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Typhoid Mary : Captive to the Public's Health
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Typhoid Mary : Captive to the Public's Health Customer Reviews
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Captive to the Public Imagination
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'Typhoid Mary' has become a catchphrase for disease, pestilence, and death. Most people have heard the nickname, but few know the particulars. Judith Walzer Leavitt takes a dreaded and legendary figure in the history of public health protection, and, in a factual but entertaining style, gives us the who, what, where, when, and why. In so doing, the author also examines the age-old dilemma of individual liberty vs public safety.
Typhoid Mary was an Irish immigrant cook named Mary Mallon, who spent decades as a prisoner / guest of the New York Public Health Department. As a healthy carrier, she did not exhibit typhoid symptoms herself, but the disease was transmitted via the food she prepared. Her refusal to seek a different livelihood, and aggressive deameanor toward health officials, resulted in her confinement on North Brother Island, a quarantine location, where she died in 1938.
"Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public Health" is not just a work of medical history or biography of a feisty woman who fought the system and lost. Mary Mallon, as a healthy carrier of a deadly disease, has her modern equal in the millions of people who are HIV positive or suffer from drug-resistant tuberculosis. Leavitt raises uncomfortable questions about quarantine practices and examines how past treatment of the afflicted has been based on gender and socio-economic status. Statistics and sociological arguments have a strong presence in each chapter, but they don't detract from the book's appeal to the lay reader.
"Typhoid Mary" is an uneasy reminder that history doesn't always repeat itself- sometimes it never goes away in the first place. |
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