North and South Brother Islands

In February 1892, New York City health authorities tracked down every Russian Jewish passenger from the Massilia.

They quarantined dozens of them in a hospital on North Brother Island in the East River and confined hundreds more to their boarding houses.

One of those passengers was immigrant Feier Meeremer, who was living in a temporary lodging house on the Lower East Side with her husband and five children.

Health officials forcibly removed the fever-stricken Feier and two of her children and placed them in quarantine.

Oh.

Mary is then forcibly transferred to Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island.

Do you know where North Brother Island is in the East River? Did you ever see the episode of Broad City? Broad City, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where Abby has to go pick up that package? Oh, yes, yes.

She has

Jail.

Well, not jail.

In North Brother Island.

She was like a super carrier.

So she went on to a place called North Brother Island, which is just a small scrap of island, and she's given a little cottage, but her freedom is essentially taken away.

It's not, she's not charged with any crime, but she's not allowed to leave this island.

Hm.

Under the fake name Mary Brown.

Mm.

So she was sent back to North Brother Island, uh, where she stayed for the rest of her life, more than 23 years.

Um, and the latter part of her life there, she got to work in the island's hospital labro- laboratory washing bottles, which is just kinda sad.

Her standing as a cook has been injured by her three years imprisonment as a public danger.

Typhoid Mary, the cook who came by that nickname because of the cases of typhoid fever that seemed to follow her around from family to family, is about to sue the city and its health department for $50,000 damages for keeping her in confinement on North Brother Island for three years.

Papers will be served within the next few days on Dr. Letterly, head of the health department, and four physicians, Dr. Darlington, Dr. Soper, Dr.

Park, and Dr. Westmoreland.

Three other instances are set forth where the fever followed within a short period after the employment of the cook.

In all, he laid at her door 26 cases of typhoid, and he added that he had traced but fragments of her history during ten years.

the physicians of the health department have never been able to discover that mary herself ever had typhoid she is described as a robust woman and weighing about one hundred ninety pounds the doctor suggested that she undergo an operation to this she would not submit in fact she always insisted that she never gave typhoid to anybody but that the water was at fault The case was adjudged one for confinement in March 1907, and Mary, after a contest of physical strength with five policemen, was taken to North Brother Island.

In 1909, she was before the Supreme Court on a writ of habeas corpus.