If nothing else, it will make you want to wash your hands on a more regular basis. I hope you get a chance to read this epic epidemic/disaster/tragedy book. You are not going to believe the things that happen to Typhoid Mary. I want to tell you all about the rest of this book, but I wouldn’t ever do it the justice that Gail Jarrow does. The cook was none other than Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. This cook would go from house to house cooking for wealthy families until somebody got sick with Typhoid fever. It takes Soper a year until he can track down a cook who is contaminating everybody. They end up hiring (guess who?) George Soper to track down the culprit. They had everything checked but nothing on their property was contaminated. Nobody can figure out why this family’s daughter got sick. A very wealthy family’s daughter comes down with typhoid fever at their summer house in Oyster Bay. Not only does this story have poop, contamination, and George Soper. It took George Soper seven months to clean up the city, but it was worth it. He starts cleaning everything up in Ithaca and setting up all kinds of crazy sanitation procedures. This is where George Soper steps into the story. Things got so bad in Ithaca, New York that a specialist was called in to figure out what they could do before the whole town died from this horrible disease. The first place typhoid fever case that starts to catch the imagination of people is at a small college in upstate New York. The story of the Typhoid fever epidemic doesn’t start with Mary Mallon and her unwillingness to wash her hands. This did not make for many Happily Ever Afters.

Typhoid fever germs where in or on everything. They made ice cream with fecal contaminated water. They would think their sheets were really clean, but the sheets were washed in fecal contaminated water. Do you know how you get typhoid fever? Typhoid fever is transmitted through fecal matter (poop, people, we are talking about poop.) People thought they were being clean by washing their dishes, but they were just washing it in fecal contaminated water.

One of the many diseases you could pick up from infected water was typhoid fever. Water would be so disgusting in some cities that people bought bottled water (yup, even way back then, people sold bottled water). People would just put their waste in the river, or ground, or you know…wherever. Once upon a time, we lived in a country that did not have public sanitation.

The title of this book should have been “Typhoid Mary: The girl who refused to wash her hands.”

Fatal fever by gail jarrow