March 27, 1915 Typhoid Mary

In 1841, US President William Henry Harrison died only 32 days into his only term, in office. The killer was a common culprit in Harrison’s day, one destined to end the life of Stephen A. Douglas of the famous Lincoln/Douglas debates, William “Willy” Lincoln (right), the 11-year-old son of President Abraham & First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, mother of President Theodore Roosevelt and grandmother on her father’s side, of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Historians believe Typhoid fever to be the causative agent behind the plague which killed the great statesman Pericles and a third the population of Athens, in 430BC. Typhoid killed as many as 6,000 settlers in the English colony at Jamestown and may have been responsible for eliminating the entire colony.

In 1880, German pathologist Karl Joseph Eberth first described the bacillus involved but, throughout the 19th century, Typhoid could be counted upon to kill more…