![]() ![]() Yet for Mary- proud of her former status and passionate about cooking- the alternatives were abhorrent. ![]() The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman. Then one determined " medical engineer" noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an " asymptomatic carrier" of Typhoid Fever. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she' d aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. ![]() On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Mary Beth Keane, named one of the 5 Under 35 by the National Book Foundation, has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as " Typhoid Mary," the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. ![]()
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