Take a photo of a barcode or cover
152 reviews for:
Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
3.69 AVERAGE
152 reviews for:
Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
3.69 AVERAGE
This was a super quick read and very, very fascinating. It's both a story about a woman who was basically ruined by being a healthy typhoid carrier and about how the Health Department and the US Government's complete disregard for the Constitution and the rights of Mary Mallon. While there were many reasons to have sympathy for Mary's ruination her inability to trust the Health Department and what they were telling her led to numerous victims. It was made a little more interesting as I just watched an episode of Call The Midwife with a healthy carrier!
I found this health history narrative to be pretty fascinating. You'll be intrigued, learn quite a bit about civil liberties, yellow journalism, women's issues, and the absolute power of the department of public health back in the day when public understanding of germs was almost non-existent. I mean, who could possibly believe that germs cause disease when clearly it's immoral behavior, witchcraft, and poor socioeconomic status that is truly the root of illness? Wow.
The reason I don't rate it higher is because I'm not sure about the audience. Surely young adults are the intended audience; I assume this because it's on all of the recommended lists for school libraries, because of the large font, the tone, and the often very simple style of narration. There are a lot of simple sentences....at first I thought it would be a perfect fit for my middle school students. However, it's inconsistent in complexity. The vocabulary is definitely at the 8th grade and higher level (if you think in terms of the Oxford Sadlier program): "Mary's temerity galled Soper." But then paragraphs explaining how our intestines and gallbladder work are very simple and straightforward, 6th-grade-ish. And then you'll see something like "correlation does not imply causation." True, but the author provides no further explanation or contextual help for the reader who finds that sentence to be difficult to comprehend (i.e. most middle-schoolers, at least in my school). So while I enjoyed the narrative and the history and science that it revealed, I can't say it's a very accessible book for my middle school population. Further proof is that it's been signed out 4 times by 7th-8th graders, and not one of them made it through. I think it would a fabulous in-class read at the middle school level; it's challenging enough to be just right for reading instruction. It's entertaining, informative, and provides an excellent example of thorough research and proper citing (the author explains her style of citation in a way that would help students learn, I think). And I recommend it to high school students, but I'm not sure if they'll feel it's too juvenile due to the sometimes simplistic style.... I will have to see how high schoolers handle it.
Bottom line: I really liked it; not sure if many of my kids will. Great for classroom instruction.
The reason I don't rate it higher is because I'm not sure about the audience. Surely young adults are the intended audience; I assume this because it's on all of the recommended lists for school libraries, because of the large font, the tone, and the often very simple style of narration. There are a lot of simple sentences....at first I thought it would be a perfect fit for my middle school students. However, it's inconsistent in complexity. The vocabulary is definitely at the 8th grade and higher level (if you think in terms of the Oxford Sadlier program): "Mary's temerity galled Soper." But then paragraphs explaining how our intestines and gallbladder work are very simple and straightforward, 6th-grade-ish. And then you'll see something like "correlation does not imply causation." True, but the author provides no further explanation or contextual help for the reader who finds that sentence to be difficult to comprehend (i.e. most middle-schoolers, at least in my school). So while I enjoyed the narrative and the history and science that it revealed, I can't say it's a very accessible book for my middle school population. Further proof is that it's been signed out 4 times by 7th-8th graders, and not one of them made it through. I think it would a fabulous in-class read at the middle school level; it's challenging enough to be just right for reading instruction. It's entertaining, informative, and provides an excellent example of thorough research and proper citing (the author explains her style of citation in a way that would help students learn, I think). And I recommend it to high school students, but I'm not sure if they'll feel it's too juvenile due to the sometimes simplistic style.... I will have to see how high schoolers handle it.
Bottom line: I really liked it; not sure if many of my kids will. Great for classroom instruction.
This is one of my favorite nonfiction books! I love how it is told like a story, although the premise is completely true. I also liked that the author went into great detail when describing Mary's life.
informative
fast-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
medium-paced
This was a short book but very informative. I have heard of the phrase "Typhoid Mary" of course, but I never knew the whole story. What I thought I knew was only that there was this person named Mary who started an epidemic without getting sick herself.
The real story is a lot more interesting and to be quite honest, a little sad and scary. The knowledge of bacteria in the early 1900s were still scant and riddled with guesswork, assumptions, and a ton of mistakes. It is scary to think of how easily illness spreads, with just a little bacteria passed on to another unsuspecting person. In fact, even now, bacteria spreads just as easily, but at least we have a lot more knowledge now of how to prevent the spread of disease, and how to cure the disease when it does spread.
One of the injustices of Mary's story is how she became the scapegoat for the spread of the disease. There were many others who were healthy carriers, like her, and who have done their part to spread the disease to others around them, but it was only Mary who was practically imprisoned for years for the "crime" of being a carrier. Obviously, the rights of women in those times were also problematic and it's probable that she became the easy scapegoat in part because of that.
I really enjoyed reading this book, it was written very well and held my interest throughout the book. The medical information was presented in clear and easy-to-understand language, and I thought the author did a great job of making the story interesting, and the characters easy to empathize with, while still being as objective as possible and staying true to the facts of Mary's experience.
The real story is a lot more interesting and to be quite honest, a little sad and scary. The knowledge of bacteria in the early 1900s were still scant and riddled with guesswork, assumptions, and a ton of mistakes. It is scary to think of how easily illness spreads, with just a little bacteria passed on to another unsuspecting person. In fact, even now, bacteria spreads just as easily, but at least we have a lot more knowledge now of how to prevent the spread of disease, and how to cure the disease when it does spread.
One of the injustices of Mary's story is how she became the scapegoat for the spread of the disease. There were many others who were healthy carriers, like her, and who have done their part to spread the disease to others around them, but it was only Mary who was practically imprisoned for years for the "crime" of being a carrier. Obviously, the rights of women in those times were also problematic and it's probable that she became the easy scapegoat in part because of that.
I really enjoyed reading this book, it was written very well and held my interest throughout the book. The medical information was presented in clear and easy-to-understand language, and I thought the author did a great job of making the story interesting, and the characters easy to empathize with, while still being as objective as possible and staying true to the facts of Mary's experience.
Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America was an interesting and well balanced examination of a person and case that I didn't know a whole lot about. The broad strokes of Mary's case are relatively well known - a cook infected with typhoid fever bacteria continued to be a cook after causing several epidemics and was eventually forcibly quarantined over it - but the author takes a deeper dive into what (admittedly little) is known about Mary Mallon herself and the context of turn-of-the-century to explain what makes the case so clear and yet so clouded and worrying at the same time.
Everyone agrees that government should protect the public from outbreaks of communicable illness and, in the service of that goal, should wield powers that will help them achieve it. However, the extent to which those powers should go is a matter of contention, and this was even more of a problem in Mary's time because hers was the first case of an asymptomatic carrier (someone is ill and can infect others, but who shows no outward symptoms of being sick) being the root cause of outbreaks. It is crystal clear that her civil rights were violated (she was basically abducted by the NYC Board of Health, who then preformed medical experiments on her without her consent and simultaneously refused to provide her other medical care) as well as her privacy (it was, according the reporting papers, a member of the BoH who told the press about Mary's case) and - most infuriatingly - that other asymptomatic carriers, even ones who caused more sickness and death than Mary, were not treated the same way. 'Well, Mary was in the wrong occupation; as a cook, she was perfectly positioned to be a super spreader, even without meaning to,' might be how one tries to rationalize this; it's certainly how I initially thought about it. But the fact that at least three other asymptomatic carriers - one of whom was a baker (a similar trade) with three deaths attributed to him (as opposed to the one death attributed to Mary) - draws the suspicion that Mary's quarantine had less to do with public safety and more to do with fears of liability (the NYC BoH was perceived as being 'responsible' for the very, very public case of Typhoid Mary) and disapproval of single working women (most of the other known asymptomatic carriers were men, one of whom the judge refused to cite because he was married with children and had to support his family).
At the same time, Mary was clearly an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, a highly communicable illness that was a well known and much feared public health hazard that killed thousands every year before effective treatment was found in antibiotics in the 1940s. The author does a good job with pointing out that - in the early twentieth century - the Germ Theory of Disease was not well known or well accepted outside of the medical profession and it is possible that Mary had no idea what doctors were talking about when they initially approached her about her being a typhoid carrier. 'You're telling me invisible things that make people sick - except me, because I never had typhoid fever and people always note how healthy I am - are in me and I make people sick with my cooking? As if!' Additionally, a factor the author did not address and I feel probably played a large role is a sense of denial that can be summed up with choice words from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Mary was middle aged at the time a sanitation engineer first connected her to typhoid outbreaks and her trade was cooking, a well paid and relatively high level position in the heirarchy of domestic work. It is understandable that Mary eventually went back to cooking after her initial release from quarantine, as cooking paid as much as twice the salary as other domestic labor and was not anywhere near as labor intensive as, for example, being a laundress would be a woman nearing fifty. Because she was never given any sort of job retraining while incarcerated on the quarantine island, she was released without having a reasonable means to support herself in a world before any of the social safety nets we have now (like social security, disability assistance, or unemployment assistance), so it is little wonder that Mary eventually did return to doing the work she knew how to do and could make a wage doing. But, in going back to cooking, she did make a lot of people and run the risk of killing them, so even though her situation is understandable, pitiable, and ultimately enragingly unfair it can't be entirely condoned or excused.
All in all, Terrible Typhoid Mary was a really thoughtful look at a really complex case. My only complaint about the book is that it is clearly written for a middle or high aged readers, and I would have preferred a more adult book. For it's intended audience I think the author did a good job of being balanced and including context about the time period, but I also think there are some issues that could have been explored in more depth but weren't due to the apparent age/maturity of the intended audience.
Everyone agrees that government should protect the public from outbreaks of communicable illness and, in the service of that goal, should wield powers that will help them achieve it. However, the extent to which those powers should go is a matter of contention, and this was even more of a problem in Mary's time because hers was the first case of an asymptomatic carrier (someone is ill and can infect others, but who shows no outward symptoms of being sick) being the root cause of outbreaks. It is crystal clear that her civil rights were violated (she was basically abducted by the NYC Board of Health, who then preformed medical experiments on her without her consent and simultaneously refused to provide her other medical care) as well as her privacy (it was, according the reporting papers, a member of the BoH who told the press about Mary's case) and - most infuriatingly - that other asymptomatic carriers, even ones who caused more sickness and death than Mary, were not treated the same way. 'Well, Mary was in the wrong occupation; as a cook, she was perfectly positioned to be a super spreader, even without meaning to,' might be how one tries to rationalize this; it's certainly how I initially thought about it. But the fact that at least three other asymptomatic carriers - one of whom was a baker (a similar trade) with three deaths attributed to him (as opposed to the one death attributed to Mary) - draws the suspicion that Mary's quarantine had less to do with public safety and more to do with fears of liability (the NYC BoH was perceived as being 'responsible' for the very, very public case of Typhoid Mary) and disapproval of single working women (most of the other known asymptomatic carriers were men, one of whom the judge refused to cite because he was married with children and had to support his family).
At the same time, Mary was clearly an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, a highly communicable illness that was a well known and much feared public health hazard that killed thousands every year before effective treatment was found in antibiotics in the 1940s. The author does a good job with pointing out that - in the early twentieth century - the Germ Theory of Disease was not well known or well accepted outside of the medical profession and it is possible that Mary had no idea what doctors were talking about when they initially approached her about her being a typhoid carrier. 'You're telling me invisible things that make people sick - except me, because I never had typhoid fever and people always note how healthy I am - are in me and I make people sick with my cooking? As if!' Additionally, a factor the author did not address and I feel probably played a large role is a sense of denial that can be summed up with choice words from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Mary was middle aged at the time a sanitation engineer first connected her to typhoid outbreaks and her trade was cooking, a well paid and relatively high level position in the heirarchy of domestic work. It is understandable that Mary eventually went back to cooking after her initial release from quarantine, as cooking paid as much as twice the salary as other domestic labor and was not anywhere near as labor intensive as, for example, being a laundress would be a woman nearing fifty. Because she was never given any sort of job retraining while incarcerated on the quarantine island, she was released without having a reasonable means to support herself in a world before any of the social safety nets we have now (like social security, disability assistance, or unemployment assistance), so it is little wonder that Mary eventually did return to doing the work she knew how to do and could make a wage doing. But, in going back to cooking, she did make a lot of people and run the risk of killing them, so even though her situation is understandable, pitiable, and ultimately enragingly unfair it can't be entirely condoned or excused.
All in all, Terrible Typhoid Mary was a really thoughtful look at a really complex case. My only complaint about the book is that it is clearly written for a middle or high aged readers, and I would have preferred a more adult book. For it's intended audience I think the author did a good job of being balanced and including context about the time period, but I also think there are some issues that could have been explored in more depth but weren't due to the apparent age/maturity of the intended audience.
informative
fast-paced
Very simply written and kind of plain which doesn’t make for a super interesting read but that’s probably because this is billed as “YA nonfiction”. I already knew a lot about Typhoid Mary after reading a fiction book about the sanitation workers working on her case but it was nice to learn more!