![]() ![]() ![]() Her captivity in a one-roomed bungalow there struck her as an unjustified imprisonment. Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant, was thirty-seven years old when she first arrived on North Brother Island in 1907 and, unlike other hospital inmates, showed no symptoms at all. 4% of people continued to harbour bacteria in their bodies after recovering from typhoid infection, making them the possible sources of new outbreaks. For more than a quarter of a century, it also enforced the isolation of a woman, neither patient nor convict, known as Typhoid Mary. The facility was shuttered in the 1960s, but before that it enjoyed a varied career sequestering the sick: smallpox patients, tuberculosis sufferers, teenage drug addicts. The red-brick buildings of the old Riverside Hospital are gap-toothed, littered with decayed furniture, suffocating in kudzu. Today, the island is abandoned, a sanctuary for water birds. North Brother Island is a 16-acre teardrop of land in New York’s East River, halfway between the Bronx and that more famous prison isle, Riker’s. ![]()
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