Who was Typhoid Mary and how did she die?
Although Yahoo! doesn’t have a category for this unfortunate woman, we found plenty of information about her by using an advanced search technique to filter out web pages about the metal band Typhoid Mary. We typed in the search expression “typhoid mary -band.” The “-” in front of a word is used by many search engines to indicate exclusion. By prohibiting the word “band,” we eliminated many, though not all, of the matches pertaining to the music group. Then we clicked through a smaller, more focused set of web page results. Mary’s life story is impossibly sad and teaches us about the social stigma attached to hapless victims of disease. Mary Mallon was born in 1870 in County Tyrone, Ireland, and emigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen. She was a notorious typhoid carrier who worked in the New York area as a cook for far too many years. At the time of
