Terrible Typhoid Mary is the true story of Mary Mallon, a woman who, in the early 1900s was responsible for an outbreak of Typhoid. The New York City Board of Health imprisoned her for life, because she was a human petri dish for Typhoid bacteria, and refused to get treatment to protect the public. The author of Terrible Typhoid Mary, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, has a clear point of view about this , which comes out often throughout the book. I think she wrote the book to convey her opinion of what happened to Mary. It appears that she believes what happened to Mary was unjust. This bias can be seen throughout the book, especially in several parts.
One place where the author is biased towards Mary is here, on page 39, where she refers to George Soper (the sanitation engineer who was trying to prevent a typhoid outbreak) as a “Snooping man.” If Mary Mallon was the protagonist of the book, Soper was the antagonist, which is shown by Bartoletti’s use of the word “snoop,” and so calling him a snoop for trying to prevent a typhoid outbreak is clearly showing that the author is attempting to defend Mary in her writing. Soper is not without his flaws, but in my opinion what he was doing was not snooping. He was collecting information about the houses where Mary had worked, in order to prevent an epidemic of Typhoid, which has a fatality rate of up to 30% when not properly treated with antibiotics. Back when the story takes place, they didn’t have antibiotics, so Typhoid was a huge problem. Mary had already infected…show more content… If the author’s complete disregard for the fact that the Health Department was within its rights to quarantine Mary isn’t enough to convince you of this bias, I don’t know what
