Mary's life story is impossibly sad and teaches us about the social stigma attached to hapless victims of disease. Mary Mallon was born in 1870 in County Tyrone, Ireland, and emigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen. She was a notorious typhoid carrier who worked in the New York area as a cook for far too many years. At the time of her death in 1938, she had infected at least fifty-one people with typhoid and caused at least three deaths.
Typhoid Fever is a bacterial infection that's spread through contaminated food and water. It causes extreme diarrhea, dehydration, and fever, and can be fatal if not properly treated. Typhoid carriers, such as Mary Mallon, remain immune to the disease but can transmit the Salmonella typhi bacteria easily.
The reason for Mary Mallon's infamy was that she kept cooking. She was poor, and probably mentally unstable. She showed up in a vacation home in Long Island, a private residence on Park Avenue, a sanatorium in New Jersey, a maternity hospital in Manhattan. She was relentlessly hounded by the New York City Department of Health and wound up confined to relative isolation in North Brother Island, off the Bronx. She lived alone for 23 years and died of complications following a massive stroke. (from Yahoo)
Prophets who go out on a limb, crash
The beginning of the new year is the season of prophets.
Pundits, sportswriters, astrologers, scientists and other fortune tellers trot out their lame forecasts, when many should have shot them instead.
The long, treacherous Road of History is littered with the glass of shattered crystal balls. Below are just some of the famous predictions or pronouncements that now lie in pieces in the dust:
- "Space travel is bunk."
- Sir Harold Spencer Jones, English astronomer, 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik
- "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
- Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale University, 1929, the year the stock market crashed.
- "If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one."
- Dr. W.C. Heuper of the National Cancer Institute, 1954.
- "But what ... is it good for?"
- an engineer at the advanced computing systems division of IBM, in 1968, referring to the microchip.
- "It's a great invention, but who would want to use it anyway?"
- President Rutherford B. Hayes, after witnessing a demonstration of the telephone.
- "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
- Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, 1946.
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