New York’s memories of Typhoid Mary

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/emma-brockes-notebook-typhoid-mary-ebola

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References to Typhoid Mary abound in New York this week, as the nurse in the Ebola quarantine scandal makes her way home to Maine. Meanwhile, in a New York hospital, a doctor fights the disease after returning from an aid trip to Guinea. The low likelihood of catching the virus from buttons in a lift or handrails on the underground is well established, but most New Yorkers I know aren’t hugely sympathetic to the nurse’s complaints.

They are also critical of the doctor, for going bowling, jogging and taking public transport in the days before his diagnosis. The fear doesn’t need to be rational: as one commentator pointed out, putting your fingers into a communal bowling ball tends to give people the creeps even without the raised threat of Ebola.

The original Typhoid Mary, by contrast, was a proven killer whose job as a cook for wealthy New Yorkers at the turn of the 20th century ensured she spread localised bouts of the disease. It was only after one of her employers brought in a pathologist that Mary Mallon was identified as a carrier of typhoid who was herself immune. Her response was to fly at him with a fork. When the health department was called in, she is said to have jumped from a window and fled.

After capture, she was quarantined on an island in the East river, whence, after a brief period of release, she returned and was held for 28 years, until her death in the late 1930s. Three people are known to have died as a result of Mary’s contagiousness, far fewer than her fame would suggest.

As with the doctor and nurse in the present outbreak, it wasn’t what she did so much as what she stood for that condemned her. And it doesn’t matter that the doctor now accused of recklessness had been overseas to combat Ebola. When he got back to the city, many fellow New Yorkers gave him a traditional welcome home: “What a jerk.”

A potent view

One World Trade Centre opens on Monday and details of the 102nd floor viewing deck emerged this week, provoking a collective shudder. I know several people whose companies are set to move into the building, and who are all reluctant to go. The observatory won’t open until next year, but photos show it to be 120,000 sq ft, taking up three floors of the building and with an adult ticket price of $32 – although families of those killed in 9/11 will be given complimentary access. If they choose to visit, it is hard to imagine how that journey to the top floor will go.

For most of us, unease about the building will wear off as quickly as fear of flying did after the terrorist attacks, but the symbol remains potent – if not of resilience, exactly, then of irrational fear overcome. As statisticians inform us, you are more likely to be killed in the cab on the way there than by anything going on in the building.

Testing Taylor

News that Taylor Swift has been made a “global welcome ambassador” for New York was greeted with mockery this week, as she has lived in the city for all of eight months. New Yorkers have been pondering how best to test her knowledge of the city she now represents. Knowing where to stand when the subway doors open? Understanding what “The 2/3 is running on the 4/5” means?

A news anchor asked: “Does she know who Dr Zizmor is?” Dr Zizmor is the dermatologist in a range of inadvertently kitsch advertisements who has been promising New Yorkers “beautiful, clear skin” since 1991. He is in the same category as Dan the guitar man, the guy in flyers posted in groceries all over the city 10 years ago, who won cult status for his comically flat tagline, “Dan Smith will teach you guitar”.

More than monuments and tall buildings, these are the things that make a city beloved by its people and put everyone fleetingly on the same side.