George Soper was not your typical detective. He was a civil engineer by training, but had become something of an expert in sanitation. So when, in 1906, a landlord in Long Island was struggling to trace the source of a typhoid outbreak, Soper was called in. The landlord had rented his Long Island house to a banker’s family and servants that summer. By late August, six of the house’s 11 inhabitants had fallen ill with typhoid fever.
乔治·索普不是一般的侦探。他是训练有素的土木工程师，但在卫生方面却成了专家。因此，在1906年，当纽约长岛的一个房东正在努力寻找伤寒爆发的源头时，索普被叫了过去。那年夏天，房东把他在长岛的房子租给了一个银行家的家人和仆人。到8月底，这所房子的11名居民中有6人感染了伤寒。
Soper had been previously hired by New York state to investigate disease outbreaks and believed that typhoid could be spread by one person serving as a carrier. In Long Island, he focused his attention on the cook, Mary Mallon, who had arrived three weeks before the first person became ill. Mallon was escorted by Baker and five policemen to a hospital where she tested positive as a carrier for Salmonella typhi, a bacteria that causes typhoid.
索普此前曾受雇于纽约州调查疾病爆发，他认为伤寒可以通过一个人作为携带者传播。在长岛，他把注意力集中在厨师玛丽·马伦身上，她在第一个人生病的三周前来到这里。在贝克和五名警察的护送下，马伦被送往一家医院，在那里她被检测出携带伤寒沙门氏菌，是一种引起伤寒的细菌。
Mallon herself had no symptoms of typhoid and didn’t believe she could be spreading it. It’s likely Mallon never understood the meaning of being a carrier, particularly since she exhibited no symptoms herself. The only cure, doctors told Mallon, was to remove her gallbladder, which she refused. She was dubbed “Typhoid Mary” by the New York American in 1909 and the name stuck.
马伦自己没有伤寒的症状，也不相信自己会传播伤寒。马伦很可能从未理解作为病毒携带者的意义，尤其是她自己没有表现出任何症状。医生告诉马伦，唯一的治疗方法就是切除胆囊，但她拒绝了。1909年，她被纽约的美国人称为“伤寒玛丽”，这个名字也就沿用下来了。
In 1909, she sued the New York City Department of Health and the case was brought to the Supreme Court. The court declined to release her, saying “it must protect the community against a recurrence of spreading the disease,” but Mallon was freed early the following year by the city’s new health commissioner. When, in 1915, a typhoid outbreak sickened 25 people at Sloane Maternity Hospital, George Soper was again called to investigate. The cook, “Mrs. Brown,” was discovered to be Mallon. Mallon was sent back to North Brother island—permanently. She died there of a stroke in 1938, after a quarter-century of quarantine.
1909年，她起诉纽约市卫生部，并将此案提交至最高法院。法院拒绝释放马伦，称“这必须保护社区，防止疾病再次蔓延”，但第二年年初，该市新任卫生专员释放了马伦。1915年，斯隆妇产医院暴发伤寒，导致25人患病，乔治·索普再次被叫去调查，发现厨师“布朗太太”就是马伦。马伦被永久地送回了北哥岛。1938年，经过25年的隔离，她死于中风。
There are over a hundred geothermal During the course of two outbreaks, at least 51 people caught typhoid through Mallon, and three died. The number of cases was probably much higher. “The story of Typhoid Mary indicates how difficult it is to teach infected people to guard against infecting others,“ Soper warned. The legacy of “Typhoid Mary” as an asymptomatic vessel for disease led to the theory of “superspreaders” that has surfaced in disease outbreaks ever since.
在两次暴发期间，至少51人通过马伦感染伤寒，其中3人死亡。病例数可能要高得多。索普警告说:“伤寒玛丽的故事表明，教会受感染的人预防传染他人是多么困难。” “伤寒玛丽”作为一种无症状的疾病传播途径，由此产生了“超级传播者”理论，并在此后的疾病暴发中再次出现。
图文来源 | National Geographic
翻译 | 新译科技AI+人工校对
编辑、排版 | 王仔洋
