep her job as a cook. Another typhoid exploded in 1915.

And this had caused her to be quarantined for the rest of her life. It was linked to dozens of infected people and three deaths. The rumors claimed to have infected thousands. /Periscope