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Anthony Bourdain wrote a great book about Typhoid Mary It's a quick read, but he really takes the time to address the socio economic reasons why a woman like Mary would continue to go back to work after knowing that she was a carrier of Typhoid.
ETA: Here's a link to one of my favorite Radiolab episodes that does a fantastic job at covering the history of Typhoid Mary
I had read Anthony Bourdain's other books and liked him a lot, but that book really made me love him. And made me start using Global knives.
He was so sympathetic to Mary. I love how he gave her that parting gift at the end of the book. It was touching
God I miss that guy :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_(cutlery)
I mean that was basically the entire COVID pandemic.
The government told us to stay home and shut down a ton of businesses, and then just said "idk you figure it out"
"idk figure it out"
we can argue about whether the response was adequate or not but that's a ridiculous exaggeration: there were a ton of active measures including stimulus checks, eviction moratorium, and PPP loans
That's in the US. Where I live, they locked us down, made it nearly impossible to work and came knocking come tax and rent season. For us, he's not exaggerating. That's exactly what happened.
Yeah, sorry about that. Not to intentionally troll redditors but from my extensive world travels I've come to the conclusion that not being American often sucks in all kinds of ways.
Comment deleted by user
Yes, and PPP loans kept people on payrolls, and those that didn't unemployment kicked in, and then when lockdowns ended things bounced back pretty fast aside from price changes (no response would have been without a cost)
Again, we can argue about whether it was adequate, but you are mischaracterizing the response.
Damn. Why do I get a hundred downvotes and this guy gets a hundred upvotes for the same thing.
This person actually wrote something informative. You just wrote, "Queen."
I’ve heard that brevity is a virtue. Guess not amongst the redditors.
Patience is a virtue, brevity is the soul of wit, and trolls should be forced through a fine mesh screen.
Quit caring. It'll make your life happier.
Caring rocks, actually. Sincerity is the new irony. Try it.
Caring about reddit downvotes really doesn't rock. It's a silly thing to have any emotional investment in because it means nothing
Quit caring about social media points you melt
Everyone calling Mary a monster and heartless would do well to listen to the episode of The Dollop about her..
Yes, it was her spreading the disease but her decision to keep working didn't exist in a vacuum. The alternatives given to her basically amounted to living in abject poverty when she knew she could make decent money. She also didn't have much reason to believe what the doctors were insisting because medicine was still very hit-or-miss back then.
This is as much of a failure of society to take care of people and forcing the sick to work as it is one person's decision to work in spite of being told she was infectious.
Everyone calling Mary a monster needs to think back to 3 years ago. When we have information at the tap of a finger there’s no excuse for ignorance. Yet people still came into work with covid.
Despite it being a 100 years since Mary, we still deal with the same shit society that forces you to go into work just to survive.
Even before COVID people would still go to work with bad colds or even worse and surely infect others at work.
Yep, even now I regularly come into the office and hear someone coughing and sniffling. Nothing has changed. 100 or 3 years ago we all still have to work and it’s all down to people being unable to afford being sick.
Even in countries where employers cover 10 days of sick/personal/carer’s leave, employees are still heavily pressured not to take them, or penalised for doing so.
Luckily I’ve worked for employers who get shitty if you come to work sick, recognise that your mind won’t be fully on the job if your son is having surgery and doesn’t want you at work that day, or encourages mental health/reduced workload at home days.
This shit drives me nuts at the office I work at. We get a generous amount of PTO for vacations as well as 40 hours of sick time separate from the vacation time and the work culture very much promotes staying home when you’re sick, even giving people the option to work from home if they want to work while sick, yet people STILL come in to the office sick. They wear it like a badge of honor, like they’re somehow better for powering through. Super frustrating when you’re immunocompromised and sitting there listening to them cough up a lung.
I caught Covid literally this week. I spent $70 on a doctors visit and $310 for a drug to help with Covid.
That’s about $380… or for me about an entire work day of effort down the drain in explicit costs even with private insurance.
Not to mention if I wasn’t a salaried employee I would have missed 3 days of work or $1,080 or what I pay in rent for a month because I was sick for 3 days.
Fortunately I’m privileged enough that I am salaried, and spending $380 isn’t a HUGE deal (still sucks but I can financial handle it). But for less privileged people this could literally mean they are on the street next month… it’s awful.
Edit: oh yeah, and that drug I had insurance for? That $310 cost? Yeah, without insurance it’s $1,500! If you REALLY NEED THE DRUG it’s literally you choosing to die or be homeless or be $1500 in medical debt…
Fuck this country.
My partner has a congenital heart condition and they have been hospitalized after being around someone who had a cold. A cold can kill a person.
A person with a "just" cold should absolutely be paid to stay home for their own health and for the health of others. The highly prized US cultural value of individualism is going to kill us all.
I'm going to play Devil's advocate here and say that if the government ever instituted something like this, it would either A) be abused by everyone or B) turned into a "government-approved injury/illness" system like the Department of the VA has.
I agree the current system is horribly broken, but I think any alternatives I've heard so far just sound like they would turn into a racket real quick.
I worked at a gas station for 4 years. I tried to call off for the flu. Was told: Sorry. No one can cover you. You have to work. Three years in a row.
I started getting flu shots just so I didn't have to work with the flu again.
I tried to call off because of a high fever. Sorry, no one can cover. You have to work.
Went to hospital after my 9 hour shift. 104.9 degree fever. Kidney infection.
I was taking a new medication. My first day taking it, it made me go blind. Cars looked blurry as I was driving in. Within a half hour of being at work, I could not see anything except for colored blobs. Couldn't even see my own fingers in front of my face. I was a cashier btw.
Sorry, no one can cover. You have to work.
Side note. I didn't have a phone so one day off, I was making a stew and got a knock on my door.
It was my boss telling me my co-worker had the sniffles and I had to come into work.
She wanted me to turn off my stew and let her drive me in.
I refused and told her I absolutely would not work that day.
The next day the general manager came into my store and told me I "Was not a team player."
I told him there was no team. It was just me being forced to work with the flu while she could call out for the sniffles. That's not a team.
I quit shortly after that.
This is the bit I've heard a lot, and it makes no sense. Why is the employee responsible for making sure someone else can work in their place, that is literally the employers job!
Your boss shouldn’t know where you live, especially a shitty boss like that
Yesterday a colleague of mine was working at the desk next to mine, with such a bad cold that she couldn't breathe even though coming into the office is absolutely optional and no one is forcing us to do so, it's just a chance to socialise a little bit, and that's all. We all work from home permanently. She even told someone in a call, that she got it from her kid so she knew it was a contagious disease.
I was there only because my doctor's office was close and I didn't want to bother with the commute back home. And no, I'm not contagious.
That's to be expected in a country where there are limits to the number of days you can stay at home sick with pay.
just the other day, my supervisor came into work with a hacking cough and a stuffy nose, and proceeded to test for covid during a meeting. she's great but a coworker and i were both moving as far away as possible
People who thought that we had no right to enforce vaccine requirements to do commerce probably would have been surprised to learn that we literally banished this woman to quarantine island for life.
... are the real monsters.
It's not even close. People had all the information about Covid necessary and still risked other lives for their convenience. Covid showed us who we are on this earth with and it's a nightmare
You completely missed the points made above then 🙄
I'm not missing anything, I'm agreeing with them and you're missing my point. Mmmk
COVID was way worse. I bet if Mary got EI and stimmy cheques she'd have stayed home
Um, we're judging those people too. Spreading any plague is bad actually.
That’s not really my point. It’s that for a majority of people they literally cannot afford to be sick and off work. So despite all our advancements we’re still the same as we were 100 years ago in some ways.
This reminds me of Covid. We’ve killed millions of people because we aren’t willing to simply support people while they are sick.
If Mary is a monster then our society is a fucking cannibal.
We’ll gladly eat each other if it means we can have an extra dollar. The trick is to just do it slowly and over time and not by outright ending their life directly. But if that became profitable to do I bet companies would find a way to make it legal.
Hell yeah the dollop is the best
The problem isn’t her working. It’s her working with food. The one profession where her disease would for sure cause deaths.
If she had taken any other unlearned profession to survive sure.
But working with food while you knowingly have an infection that’s most easily transmitted via food, after already having caused the death of others?
That’s just pure egotism.
Most people don't have the luxury of choosing a job today, let alone a woman a hundred years ago. The unemployment/social assistance system in the US isn't designed to get you a job that you are good at or enjoy, it's designed to get you to work ASAP for the lowest possible pay. And most of those social systems didn't even exist back then.
If you have the means to pick & choose your job you are in the minority of the entire world today, and would have been damn near unheard of a hundred years ago.
Listen to the episode. Or read Anthony Bourdain's book. You are decidedly wrong in your assessment of what she knew and what else she could do to get by.
I’m too old for a homework assignment. What’s the bottom line response to Consistent Bee’s perfectly valid reaction?
She was uneducated, disease theory was only just getting started, getting a new job in a different field is difficult; you have to dodge poverty while also building a new skillset.
Consistent Bee's reaction comes with the benefit of a century of scientific and societal progression that Mary didn't have.
Also it was the era of huge anti irish immigration so a bunch of officials saying you cant work anymore seemed less like a health and safety reason and more like racism.
You seem to have decided already so why bother asking the youth to do your homework for you
She basically could have cooked, been a laundress (making WAY less money), or been a prostitute.
What would you choose?
If she was Covid Mary, people on reddit would have a VERY different opinion.
Yes. Because covid Mary would have 100 years of solid proof that disease theory was accurate.
In 1300 someone who believed in a flat earth was uneducated but rational. In 2024 someone who believes in a flat earth is willfully ignorant and possibly malicious. It’s the same damn thing.
I feel like Mary knew on some level that she was a carrier, because she consistently left after an outbreak and made it harder for other people to find her.
Until her dying breath she never believed in the science that proved she was the problem.
Sounds like a bunch of idiots during the pandemic, too.
Denial is one hell of a drug. If she did acknowledge the reality of the situation, that she had been the root cause of other people becoming seriously ill or dying, that would have been an unbearable realisation. We are now acutely aware in modern times there are some people who would rather believe anything other than reality, even when confronted with indisputable facts.
If people have core beliefs that defy logic. Logic will never have a real hold on them.
That is about 85% of the population now 99% or better then.
I can forgive Mary a lot more than any adult during Covid. The medical community knows a lot more about how viruses are spread and during Covid we offered unemployment benefits to those both allowed to work during shutdowns. We had more options than she did to survive; not only Covid but just keeping a roof over our heads and food on our plates.
True, but unfortunately I don't think it's necessarily a matter of how much is known, but rather it's a human nature to choose what we believe based on what we want to believe. There was so many people during covid who were educated, some of them even doctors, who simply refused to accept the severity of the situation. Not just initially, but throughout the whole pandemics. My country went through several major lockdowns, and there were periods when the hospital were totally crowded with covid patients and were barely functioning. THe standard of care at the time dropped drastically and although nobody says this publicly it's clear that people have died because of this. Yet, you will still have highly esteemed people including doctors or head of universities who will claim there was no real problem and the response to it was unnecessary.
She needed to work to live, like most people. She was probably in denial because of her financial needs.
Also, she didn’t really understand the implications. She basically thought these guys were saying she was a terrible cook and had to retire.
Nah, I worked on a COVID unit and almost all of them had the time to recognize that what they previously believed was wrong before they died. Hell, in the last wave, all but like 2 asked for vaccine. Of course it was too late to take it by then, but they overwhelmingly knew they were dying due to the disease they poo-pooed.
We're all part of the problem now. The epidemic is pretty close to endemic now.
Based on her Wikipedia page if Mary was around during Covid, she’d be the type of person to “do her own research”
She did anything but protect others from her sickness or take accountability.
I get the impression she would have been forced to live in poverty if she didn't work?
There were other kinda of jobs besides food prep
Holy hell that's a good point, you're definitely right
Yes, but she would have made way less money, making her homeless because she did not own a home. She living ''on the brink of poverty'' (quote from the article), and at the time the concept of healthy carrier was unknown, also, the common person had no idea washing your hands was one of the ways you could stop the spread of a disease. There are so many things to consider.
Wash your hands Mary! Stop cooking for others! That's all you needed to do.....
Hah, man, this woman was either a total idiot or evil.
Knew she had the disease, but kept working with food. It was her only means of income, but still. Maybe find somethings else? Idk
Between a rock and a hard place and likely in disbelief at her misfortune
She was uneducated and disease theory was in its infancy.
You have the benefit of a hundred years of society, history and science that she didn’t.
Given what happened just a few years ago, that benefit doesn't help as much you'd think.
In my country two of the earliest covid cases were:
-iranian student coming back to our university with symptoms because in their country he would have got worse healthcare
-american student on vacation flying to budaoest from italy will full symptoms and high fever because she didn't want to leave when everything was paid for. She got too sick and flew home after spreading it here too
(And the thousands of delivery drivers who were told by police on the border to not report symptoms if they want to continue working.)
She was educated after the first time. If she really had no idea, she wouldn't have left jobs so quickly when people started dying around her.
Yeah but she also steadfastly refused to wash her hands, even when preparing food. You don’t need science or education to get that that’s a lil gross.
Physicians didn’t wash their hands between patients back then, how would an uneducated person know better?
Many surgeons were washing their hands before surgeries back in her time. Things didn't exist in a vacuum.
Question: When do you think washing hands gained popularity? It's a hell of a lot later than you think.
EDIT: The answer BTW, is the late 1860's - And only in certain medical circles. It wasn't really a thing in the general populace while Typhoid Mary lived.
Because they guy who "invented" it earlier was called insane for suggesting it at all.
Science and education are literally the only reasons you know that washing hands makes them clean.
You wouldn’t instinctively think to remove poop from your hands before cooking food?
what do you mean, but still? There wasn't an alternative, you would've done the same
There were lots of different kinda of jobs besides making food
not everybody can simply afford to not work, even long enough just to switch jobs
In 1915? naw man, she was more of a victim, doctors who weren't quaks back then were very rare, no one would listen to them the way they do today and with good reason.
Covid proved that more than a century later there are people who just don’t care.
Employers that tell workers if they don’t come to work they will be fired. Jobs with little or no sick time policies. Society that doesn’t support sick workers.
Society that doesn’t support any workers
She didn’t know she had the disease though. She didn’t believe/understand the concept of being a carrier and didn’t trust the doctors who told her she was. From her pov she wasn’t sick, and how could she be making people sick when she wasn’t even sick. These damn doctors keep on harassing me and try to keep me from working.
I wonder if there's a more recent example of this that you might be able to think about. Maybe something happened about 4 years ago roughly this time? Millions of people fighting to just go back to work? Maybe it's not being an idiot or evil, and instead maybe a 3rd thing? Maybe?