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Josie Crossland

Typhoid Mary - 0 views

  • IT WAS AUGUST 27, 1906, when at the rented summer home of Charles Henry Warren and family in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the Warrens' young daughter became ill with what was diagnosed as typhoid fever. The same week, five more persons began showing symptoms: Mrs. Warren, a second daughter, two maids, and the gardener. The relatively affluent town of Oyster Bay had never had an outbreak of typhoid before. A popular vacation spot for wealthy urban New Yorkers, it was best known for hosting President Theodore Roosevelt during the summer. The house the Warrens had taken for the season stood on high ground, overlooking the bay, and the circumstances of its occupants were impeccable — a wealthy banker, his family and their servants, living in fairly luxurious style.
  •     The Warren family were not the type of people thought likely to contract typhoid — an illness widely associated with poverty and filth. Charles Warren was the president of the Lincoln Bank. They were the sort of folks who could afford to rent a nice big summer home on affluent Long Island (as well as hire a cook, servants, and gardener to keep things tidy). Rich people just didn't get typhoid — especially in Oyster Bay — and predictably, there was concern in the area that the town would become a less desirabl
  • e resort should it be seen as teeming with the disease.
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  •     George Thompson, the owner of the house, was particularly worried, concerned that no well-to-do New Yorkers would be of a mind to rent his home the following season if it was associated with disease. The house was very large, and expensive to run. Thompson himself, though the owner of four other homes, could not afford to live there. If the house lay vacant, it would mean disaster. Desperate, he called in experts to track down the source of the contagion, hoping it came from outside the property and eager for someone to prove it.     Drinking water was analyzed. The single indoor toilet, the cesspool, manure pit, and outhouse were all examined and ultimately rejected as the possible source of infection.
  •     Dairy products were inspected.     An old woman who lived on the beach was considered a likely suspect. She had offered the family clams for sale, and these were scrutinized minutely, but no one else in th
  • e town who had eaten shellfish from the same source had fallen ill.
  •     Thompson, unsatisfied with the inconclusive results from local health authorities on the scene and from his hired experts, reached out to friends in New York City, looking for someone, anyone, to help him with his embarrassing problem.     Salvation didn't exactly ride in on a white horse. Nor was Dr. George Soper hero material exactly. Dr. Soper was not even in fact a medical doctor. He was a sanitary engineer — as one newspaper described him: `a doctor to sick cities.'     Called into the fray, he took the train out to Oyster Bay from the city and set immediately to work. After reviewing the findings of the first medical men on the scene, as well as those of earlier experts who had scrutinized the drinking water, trash and sewage, he began questioning members of the household, inquiring about visitors, ultimately receiving a comprehensive list going back an impressive ten years. To the best of his ability, Soper examined the medical histories of each of these individuals, eventually ruling all of them out as possible sources.
  •     Soper now uncovered `other episodes', as he called them. Provocatively, there was a two-year period for which there were no records available at all for Ms. Mallon's employment — the period between the Gilsey family incident and Mary's arrival in Oyster Bay.     The two-year blank was tantalizing to Soper. Where had Mary been? Who had she been cooking for? She must have been cooking somewhere ... The sanitary engineer's mind teemed with disturbing images. He no doubt pictured the cook stirring soup in some unknown and very busy cellar kitchen, barehanded, unknowing, infecting untold multitudes of solid citizens with potentially deadly bacilli.     Dr. Soper's breathless, self-serving, yet ultimately unreliable accounts to newspapers give a sense of how excited he was, how exhilarated by the thrill of the chase and the tantalizing prospect of being onto something really important. At first he had anticipated a case that might last only a few weeks — a little sea air, a few bowls of steamers, some resolution, and back to the city — but now he found himself further drawn into a quest which had already occupied him for a full four months. The Warrens were long gone — back home with the other summer renters. The weather had turned colder, the house now stood empty.
  •     He went over the facts of the case as they had presented themselves to him. Here he had an unexplained outbreak of typhoid in an area where no typhoid of any kind had been previously. The home was immaculate, clean from top to bottom. All other possible sources of infection had been examined and ruled out. The only new element introduced into the household had been a cook. The cook handled food, which all the afflicted members of the household had eaten. The disease broke out, and the cook was now gone. Had she left under different circumstances, say, the disappearance of a diamond necklace, the cops — or any investigator — would have been looking very hard in her direction.     Soper got a description of the suspect: a woman of about forty, tall, with a buxom build, blond hair, blue eyes, and a firm mouth and jaw. It was remarked that she was `a pretty good cook', though she was observed by some interviewees in retrospect as bein
  • `not particularly clean' in her work habits and `difficult to talk to'.     Writing later, Soper describes what he did next:
  •     This was frustrating. Things usually went pretty quickly in cases like this. Feces in the water supply, contaminated milk, a sickly visitor, and case closed. Not so at the Thompson house. Soper began to `walk the cat backward' in search of an answer.     Typhoid's incubation period was known to be ten to fourteen days long, so he focused on a time on or before August 20. Soper was intrigued by the news that on the fourth of the month, the Warrens had seen fit to change cooks. More significantly, the new cook, a Mary Mallon, was now missing, having left without notice or explanation some three weeks after the sickness began.     A missing cook! It was the kind of lead that criminal investigators find almost too easy, too good to be true; evidence of a kind that prosecutors like to present to jurors as indicating `guilty knowledge', the kind of red flag that Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would disregard automatically as being just too obvious. Look at it: A murder or some other felony is committed in a household or place of business, and someone who used to be there is suddenly no longer there. It doesn't take an investigative mastermind to deduce who to go looking for first. It was circumstantial evidence of the most provocative kind, and Soper was well acquainted with the old saw about circumstantial evidence: `It's like finding a goldfish in your milk. It doesn't prove anything — but it's mighty suspicious'.
  •     Carriers were a very hot concept in the new world of epidemiology, a theory unproven in the United States. In Germany, however, the respected bacteriologist Dr. Robert Koch had recently investigated repeated outbreaks of typhoid in a Strasbourg bakeshop. The bakery was clean. The water supply was uncorrupted. Yet well-heeled customers were getting sick. Dr. Koch questioned the proprietor and found that she had, years earlier, contracted typhoid, but had survived the experience and was now, seemingly, fully recovered. After testing her, Koch found that even though she was devoid of symptoms and to all outward appearances a healthy person capable of working and going about her tasks like everyone else, she was in fact still teeming with typhoid germs, exuding them through her bowel movements and spreading them with improperly cleaned hands. This was a revolutionary discovery, and news of it had found its way to New York, where it was discussed with interest. Soper had read the transcript of a speech Koch had given on the subject a couple of years previous.     Dr. Soper had learned of seemingly clean and affluent homes in Mary Mallon's past being struck with typhoid after her employment. Now he was confronted with similar circumstances in yet another place she had worked. Given that no human carrier such as Koch's bakery proprietor had ever been identified in America, Soper was suddenly very, very interested in getting his hands on the mysterious Mary Mallon.
  •     That she was evidently not interested in being found only piqued the good doctor's interest to even greater pitch:
  •     At this point, Soper already seems to have formed in his mind a picture of Mary as some kind of Moriarty-esque nemesis, an elusive and crafty adversary with the answer to all his questions, but always just out of reach.     He wanted her badly. His day-to-day work, by this time, had become closer to a detective's than a microbe-hunter's, interviewing witnesses, poring over records. He felt good. He was going to make his bones with this case. He foresaw himself as the poster boy for epidemiologists and health professionals, an honored and much-sought-after speaker at all the medical societies, a hero to the afflicted, a newspaper personality, idol to generations of aspiring sanitary engineers.     Furthermore, he knew that his work was important. Typhoid was lethal and, especially in 1906 and 1907, no joke.
  •     These were boom times. It was a new century and a new world that Soper lived in. The 1900 Chicago World's Fair had once and for all convinced Americans that they lived in a great country, a major world power, on a par — at least — with the European monarchies. Any inferiority complex New Yorkers and Americans might once have felt was rapidly disappearing in the light of an increasingly powerful, worldwide naval presence, a national construction explosion, the emergence of a newly affluent and pleasure-seeking middle class, the recent developments of subway systems, mass-produced automobiles, a tunnel under the Hudson River, new entertainments, libraries, an exuberantly sensationalistic press, and the warm glow of having recently drubbed the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines. Great strides had been made in the fighting of disease and the word `epidemic' was now an embarrassment to a city. An earlier epidemic of typhoid and cholera had had New York and Philadelphia pointing fingers at one another, each claiming the other was responsible for the outbreak, both mortified that something so closely associated with the squalor of the old world would be blamed on their fair metropolis.     Soper's description of an earlier experience with a typhoid epidemic gives a flavor of what a man in his position saw as his responsibility, of what he perceived himself to be up against:
  • These were the stakes as Soper saw them. Confusion, suspicion, contagion, neighbor pitted against neighbor, panic in the streets, and ultimately, chaos and death.     Epidemics — especially unexplained ones — tended to bring out the worst in people, and the `carrier' theory, however fearful its implications, was far preferable to some of the alternatives. In the past citizens thought to be contagious — particularly if they were members of the minority or underclass — had hardly been taken to the bosom of their communities. Instead the usual outcome was for mob rule to win out. It was not unheard of for those thought to be infected to be run out of town on a rail or set adrift in the Long Island Sound — often at the point of a gun — or worse still. As Soper saw it, he needed a quick and tidy solution to the Oyster Bay problem.     Looking at pictures of Soper — a serious, narrow-faced, whippetlike man with a neat mustache and a receding hairline — one gets the impression of not so much the dogged detective he might have liked to see himself as, but of a timid, fastidious scientist, a man ensconced in reasoned practice and methodology. That he might have been racist, sexist, and far too influenced by the prejudices of his class — as has been suggested by revisionist accounts — a flawed, ambitious fellow who looked for the first likely Irish woman he could clap the manacles on — does not present itself through photography. Nor do we get much of that from his work later in life: tomes with titles such as: The Air and Ventilation of Subways (1908), Modern Methods of Street Cleaning
  • (1909), Further Studies of European Methods of Street Cleaning and Waste Disposal With Suggestions (1930), and of course, what proved his masterwork, the story for which he became best known, the pamphlet with a title like a Victorian detective story's The Curious Case of Typhoid Mary (1939).     George Soper looks from his photographs not to be a nice guy. He looks like someone who was bullied in high school, a nerd, a geek, an apple-polishing dirt-wonk with an unseemly interest in filth and how to make it go away.     It was not for a good many more months, not until March of 1907, that Soper finally came face to face with Mary Mallon. It was then that reports reached him that a family on Park Avenue in New York City had been stricken with typhoid. Two cases had initially been reported. A maid was ill, and a daughter of the people who owned the house, a beautiful young woman in her twenties, was lying on her deathbed. The family were reportedly beside themselves with grief. The girl died two days later, and soon the nurse who had attended her became str
  • icken as well.     The details of the case as they reached Soper were indeed tragic, another example of bad things happening to people to whom bad things are not supposed to happen; but what particularly excited Soper, got that Sherlock Holmes mojo working again, was the news that there was a new cook fitting the description of Mary Mallon still employed by the stricken family.
  •     The cook in question, and indeed it was Mary Mallon, did not quite share the good doctor's enthusiasm. She showed true displeasure when Soper, who rushed over to the Park Avenue address immediately upon receiving the news, suddenly showed up at her job, accusing her in no uncertain terms of causing the typhoid which right then was draining the life from one member of her employer's family.
  •     To his dismay, Mary did not see Soper as the answer to some long-troubling question about the series of odd and unpleasant coincidences that had long followed her. He stood an accuser, and she reacted thus, and her reaction seems to have come as a complete surprise to him.     Here, at this first meeting between pursuer and pursued, is where things began to go terribly wrong — at least for Mary Mallon and any future she might have had. What was said here, and how it was said, would set the tone for everything that happened after.
Caden Lewis

CDC - Frequently Asked Questions - Yellow Fever - 2 views

    • Caden Lewis
       
      Question and Answer fact sheet on Yellow Fever
  • What is yellow fever? Yellow fever is a disease caused by a virus that is spread to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito.
Chad Davidson

Cholera - 0 views

  •  
    A FAQ(Frequently Asked Questions) page about Cholera.
justin krantz

HowStuffWorks "Who was Typhoid Mary?" - 2 views

  • Painful diarrhea, high fever, nasty red rashes and sleeplessness typically characterize the illness.
  • Left untreated, typhoid can result in death.
  • Salmonella typhi, the parasite that causes typhoid fever, spreads through water and food, making the disease highly contagiou
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  • Typhoid Mary, for intentionally spreading the deadly illness
  • In turn-of-the-century New York City, typhoid was a growing problem. The Department of Health had a lot on its plate; in addition to typhoid, it was trying to quell out­breaks of smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria and whooping cough that were sweeping through the area [source: NOVA]. Luckily,
  • scientists had developed a sophisticated understanding of microbial diseases and how they spread -- even if everyone in the lay public didn't quite
  • rasp all of it yet.The Department of Health knew what caused typhoid, but dealin
  • g with the spread of the disease was another question altogether. It's a question that plagues us to this day. It's no longer considered humane to simply cast contagious disease victims out of society and into the wilderness to fend for themselves. What exactly to do with them remains controversial. Authorities must walk the line between keeping their societies safe from debilitating illness and infringing on the victims' personal rights. This controversy reached a fever pitch in early 20th-century New York when it came to one individual.It might surprise you to learn that this fervor revolved around someone who was actually immune to typhoid. Though it's uncommon, some people are naturally immune to the illness, meaning they can carry the parasite and never suffer from a single symptom. Nevertheless, these people can just as easily spread the disease to others. This was the case for one Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time as well as in the worst possible occupation for a carrier of typhoid: She was a cook.
  • Painful diarrhea, high fever, nasty red rashes and sleeplessness typically characterize the illness. Left untreated, typhoid can result in death.
Jacob Morrison

Debating Death and Disease: Student Research Center - powered by EBSCOhost - 0 views

    • Jacob Morrison
       
      Intriguingly, just as the Black Death had a significant impact on European society, so its study has had a major impact on medieval historiography, leading to a series of dramatic debates, in particular over the identity of the disease. The debate was largely sparked by Samuel Cohn, who threw doubt on the long-held belief that the cause of the Black Death was bubonic plague in The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (2002). In 2010 DNA analysis by an international team of scientists identified Yersinia pestis, the pathogen responsible for plague, in medieval burial sites in five European countries (see the online article, S. Haensch, R. Bianucci, et al, 'Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused by the Black Death' These findings have now been absorbed by the historical community, as can be seen in articles in the recent volume edited by Linda Clark and Carole Radcliffe, 'Society in an Age of Plague' in The Fifteenth Century, XII (2013), but it has been questioned how far these very local findings can be generalized - and so the debate continues.
katelyn dunn

Facts About Smallpox - 2 views

  • Smallpox does not occur in nature. People cannot get smallpox by traveling to a foreign country, nor can they get it from people visiting this country. The only known stocks of the virus exist in high-security labs in Atlanta and Russia.
  • Vaccine given within 4 days of exposure can prevent the disease or lessen symptoms.
  • Smallpox is spread from one person to another by infected saliva droplets that expose a susceptible person who has face-to-face contact with the ill person. Persons with smallpox are most infectious after the onset of rash. Vaccine given within 4 days of exposure can prevent the disease or lessen symptoms. The vaccine does not contain smallpox virus. The incubation range for smallpox is 7 to 17 days following exposure. Initial symptoms include high fever, fatigue, and head and back aches. A characteristic rash, most prominent on the face, arms, and legs, follows in 2-3 days. 70% of patients with smallpox recover. Further, to help the media provide accurate information to the public through articles, interviews, or other venues, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and ASTHO Affiliated Organizations are making the following experts available to answer questions about smallpox and related public health issues.
  •  
    this is the environmental health services, so this site must be true about smallpox
a-a-ron butler

The Black Death - 0 views

  • during the High Middle Ages (1000-1300)
  • Waste accumulated in the streets for lack of sewer systems
  • traced back to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in the 1320s.
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  • was the spread eastward to China
  • the traders carried the bacterium yersinia pestis in the rats on board as well as in some of the sailors themselves. The Black Death had arrived in Europe.
  • Once the flea bites a human, infected blood from the rat is introduced to the healthy blood of the human, and the bacteria spreads. Death occurs in less than a week for humans. A high fever, aching limbs, and fatigue mark the early stages of infection. Eventually, the lymph nodes of the neck, groin, and armpit areas swell and turn black. Those black swellings on victims are what give the Black Death its name. The victim begins to vomit blood and in some instances suffer hysteria from fever and terror. Exposure to any body fluids means exposure to the bacterium, and thus spreading the disease is very easy through coughing victims. The victim dies shortly after the lymph nodes swell until bursting within the body.
  • As winter approached, colder temperatures killed fleas and caused rats to seek dormancy
  • disease was not gone, it was simply dormant for a few month
  • bubonic plague is actually the weakest strain of known plagues.
  • Black Death was solely caused by the bubonic strain of plague has been questioned
  • which infects the respiratory system
  • other two strains are the septicaemic plague, which infects the circulatory system in victims, and the pneumonic plague
  • Black Death killed virtually all infected people raises doub
  • bubonic plague is not as fatal compared to the other two strains (which have mortality rates close to 100%)
  • the site of the first plague cases in Italy, Messina:
  • Soon the boils grew to the size of a walnut, then to that of a hen's egg or a goose's egg,
  • There was not nearly enough consecrated ground for each victim to have an individual plot, and so enormous trenches were dug into which layer upon layer of dead bodies were lain. The trench was topped off with a small layer of soil,
  • Pope Clement VI even consecrated the entire Rhone river so that corpses could be thrown into it for lack of earth.
  • people, and considered it to be a punishment from an angry God. Some peasants resorted to magic spells, charms, and talismans.
  • Some people burned incense or other herbs as they believed that they overpowering smell of the dead victims was the source of the disease.
  • Some people even tried to "drive the disease away" with sound from church bells and canon fire
  • Churchmen, and public officials considered the disease to be just that; a disease.
Maddie Luna

Where Did Smallpox Originate? - Ask.com - 2 views

  • Where smallpox originated is uncertain. However, it is thought to have originated in Africa and after that spread to India and China thousands of years ago. The first smallpox epidemic to be recorded was in 1350 BC in the time of the Egyptian-Hittite war. Smallpox got to Europe between the 5th and 7th centuries and by 18th century it was present in major European cities.
a-a-ron butler

Black Death - 0 views

  • Black Death Victims in the Middle Ages - TreatmentsThe Black Death victims in the Middle Ages were terrified of the deadly disease. The plague held a massive mortality rate between 30 and 40%. Victims had no idea what had caused the disease. Neither did the physicians in the Middle Ages. The most that could be done was that various concoctions of herbs might be administered to relieve the symptoms - there was no known cure. Headaches were relieved by rose, lavender, sage and bay. Sickness or nausea was treated with wormwood, mint, and balm. Lung problems were treated with liquorice and comfrey. Vinegar was used as a cleansing agent as it was believed that it would kill disease. But bloodletting was commonly thought to be one of the best ways to treat the plague. The blood that exuded was black, thick and vile smelling with a greenish scum mixed in it.Black Death Treatment: Black Death was treated by lancing the buboes and applying a warm poultice of butter, onion and garlic. Various other remedies were tried including arsenic, lily root and even dried toad. During a later outbreak of this terrible plague, during the Elizabethan era, substances such as tobacco brought from the New World were also used in experiments to treat the disease.
  • Black Death in England - 1348-1350 The Black Death reached England in 1348. Bristol was an important European port and city in England during the Medieval era. It is widely believed that Bristol was the place where the Black Death first reached England. The plague reached England during the summer months between June and August. The Back Death reached London by 1st November 1348. London was a crowded, bustling city with a population of around 70,000. The sanitation in London was poor and living conditions were filthy. The River Thames brought more ships and infection to London which spread to the rest of England. The crowded, dirty living conditions of the English cities led to the rapid spread of the disease. Church records that the actual deaths in London were approximately 20,000. Between 1348 and 1350, killed about 30 - 40% of the population of England which at the time was estimated to be about five to six million. Many people were thrown into open communal pits. The oldest, youngest and poorest died first. Whole villages and towns in England simply ceased to exist after the Black Death.
  • The Black Death and ReligionDuring the Middle Ages it was essential that people were given the last rites and had the chance to confess their sins before they died. The spread of the deadly plague in England was swift and the death rate was almost 50% in isolated populations such as monasteries. There were not enough clergy to offer the last rites or give support and help to the victims. The situation was so bad that Pope Clement VI was forced to grant remission of sins to all who died of the Black Death. Victims were allowed to confess their sins to one another, or "even to a woman". The church could offer no reason for the deadly disease and beliefs were sorely tested. This had such a devastating effect that people started to question religion and such doubts ultimately led to the English reformation.
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  • Key Dates relating to the event: This terrible plague started in Europe in 1328 and lasted until 1351 although there were outbreaks for the next sixty years
  • called the Black Death because one of the symptoms produced a blackening of the skin around the swellings.
  • buboes were red at first, but later turned a dark purple, or black.
  • spread of the Black Death followed all of the Trade Routes to every country
  • Nearly one third of the population of died - about 200 million people in Europe The 1328 outbreak in China caused the population to drop from 125 million to 90 million in just fifty years7500 victims of the disease were dying every day
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