Was Mary Mallon a victim or villain free essay sample

Mary Mallon was a woman of Irish descent who came to the United States as an immigrant to start a new life in 1886. She worked as a cook in a house where wealthy families came to celebrate their vacation. She was a healthy carrier of typhoid and made the guests sick and they died because of her. Although science had not been developed enough yet and she was tried unfairly it did not make her only a victim. Mary Mallon transformed from victim to villain. When she decided not to report to the police and return to cooking. Mary Mallon was a victim when she was quarantined for the first time. Science had not been developed enough yet to prove and explain what healthy carriers really were and if they existed at all. She believed that she could not be a carrier without being sick. At the time she was asked by George Soper, a researcher who specialized in investigating where diseases come from, to cooperate to do a test with him, which she did not want to do. We will write a custom essay sample on Was Mary Mallon a victim or villain or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Soper implied that she might carry the bacteria and be the cause of the vacationers in the house getting sick. But because she was not sick herself she did not believe a word he said and ignored him. Mary had no reason to believe she could be a typhoid carrier. At the time the theory was; you either have typhoid and are really sick or you do not. The same applies to spreading it. She at least would have to be very sick in order to spread it. No one knew about healthy carriers, who like her, were healthy and yet carried the disease with them their whole lives and could also spread it. They did not get sick themselves because their immune system had beaten the bacteria. Therefore, when police officers came to arrest her and put her in quarantine without trial, she really did not know what was happening to her and why. They told her that she was a healthy carrier and had made people sick, but why would she believe this? It was a really novel idea and people were still under the assumption that typhoid was spread by lack of hygiene. So was she. â€Å" Message to good Housewives† with the warning that the house might look clean, â€Å"but don’t get the idea that you can judge simply by the appearance of things†. â€Å"Wherever there is dirt, germs can breed; and flies and vermin will come† (Tomes Reading, p 165). People also did not know that typhoid could be spread by uncooked food like ice cream. If science had been developed more they could have maybe used Mary to find a cure or at least it would probably have given her a better trial in the first place. Now everyone was thinking she had typhoid, so let us just lock her up. Maybe they could have thought of better solutions if they had known more. However, Mary Mallon became a villain after she was released from quarantine, because then she knew she was not allowed to go back to cooking and she did anyway. As a result, many people in the hospital where she worked became sick and died. I have to believe that when she was in the hospital and all of the papers were written about her and cartoons were published she had to know she was carrying it. They would not have kept her in quarantine for so long if she had not been a threat to civilization. Also given the fact that the people in the house where she had worked at first had all become sick must have proved a point to her. They did multiple tests on her as well that proved she carried it. She might still have been thinking that it could not be true but that would have been really ignorant. The facts speak for themselves. When she got out of quarantine and had to obey the rules that they had given to her, and did not obey them she had transformed in to a villain. She knew she was not allowed to cook again because she could spread the disease that way. She had to inform the government where she was and did not do that either. The fact that she went back to cooking for me proves she turned into a villain, because that made many innocent people sick and caused many of them to die. And the worst thing is that of all places she did it in a hospital. She knew she was not allowed to do it but still did it with huge consequences. When she did not know what she was doing she was a victim of her own medical condition, once she knew what she was doing she had become a villain. The fact that after she came out of quarantine she had to work extremely low- paid and bad jobs did not give her the right to go back to cooking and make innocent people sick and die.