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not doing as she was told.
    On a cold morning in March 1907, the Department of Health coordinated with the New York City Police Department and decided that Mary Mallon must be brought in. Dr. Soper suggested she might surrender more easily to a woman and sent a doctor named Josephine Baker to ring the bell of the Bowen residence, where Mary was employed, with four police officers standing behind her. They had not considered that even in the face of such authority her friends would lie for her, help hide her, insist that she could not be the person they were seeking. When they finally found her, she would not come peacefully, so each officer gripped her by a limb and carried her across the snow-covered yard while the rest of the domestic staff looked on. Once the police got her into their truck she started swinging and kicking, until finally they wedged her between their stout bodies and held her as well as they could, and Dr. Baker sat on her lap. “Please, Miss Mallon,” Dr. Baker said, over and over, and after a while, “Please, Mary.”
    Mary assumed they were bringing her to the police station on East Sixty-Seventh, so when the truck continued downtown in a southeasterly direction along the same route she took from the Bowens’ to the rooms she shared with Alfred on East Thirty-Third, she thought for a hopeful moment that they might be dropping her at home. They had come to teach her a lesson, she prayed, and now they would set her free. She glimpsed street signs through the small barred window as the driver turned east at Forty-SecondStreet. They traveled south along Third Avenue until Sixteenth Street, and then east again with such urgency that she could feel the rhythm of the horses’ sleek heads pumping. The truck stopped just before the river, at the main entrance of a building Mary didn’t recognize, at the very end of a block so desolate that she felt the first stirring of panic that no one she knew would ever find her there.
    Dr. Soper was waiting at the entrance to the Willard Parker Hospital, but instead of speaking to her, he just nodded to the pair of policemen who had her braced by her elbows. Up on the sixth floor, they hurried her along the corridor to the Typhoid Wing, where more doctors were waiting in a room with a gleaming mahogany table. One of her guards indicated where she should sit, and before she could properly look around the room, Dr. Soper told her and the rest of the people present that the newest theory of disease had to do with germs and bacteria, and although Mary appeared perfectly healthy, he had good reason to believe that she was, at that very moment, manufacturing Typhoid bacilli inside her body and passing along the disease to innocent victims. He accused her of making twenty-three people sick and being the cause of at least three deaths. “Those are the cases we know of,” he said. “Who knows how many more we’ll find when we can investigate Miss Mallon’s full employment history?” In front of five other men and Dr. Baker, Dr. Soper turned to her, finally, the source of all this trouble, as if waiting for her to say something. Mary felt like her mind had dropped straight out of her head like a stone.
    “George,” Dr. Baker said, “she hasn’t even been here fifteen minutes. Perhaps we could give her time to collect herself.”
    “Back here in half an hour, then?” one of the other doctors asked.
    “In the morning, gentlemen,” said Dr. Baker. “There is nothing that can’t wait until morning, is there?”
    No, Mary thought, this mistake will be corrected by morning and I’ll be gone. I’ll walk straight home, make a pot of coffee, tell the whole story to Alfred, and never come near the Willard Parker Hospital again.
    Dr. Soper tilted his head and considered Mary from across the table. “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “Fine.”
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    Mary’s bed was at the end of a row, in a large room that held sixteen beds, all occupied except for