Getting sick sucks, but you know what sucks more? Having your body be a literal germ factory that infects anyone that comes near you and becoming the quite literal boogeyman of the early 20th century. That was the sad fate of Typhoid Mary.
TM was born to a poor family in Ireland, and like many young Irish of the time, immigrated to New York City at the tender age of 15 to find better opportunities. For TM, those opportunities involved cooking for rich people, a job she proved amazingly good at despite thinking hand washing was highfalutin tom foolery. However, while people found her food very delicious, everyone TM worked for kept coming down with typhoid fever. Over a seven year period she worked for eight different families, and all but one saw the majority of their households fall ill, which for a number of people also involved dying. Eventually, this strange set of circumstances led to an investigation by a doctor with a wealth of medical knowledge, but fairly shitty people skills.
It didn't take long for the good doctor, being a man with the basic skill of pattern recognition, to figure out that TM was the common denominator. The doctor went to TM's place of work and told her she was giving everyone typhoid, a fact she found hard to believe given she was healthy as a horse. The doctor, lacking tact, then asked if he could have a stool sample. Not enjoying being harassed by what appeared to her to be a quack with a fecal fetish, TM grabbed a carving knife, started cursing like a drunken sailor, and chased the doctor out the door. The doctor, a persistent fellow, proceeded to harass TM for several weeks, demanding she hand over her poop. When this tactic didn't work, he brought in the police, and TM was summarily arrested, after putting up a huge curse laden fight, and placed into quarantine on an isolated island in the East River.
TM was held in isolation on that island for three years, during which time she was forced to turn over her poop on a weekly basis. Finding a large amount of typhoid in her gall bladder, the medical experts suggested removing it. TM refused and instead started personally sending more poop samples to a private lab for analysis. When the private lab tests came back negative she sued the government and lost, but was later released due to public outcry over her forced isolation. However, as part of her release agreement she had to agree to quit her career as a cook. TM gladly agreed, returned to New York City, changed her name, and went back to cooking delicious meals with her very dirty hands.
TM thought she was doing nothing wrong, because again, she felt she was healthy as a horse. Perhaps to prove her point, five years after her release she took a job cooking at a maternity hospital, where she was caught because pretty much everybody got typhoid, which is not a plus in a maternity hospital. Tiring of TM’s shit, literally, the city medical experts quarantined her back on the isolated island in the East River. TM there, mostly alone except for a dog and the occasional visitor, for the next 23 years. During this time, for god only knows what reason, she was allowed to work at the hospital on the island in the laboratory, but only under, what can be assumed, close hand washing supervision. TM died at age 69 in 1938. Four years later they invented antibiotics, reducing typhoid from a deadly disease to a minor distasteful annoyance.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Mallon_in_hospital_(cropped).jpg