In 1906, the Warrens, a wealthy New York banking family, rented a summer house on Long Island. That summer, six people in the household came down with typhoid fever, a serious bacterial illness with a persistent and very high fever. In the era before antibiotics, typhoid was frequently deadly.
Although the Warrens all survived, the outbreak was troubling enough that a sanitary engineer named George Soper was hired to investigate. Soper examined the water supply, the plumbing, and other possible sources of contamination, but found nothing to explain the outbreak. Eventually, he investigated the family’s new cook, a woman named Mary Mallon. Soper went through her employment history, and found that there had been typhoid outbreaks in most of the places she had worked. Mary Mallon, who became known as “Typhoid Mary,” was the first documented example of an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid (Figure 1.1). She herself was not sick, but she was able to spread the disease to others. Once Mary was discovered to carry typhoid, she was quarantined in a hospital for most of the rest of her life.
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