During her two-year period of confinement, she had 120/163 stool samples test positive. In 1909, Mary unsuccessfully sued the health department. Mary’s stool was positive for Salmonella typhi and thus she was transferred to North Brother Island to Riverside Hospital, where she was quarantined in a cottage. At the end she was forced to give samples. Baker and the police were met by an uncooperative Mary, who eluded them for five hours. Josephine Baker, who along with the police, was sent to bring Mary Mallon in for testing. Sober, after enlisting the support of Dr. Mary was then frequently accused of being the source of contact for hundreds of the ill. Thus, a dangerous source like Mary had to be restrained. Immunization against Salmonella typhi was not developed until 1911, and antibiotic treatment was not available until 1948. That year, about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Salmonella typhi, and probably Mary was the main reason for the outbreak. Twenty-two people presented signs of infection and some died. Seven of them had experienced cases of typhoid. Sober reconstituted the puzzle by discovering that previously the cook had served in 8 families. His attempts to obtain samples of Mary’s feces, urine and blood, earned him nothing but being chased by her. From March 1907, Sober started stalking Mary Mallon in Manhattan and he revealed that she was transmitting disease and death by her activity. Finally Sober had solved the mystery and became the first author to describe a “healthy carrier” of Salmonella typhi in the United States. Although Sober initially feared that the soft clams were the culprits, this proved to be incorrect as not all of those stricken had eaten them. Mary continued to host the bacteria, contaminating everything around her, a real threat for the surrounding environment. Having believed initially that freshwater clams could be involved in these infections, he had hastily conducted his interrogation of the sick people and also of Mary who had presented a moderate form of typhoid. The sanitary engineer, committed by the Warren family, George Sober, published the results of his investigation on the 15th of June 1907, in JAMA. At this time, typhoid fever was still fatal in 10% of cases and mainly affected deprived people from large cities. From 27 August to 3 September, 6 of the 11 people present in the house were suffering from typhoid fever. She was engaged in 1906 as a cook by Charles Henry Warren, a wealthy New York banker, who rented a residence to Oyster Bay on the north coast of Long Island for the summer. Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in 1869 and emigrated to the United States in 1883 or 1884. Salmonella thus became new scientific knowledge and therefore the contagion mechanisms, as well as the existence of healthy carriers were relatively in status nascendi. The genus “ Salmonella” was named after Daniel Elmer Salmon, an American veterinary pathologist, who was the administrator of the USDA research program, and thus the organism was named after him, despite the fact that a variety of scientists had contributed to the quest. His discovery was then verified and confirmed by German and English bacteriologists, including Robert Koch. It was Karl Joseph Eberth, doctor and student of Rudolf Virchow, who in 1879 discovered the bacillus in the abdominal lymph nodes and the spleen. A great number of doctors and scientists had tried to discover the nature of the microorganism responsible for the disease and had encountered great difficulty in isolating the bacillus. According to Budd, every case was related to another anterior case. William Budd, a doctor in Bristol who was interested in cholera and in intestinal fevers, demonstrated in 1873, that typhoid fever could be transmitted by a specific toxin present in excrement and that the contamination of water by the feces of patients was responsible for that propagation. He also tried, with his colleagues, to demonstrate that the spread of epidemic was related to drinking water contaminated by the excrement of patients with typhoid fever. Long before the bacillus responsible for the disease was discovered in 1880, Karl Liebermeister had already assumed that the condition was due to a microorganism.
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