The New Yorker:

When Mary Mallon cooked, people became ill and sometimes died. Health officials came after her repeatedly, and repeatedly she tried to escape.

By Stanley Walker

Mary Mallon was known and dreaded a generation ago as Typhoid Mary, America’s first identified carrier of typhoid bacilli. She was a cook, and a pretty good one, but into each kitchen she entered she carried illness and sometimes death. She was caricatured in the Sunday newspaper supplements as a fiend dropping human skulls into a skillet. Experts said that if she had been employed in a milk-distributing station, thousands of inhabitants of New York would have come down with typhoid in the course of a single month. After she had been suspected of being a carrier, she became defiant, sly, and difficult to capture or control.
Today this same Mary Mallon, paralyzed on her right side, lies on a bed in a ward in Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, a lonely spot in the East River off 138th Street. She suffered the stroke at Christmas, 1932. Most of her old bitterness is gone. She is a Catholic, and in her last years (she says she is sixty-five years old, but the physicians on the island think she is a little older) she gets from religion some of the consolation which was denied to her during a lifetime as a pariah—unwanted and untouchable.

Go to link