Fatal Fever by Gail Jarrow is about typhoid, a deadly disease that killed a lot of people in the US around the 1900s. More specifically, the book is about the “first healthy typhoid carrier ever found in the United States”, the infamous Typhoid Mary. The story follows the stories of three people: Dr. George Soper, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, and of course, Mary Mallon. Even though the book mostly focuses on Mallon’s life, Soper and Baker had major contributions in tracking her down, so that she wouldn’t infect others with typhoid. However, Mallon is extremely uncooperative, and caused a lot of problems along the way.

This is a really interesting book to read, and I found several central ideas as well. I apologize in advance for my handwriting, and welcome into my notebook! 🙂

The first central idea I got was that people should cooperate with officials about problems that might concern the health of the public. That isn’t exactly how I phrased it in my notebook, but the general idea is very similar. Personal freedom is important, but if a bunch of people are going to get sick because you refuse to cooperate with the health officials, then… not a good idea (does that sound familiar? *cough* COVID *cough*)

As I read, I found some sort of theme as well. Sometimes, you need to put down your pride. This somewhat connects to my first idea as well, that people should cooperate with health officials. Mallon refuses to believe that she is a typhoid carrier, and she stated multiple times that she “is a clean person”. I think she feels insulted when Soper and others call her a typhoid carrier, because she might think that they’re saying she’s “dirty”.

So why exactly is Mary Mallon more… problematic than other typhoid carriers? Why isn’t the other carriers locked up like she was? Personally, I think that Mallon is more of a problem to the New York City health officials is because she refuses to cooperate. For this page, I used a cause-and-effect sort of method to take notes. The bubbly boxes are some thoughts that I had while I was reading.

And that concludes this (very short) peek into my notebook! I apologize (again) for my handwriting, I had to cram words into a small amount of space quite a few times, so some things might look a bit squished.

To be honest, I thought about COVID-19 a lot while I was reading this book. Deadly disease/virus that spreads from person to person? Check. People not cooperating with the health officials? … Yeah. Unfortunately.

Thanks for reading!