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Mary Mallon: being evil vs. being an evil

August 21, 2007

NOVA featured The most dangerous woman in America, this evening, about Mary Mallon, the Irish immigrant otherwise known as “Typhoid Mary”. 

When she was finally quarantined in 1909, germ theory was not widely accepted by the public.  Certainly she never accepted, on the basis of scientific evidence about invisible germs, that she was a threat to anyone.  She fought a legal battle, and won public support for her plight as an innocent woman imprisoned against her will.  Finally, under court order, the New York Public Health department released her.  But they kept track of her to make sure she didn’t work again as a cook.

Until they lost track of her, that is.  When epidemiologist George Soper caught up with her again (alerted by a new outbreak), he found her working as a cook again, in a maternity hospital.  Public sympathy for her evaporated, and this time she was quarantined for good. 

The episode, strong on historical fact, left the viewer to weigh the merits of punitive measures against infectious people.  But the fact is, a balance does have to be struck. By draconian measures, we could confine one bad example, while ensuring that hundreds of people at risk fake their samples to avoid detection.  It’s a balancing act.

But there is another lesson, untouched by the NOVA episode, and it is that science and math education matter.  Students need to look through microscopes, through telescopes, use laboratory scales and measures.  They need to take measurements in the real world and do statistical analysis on the data they collect.  This need not be magnetic resonance chemistry; it can be counting birds in a field or recording how many people pull when the sign says “push”.  Because you never know when, or what, the student might need to understand someday. 

Today, school children calmly accept revolutionary ideas that once confounded experts and the public.  Science education begins this process; for the general public, science journalism picks it up and illuminates the cutting edge of the scientists’ tools.  Science is the reach that exceeds the grasp of our senses, past the intuitive limitations of our spectral sensitivity, our temporal, spatial, and quantitative frames.  Where religion once flailed at explanation, science digs patiently, methodically. 

Was Mary Mallon evil?  It isn’t that she wanted to hurt anyone; she really didn’t believe she was hurting anyone.  But moral judgments about her intentions aside, even if she wasn’t evil, she was an evil to the people she needlessly infected with a catastrophic disease. 

  1. August 21, 2007 at 22:59 | #1

    I think you’ve made an important distinction between being evil and being an evil.  The former requires us to speculate way too much about a person’s understanding and motives, and hence, it will usually be quite debatable whether someone is evil or not.  But the latter distinction often produces something most of us can agree on because the facts of the case are much more obvious.

  2. August 22, 2007 at 06:44 | #2

    I like the idea presented in the article that those in Mary’s position would be more likely to submit themselves if their economic situation was taken care of.

    The episode, strong on historical fact, left the viewer to weigh the merits of punitive measures against infectious people.

    I think if you have a disease you should think about the greater good.  Spreading a disease or virus you have to everyone else (while knowing you have it and the associated risks), just makes you a jerk in my opinion.  Reminds me of the guy on the plane.

    Was Mary Mallon evil?

    I agree with Paul and DOF here.  She was an evil

  3. Ted
    August 23, 2007 at 08:37 | #3

    Today, school children calmly accept revolutionary ideas that once confounded experts and the public.  Science education begins this process;

    Do you really believe this? I find it hard to understand this line of thinking because it seems to me that school children accept it because we tell them to accept it, not because they understand the science of it or the science behind it.

    To understand the science of it, each and every child would need to repeat the process for themselves and do the requisite thought process. They don’t because we expect them to consume the presented information as true that they can build future work on. And throughout history, our pedagogical books have been wrong, yet we accepted them as true at the time. However, we live in a time of completeness, where we’ve come to the final state of trueness.

    To me, this acceptance of “formerly revolutionary ideas” just seems like cultural indoctrination, not really all that different from the indoctrination conducted with each preceding generation.

    Anywho—my view is that many people replace religious faith with science faith, because a lifetime is too short not to accept many things on faith.

  4. August 23, 2007 at 09:13 | #4

    Do you really believe this? I find it hard to understand this line of thinking because it seems to me that school children accept it because we tell them to accept it, not because they understand the science of it or the science behind it.

    Yes – for example, kids today accept germ theory even if they don’t understand the science behind it.  That is why I hope we’ll work harder at getting them to understand the science behind it.

    To me, this acceptance of “formerly revolutionary ideas” just seems like cultural indoctrination, not really all that different from the indoctrination conducted with each preceding generation.

    The nature of the acceptance is similar, but the thing being accepted is different.  Science may be believed but does not require belief.  In principle, one can go check for oneself and verify it, come up with a better theory and present it for peer review, etc.

    my view is that many people replace religious faith with science faith, because a lifetime is too short not to accept many things on faith.

    Right.  I think of life as a science-fiction movie… keep necessary suspension of disbelief to a minimum.

  5. August 23, 2007 at 10:28 | #5

    I think the problem lies with the textbooks and how science and math are taught.  When I went through school we were taught to believe certain principles of science, but not taught why.  It never made much sense to me.  It was as if memorizing the fact was more important than understanding why it’s true.  Are schools just assuming we will learn the why in college?  Or do they just suck at teaching?  Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to teach kids how to think and reason through an idea?

  6. August 23, 2007 at 10:40 | #6

    I don’t think memorizing the fact is a bad thing at all; some students will “get it” from that alone.  But I’d like to see more emphasis on understanding, which receives little attention since curriculum is driven by politicians who don’t understand.

  7. Ted
    August 23, 2007 at 10:51 | #7

    Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to teach kids how to think and reason through an idea?

    Meh. There’s several questions that can lead from that:

    1. If everyone is an independent thinker, who gets to unclog the toilets. I mean the really bad ones that your handy $5 plunger doesn’t get.

    2. There’s historically been a difference between education and training, and it’s been kept purposely vague. The deep thinking is reserved for the “educated” class and although people can think that getting a four year undergraduate degree places them in the educated class, I think that due diligence should tell you to examine the notion of what makes the educated class at any particular moment. Often.

    3. Ideally, your notion that it’s beneficial to have kids learn to reason things through may have some merit, but look at the practical implementation in Gen-Y/Gen-Z and their relationships to social networking (MySpace, Facebook, IM, etc – reality by consensus). If there was a generation more prone to institutionalized herd mentality and groupthink, I can’t think of it offhand. Social indoctrination has always been with us, but the reliance on groupthink by Gen-Y/Z is viewed as a positive intellectual enabler through technology. By them.

  8. August 23, 2007 at 15:03 | #8

    It has always amazed me that even in todays lax society a family with a highly contagious disease such as small pox would be quarantined yet society thinks it is perfectly okay to let someone with AIDS walk around free to infect others.

    HIV could have been controlled when it was first detected in this country if society had demanded it. But it was not politically correct to do so because the majority infected with AIDs were homosexuals. Now AIDS is a danger to anyone even needing a blood transfusion.
    s
    From where I sit the only ones who have actually profited from this political correctness is the makers and vender of condums.

  9. August 23, 2007 at 16:59 | #9

    It has always amazed me that even in todays lax society a family with a highly contagious disease such as smallpox would be quarantined yet society thinks it is perfectly okay to let someone with AIDS walk around free to infect others.

    The raw exercise of government power often goes off track.  Except in the case of extreme respiratory illnesses, locking people up turns out to be counterproductive because many people who suspect they have the disease stay well clear of testing and treatment.  For example, Mary Mallon wasn’t a threat to anyone just as long as she didn’t work as a cook.  It would have been far cheaper to get her (or give her) another job that paid as well as to expect her to make a personal sacrifice by eaking out a living as a laundress.

    So locking up people with AIDS wouldn’t be particularly effective public health policy.

    There are some societies where AIDS has spread much more slowly or is even on the decline, and for the most part they are quite permissive about sex and accepting of condoms.  Two societies where AIDS is a huge problem are the US and to an even worse extent, Africa. 

    The US has a kind of bizarre Puritanism that magnifies sex (as if Mother Nature needed any help) while holding it at arms length and making it taboo discussion.  We have religious-right whackos spreading misinformation about condoms, saying they are less effective than they really are.  We have abstenance-only sex mis-education (same source, no surprise) that actually lowers the chance kids will use a condom but doesn’t reduce their rate of sexual activity one bit.  We sell condoms everywhere but then totally freak out if we catch our kids with them.  This confusion greatly increases the chances that when two people reach the point of physical intimacy, they got there over a path of self-deception and denial and didn’t bring condoms along for the trip.

    Africa has a similar problem, made worse by a culture of infidelity, combined with macho resistance to using condoms, and made worse by the president of South Africa who knows better than all the scientists and claims that HIV does not cause AIDS.

    The most effective long-term response isn’t usually locking up ignorant people but making them less ignorant.

  10. August 23, 2007 at 17:36 | #10

    If everyone is an independent thinker, who gets to unclog the toilets…
    The deep thinking is reserved for the “educated” class…
    If there was a generation more prone to institutionalized herd mentality and groupthink, I can’t think of it offhand…

    There are lots of independent thinkers among craftspeople.  And I don’t think we can afford an uneducated class any more.

    People have been saying the younger generation was a bunch of slobs since Aristotle.  I work with college students.  Some of them are very conformist, some incredibly self-absorbed, and others are thoughtful, wonderful people.  I don’t have any idea how you’d measure that against previous generations.  My dad told me there were some people in the Navy whose attitude was ‘I got mine, hell with you’ but we don’t say that generation (what letter would that be?  V for Victory?) is conformist or self-centered. 

    I’m pretty sure there’s always been a large subset of people who want to conform.

  11. Ted
    August 23, 2007 at 17:57 | #11

    And I don’t think we can afford an uneducated class any more.

    1. Any more? What’s the pressing emergency you speak of?

    2. Are you making a distinction between the uneducated class, the trained class and the educated class? Because I think there’s a difference and a lot of vaguery can get jammed into saying that someone is educated or uneducated.

    3. I didn’t mean to imply that tradespeople are unintelligent or are not independent thinkers; but we do have jobs that depend on problem solving by using logic-innovation-creativity, and jobs that depend on following the recipe (i.e. task based workers).

    4. True that each generation thinks that their progeny are worthless, but maybe the best way to check up is to examine them in detail. There are always exceptions to each rule, but the important thing is to divine the trend; for most of us it’s the sea of mediocrity not the POUM exceptionalism that will make the difference.

  12. August 23, 2007 at 20:06 | #12

    Only one pressing emergency?  I can think of two.  Environmental problems that were once only local are now global, and local economics is more globalized.  The two emergencies are that our elected officials now have the power to do damage on a far larger scale, by wrong action in systems of increasing complexity.  Can we elect smart people if we aren’t at least a little bit smart ourselves?  (As Paul Graham says, you need good taste yourself to hire a good designer.) And secondly, our personal choices are starting to have global effect.  Society is about to be massively restructured and it won’t be pretty for “task-based” workers. 

    Thanks for posting that report (Are They Really Ready To Work  Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce).  I’d heard of it but not read it before.  It is quite depressing and I must agree that the English communication skills of today’s college students leaves a lot to be desired.  And some of them seem to know a lot of math, but have not the slightest clue when to apply it or why.  But on the other hand I shudder to think of what I was like at that age.

    I’m not sure what your point is, except that our education system has failed our kids.  Even so, they know things their ancestors didn’t know, amazing things, relevant things.  Not as much as they should know, for sure.

    “Task-based” is a good description of jobs that robots will be doing soon.  Society is about to be restructured by ubiquitous automation, and it won’t be a smooth transition.

  13. Ted
    August 24, 2007 at 08:22 | #13

    I’m not sure what your point is, except that our education system has failed our kids.  Even so, they know things their ancestors didn’t know, amazing things, relevant things.  Not as much as they should know, for sure.

    I think what I’m saying is this: “It’s relatively natural to dismiss the worth of the progeny (or their preparedness to act), by invoking the saw—all generations think their kids are worthless”.

    I’m no scientist but I’m guessing that the scientific way to handle education or to assign a value to the dumbassedness of a generation is to examine them in detail, and then make smallish adjustment so that the future curve trends upwards and doesn’t fluctuate wildly while one frobulates the dials. Right now, it’s fluctuating wildly.

    They do know some amazing things—mostly because they inherited the culture. But their understanding of geopolitics or economics or basic finances or basic philosophy is generally lacking. Not to mention basic core survival skills—how to survive in a quonset world, how to skin a mule deer, how to not keel over dead because they’re packing 100 extra pounds on their frame and have Type II diabetes, and so on.

    I feel for them and do feel that we’ve let them down—mainly by allowing consumer interests to bypass reasonable filters and address them directly.

    But on the other hand I shudder to think of what I was like at that age.

    Well, were you required to know it when you were their age? In 10 years, 85% of jobs will require a minimum of 4-year degree. 30 years ago, one could actually make a good living right out of HS by getting a union job. But times change. We WERE able to jack off a bit more in our youth, because we had a level of protectionist measures that were the norm. Not so much any more—punting the kids out of the house and telling them to go find something “that they’re passionate about” is a bit of a disservice, because the outside world is still a harsh place (albeit a different harshness). And I see a generation of flip-flop wearers trying to find something passionate while there is a surplus of both cheap global manual labor and cheap global educated professionals breathing down their neck and eating their lunch.

  14. August 25, 2007 at 21:36 | #14

    “And I see a generation of flip-flop wearers trying to find something passionate while there is a surplus of both cheap global manual labor and cheap global educated professionals breathing down their neck and eating their lunch.”

    In terms of Intelligence/education/aptitude/“dumbassedness”, it has always been a bell curve and it always will be. The only things that vary are the height and the width. Worrying about whose kids are on the right side of the curve is racist. Life goes on, and extinction awaits those who cannot solve the problems they are handed.

    Society has always set up the poor for failure, either by making them “cannon fodder”, or by making sure they can only afford to eat at Mickey-Ds and cannot afford to buy into schools that will teach marketable skills. I wouldn’t worry about available labor to plunge your toilet if I were you. The most interesting final exam question I ever heard about was, “What is the name of the woman who cleans the halls?” I worry more about the prep school kids who would not be able to answer that question.

  15. August 25, 2007 at 22:25 | #15

    Painfully offered for your consideration, a Miss Teen USA candidate answers a question about education and the US’ place in a global economy:

    Some People Don’t Have Maps

    Damned if I know where to go from here.  She may be vaguely aware of germ theory, but in her own way, this kid is as ignorant/dangerous as Mary Mallon.  She’s well on her way to becoming an evil to somebody who will have to suffer the consequences of her ignorance.

  16. Ted
    August 27, 2007 at 13:02 | #16

    In terms of Intelligence/education/aptitude/“dumbassedness”, it has always been a bell curve and it always will be. The only things that vary are the height and the width. Worrying about whose kids are on the right side of the curve is racist. Life goes on, and extinction awaits those who cannot solve the problems they are handed.

    Yeah, I don’t really understand what you mean here. Sure, there is always a bell curve, but I think it’s critical to understand that in a globalized economy the cohort group is very large and extends beyond the national borders that one is led to believe is the closed set. In one sense today’s generation is a lot more open to diversity just in social group inclusion. I POS my kids and see them chatting away with others in Brazil, China, Europe, etc. Yet, for some reason they don’t seem to take that inclusiveness and understand that it works bidirectionally, and that it’s in opposition to artificial national barriers – cultural, legal, economic, etc.

    I’m not sure why it’s racist to want to elevate more kids and control change so that the educational process becomes more predictive. I’m not suggesting leaving the trailing end of the curve in the dust.

    Painfully offered for your consideration, …

    You have scared me like Rod Serling was never able to do. I couldn’t bear to watch it after a few seconds.

  17. August 27, 2007 at 14:30 | #17

    I actually feel more intelligent after watching that video DOF.  But scared s***less to think people like her might be running this country some day.

    Hopefully these kids will take over instead

  18. August 27, 2007 at 14:36 | #18

    C’mon, Webs, embrace the Brittany Spears administration…

    How about these kids?

  19. August 27, 2007 at 15:14 | #19

    That link gives me hope for sure!

  20. Ted
    August 27, 2007 at 18:00 | #20

    How about these kids?

    I’m of two minds on this.

    1. Science nerds influencing public policy in America? Sounds science-fictoney to me. They’d be more liable to take their large, beautiful brains and use them to to fisk the religious. Maybe on ScienceBlogs – America’s premier Atheism forum.

    2. They’ll invent something cool, make lots of money and influence public policy by bribing government functionaries through lobbyists. Like Gates maybe. But I don’t see them doing it as scientists.

    *******

    On reconsideration, I really feel bad for that girl though. Maybe she’s not that dense. Public speaking is a bitch for a lot of people, and maybe she just got the deer in the headlights thing happening. But that video will follow her around unmercifully.

    “Yeay, Internets”, I guess.

  21. August 27, 2007 at 20:24 | #21

    Well you’d think someone entering a beauty contest wouldn’t be shy…  but maybe.

    I think I’d take my chances with Bill Gates running the country over what we have now.

  22. August 27, 2007 at 21:54 | #22

    If Bill Gates ran the US, the world would be his bitch!

    Science nerds influencing public policy in America? Sounds science-fictoney to me. They’d be more liable to take their large, beautiful brains and use them to to fisk the religious.

    I’m actually hoping that scientists get as good at communication as they are at using science.  Then they could make the world a better place while spreading the message of science education.

  23. Ted
    August 28, 2007 at 09:53 | #23

    I think I’d take my chances with Bill Gates running the country over what we have now.

    So you don’t think that Gates and his ilk run the country now? What of the energy policy meetings in Cheney’s office? What of Abramoff? What of the think-tanks that we’ve outsourced our foreign policy to? What of MS anti-trust enforcement? What of financial oversight? What of Big Pharma and profits of the last few years? What of Defense contractors? Etc. Etc.

    The thing about Gates and his kind is that they’re only interested in the parts of government that benefits them.

    I envision the government as a pie and various business interests call “DIBS!” on varying slices of the pie—i.e. focus on intellectual property enforcement, or defense policy to maintain economic growth, and so on… Unfortunately (or fortunately), not many would claim areas that don’t benefit them directly, and the more of the pie that is unclaimed just gives more room so that oligarchs that jockey for the slice don’t get into too much of a tussle with other oligarchs. The public good portion of the pie is viewed as the remaining “Manifest Destiny”, available to be exploited.

    As an aside, (just FYI)—I ran across a great quote today that backs up my personal view of the government:

    There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult.”—Keynes

    The Times (March 11, 1937); Collected Writings, vol. 21, p. 409.

  24. August 29, 2007 at 07:14 | #24

    OK that just went in the quotes file!  It should be chiseled into the doorjambs of every building in Washington.  (A lot of decisions they’ve “arrived at” would have been better not.)

    I think Gates’ philanthropic work distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill industrialist.

  25. Curnel
    December 3, 2008 at 22:53 | #25

    :-D :O :P :]

  26. Stipa
    April 16, 2010 at 20:56 | #26

    I think we have to look at the cultural background of Typhoid Mary Mallon to understand her behavior and what happened during that distressing case.

    Mary came from an Irish background, a culture noted for its distrust of authority and aggressive denial when things go wrong. To be Irish in those days was to actually believe that if you denied something distressing it would go away. She was also a survivor that had managed to grow to maturity in the poverty stricken disease ridden country of the time.

    This would have lent to the development of some very robust survival and defense mechanisms within her.

    The actions of the New York health Authorities in terms of the values of society at that time were not heartless. This was a society pre-vaccines for Typhoid and pre-antibiotics so Quarantining was the only feasible method of dealing with a non complicit carrier like her.

    But what is sad about this is that they could not rid her of the bacteria that constantly was brewing inside her. What was also sad was Mary’s “maniacal integrity”. To her dying day she believed she had no contagion, was not dangerous and could do no wrong. She was a tough lady, a believer only in herself and that belief allowed the contagion in her to prosper dreadfully.

    The saddest part of all was she died only a few years before antibiotics became widely available
    and diseases like Typhoid became virtually unknown in the western world. But let her story be a lesson for all of us. It is possible for righteousness to become unwittingly lethal and this applies to all aspects of the human psyche not only to the carriers of infectious disease.

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