Still, I was far more intrigued by Mary’s reaction to her vilification as Typhoid Mary.
Personally I found the chapters focusing on her relationship, or following Alfred, a distraction from Mary’s story though it does add depth to her character. Keane focuses on the period between Mary’s arrest and her second period of exile, sharing the details of Mary’s ordinary day to day life with her common law relationship with Alfred Breihof, a feckless drunk who was often unemployed. Mary does prove to be a sympathetic character in Fever, even though she has a temper and a tendency to make poor decisions. I am familiar with only the basics of the case (see Wikipedia for an outline) so I am not sure where exactly Keane’s imagination merges with known facts but the author brings some balance to the prevailing view of the ‘evil’ woman who fought the Health Deapartment every step of the way, and later flaunted their decree she was never to cook again. Mary Beth Keane attempts to humanise Typhoid Mary in this novel and illustrate the possible thought process of the woman accused of willfully spreading deadly disease.
There was little sympathy at the time for Mary Mallon, who caused the illness of as many as 50 persons, the death of three and likely more. Mary felt victimised by the state who tried to force her to have surgery to remove her gallbladder (thought at the time to be the host of the disease) and when that failed exiled her to North Brother Island, a Quarantine hospital in the middle of the East River where she eventually spent over 30 years in isolation until her death in 1938. Her role was identified by Dr George Soper, a health researcher who discovered that Mary was the link between outbreaks, despite the fact she remained asymptomatic.
A forty year old, unmarried, Irish immigrant cook she stood accused of spreading Typhoid, a bacterial disease transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, among the New York households she worked for over a period of several years. In 1907, Mary Mallon was arrested at the direction of the Department of Health. Status: Read from March 27 to 28, 2013 - I own a copy įever is a fascinating novel that mixes historical fact and a fictional narrative to tell the tale of ‘Typhoid Mary’, the woman held responsible for several deadly outbreaks of the disease in the US around the turn of the nineteenth century. Published: Simon and Schuster AU March 2013
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