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On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon, the woman known to the papers and to all of history ever after as Typhoid Mary, passed away on North Brother Island, where she had been lodged by the New York City Department of Health for the previous 23 years to safeguard the general population from the disease which she carried. Her life’s course since 1907 had been entirely determined by the persistence in her body of an illness that, to her dying day, she insisted she never had, but whi

Last week my stepfather, a retired electrical engineer, passed away at the age of 89, and in the boxes and boxes of papers he had kept as...