User:Andrewlevinger/sandbox

Ethics
The ethical question of her arrest and forced quarantine asks if there was a justification for arresting her and isolating her from the world. The answer to this question is complex and is still being argued to this day. Historians frequently bring up the argument of Mallon knowing she was contracting her clients with Typhoid based on the frequency of the disease being present after her departure.They also cite the argument that antibiotics did not exist at this time and ten percent of those affected by Mallon carrying the virus died. This argument could also potentially view Mallon as a murderer of those ten percent of people if she knew she was a carrier of the disease. This argument would be a justification for her arrest. Another group of individuals argues that Mallon did not know that she had the virus and therefore does not deserve to be arrested when she never committed a crime. At the time there was no such thing as an asymptomatic carrier and Mallon was believed to have said that she didn’t feel sick, look sick, or have any sort of visible sickness. Although Mallon did not feel ill or look sick, the disease was living dormant in what was assumed to be her Gall bladder. When private investigator George Soper attempted to take any form of sample to see if Mallon was carrying the virus, she proceeded to hide in her house and flee from Soper. Historian, B.D Mcclay, believes that even if Mallon verbally claimed she was not sick, she had some idea that Mallon was carrying the virus because she refused to talk to George Soper.

The Media's View
The treatment Mary Mallon received from the City of New York Department of Health has raised ethical questions on the claim made by Mallon, that she was never given any medical attention to help cure her of being a carrier but instead was sent into two separate quarantines and forced to encounter an abundance of tests. Mallon was supposedly never asked about her condition or even her side of the story but was constantly subject to any tests that the physicians felt could stop her from spreading Typhoid. After Mallon was sent into her initial quarantine, the newspapers changed their opinion on her case. They wrote articles shifting the blame from fully her fault to the opposite stance, the belief that: she didn’t know she was carrying anything and instead it’s the germs that she has no control over to be at blame. The newspapers also claim that Mallon was barred from using the telephone to contact anybody except the surgeons treating her and her guard. What started as a way to make the public health department and legal system look good through the media was ultimately a place for people to sympathize with the events Mallon supposedly encountered. Public health officials claim the opposite, that she was treated to their best ability but in return refused to comply with the requests of the health officials. They believe this led Mallon to believe she was being mistreated when in fact she was not.

Lessons Learned
Mallon was the first individual who was found to be an asymptomatic carrier of the Typhoid virus, and this caused the health officials to have little to no idea of how to deal with someone in her position. However, Mallon’s case helped these officials identify other people who carried diseases that were dormant in their bodies based on the information they learned from Mallon’s case. Mallon’s case created a shift in emphasis around the understanding of personhood and social responsibility. It also was the case that led scientists to shift the idea of the asymptomatic carrier from an idea to an evidence-backed scientific study. In addition to opening new lanes of science, Mallon’s case showed even further than events in the past, that diseases do not discriminate, and no matter what ethnicity, gender, or social class you were in, you could be a carrier of a disease.