Producer – Nancy Porter and Laura LeMarr

60 minutes, 2004

In Distribution

To millions, she became a villain; to others, a hero; and for many more, she was the archetypal innocent victim. But Mary Mallon could not have been a more unlikely candidate for celebrity of any kind – let alone such notoriety that her two-word nickname, almost a century later, still resonates: Typhoid Mary.

Interweaving biography and social history, the film uses the unparalleled story of Mary Mallon, the first person in North America to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever, as a framework for investigating the social, cultural, ethical, legal, and philosophical implications of public health policy toward communicable disease during the early twentieth century.

The Most Dangerous Woman in America dramatizes how an otherwise ordinary woman was transformed by forces well beyond her control into an extraordinary symbol of her era. For it was her fate not only to carry a newly discovered bacterium but also to be burdened by the prevailing social and cultural conventions of early twentieth-century America.