Mary Mallon was not the only carrier of typhoid fever in the United States during the past two centuries - there were hundreds - but for many people who recognize her nickname, Typhoid Mary, she might as well have been. She quickly became "the carrier" in the public's mind, a luckless disseminator of disease who refused to admit to others or to herself that she dished out Salmonella typhi with the meals she prepared for her wealthy and unfortunate employers.

There is little chance for anyone today to get to know Mallon because, like most other poor Irish immigrants who lived a century or more ago, she left few records or writings historians could use to create a personal portrait of her. Her status as a public health menace, however, is well documented. The book Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health, by Judith Walzer Leavitt, Ruth Bleier Professor of the history of medicine, history of science, and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Medicine, is a good example.

How can we know what it was like to be a poor, immigrant, middle-aged, single woman trying to support herself while keeping one step ahead of public health officials and the police, taking jobs as a cook in private homes and always leaving when typhoid fever broke out, as it almost inevitably did? Anthony Bourdain, author of Typhoid Mary, An Urban Historical attempts to provide as clear a picture of Mary as the scant historical record, supplemented by his personal experience, allows. That experience includes many years as a professional chef, a career he has recounted in Kitchen Confidential, an entertaining memoir of the grittier side of restaurant cooking.

Bourdain's picture of Mary, a tall, well-nourished, and fiercely independent woman who was, perhaps understandably, capable of displays of ferocious temper, is informed by a perspective he understands well - the stressful and underappreciated life of the lowly cook. This is not the life of the four-star, celebrity, gourmet chef surrounded by legions of assistants working in shiny clean kitchens as royalty and other famous, pleased, and sated personalities stop in to pay their respects. It is a life of heat, sweat, long hours, burned hands, and hard work.

"Going in," Bourdain writes of his subject, "I knew only that she was a cook with a problem. Few, it seemed, knew her real name. 'Typhoid Mary,' the moniker she's come to be remembered by, is now an all-purpose pejorative, an epithet implying evil intent, willful contagion; shorthand for a woman so foul, so unpleasant, so infectious as to destroy all she touches. . . . It helped that I was writing about a fellow cook."

And it helps the reader to gain a sense of what life was like for poor Mary Mallon.

She herself may never have experienced the symptoms of the disease she spread. Typhoid fever has an insidious onset, beginning with common symptoms like fever, headache, fatigue, loss of appetite, intestinal disturbances. But the illness can worsen enough to kill 10% of those it strikes if they are not treated with antibiotics, which of course did not exist when Mary was employed as a cook in some of the better homes in New York.

Most chronic typhoid carriers are infected in middle age. They may experience acute or only mild, barely noticeable illness. Some individuals, like Mary, carry the bacilli without showing any symptoms at all. Unless such carriers practice conscientious hygiene, including carefully washing their hands before leaving the bathroom, they can easily spread this potentially lethal form of food poisoning. Mary swore she never had typhoid and so could not be responsible for passing on the disease.

Public health officials disagreed.

In the 19th century, typhoid was not uncommon in cities. By 1906, however, the year Mary obtained a job as a cook for a wealthy New York banker and his family in their rented summer home in Oyster Bay on Long Island, public health officials knew that most typhoid outbreaks could be traced to contaminated water or food. Consequently, as a result of improved sanitation, typhoid infections were declining.

Oyster Bay was hardly a place where one would have expected a typhoid outbreak. Yet of the 11 family members and servants in the home where Mary worked, six developed typhoid fever.

When authorities could find no contaminated water or food, suspicion fell on Mary. She had left the house about three weeks after the first case of typhoid appeared. Tracked down, Mary refused to cooperate. She was insulted by the suggestion that she was the source of disease. But a reconstruction of her work history indicated that in the decade preceding the Oyster Bay typhoid episode, similar outbreaks had occurred among seven of the eight families she had cooked for. In her culinary wake, the toll was 22 sickened and one dead. Over her lifetime, she is said to have infected at least 33 people, with three fatalities.

Before her run-in with the law, Mary never wanted for work. Bourdain concludes that she must have been a pretty good cook. He notes that her ice cream, particularly her peach ice cream, was a favorite of her clients. Because heat kills the typhoid bacillus, it's likely that some uncooked preparation - perhaps her popular summer treat - was the means of transmission.

With the public health finger pointing at her, Mary was tracked down and incarcerated. She was freed only after she promised not to cook for anyone again. She tried washing laundry for a while, but soon returned to what she knew and did best, preparing meals. After infecting more people, this time personnel in a hospital where she had found employment, she was rearrested. She was confined for more than a quarter of a century, until her death in 1938, to a small island in New York City's East River.

Mary was the first typhoid carrier to be recognized by public health officials, but hundreds of others followed. Only Mary attained notoriety, despite the fact that some other carriers also defied officials by working in professions in which they threatened the public's health. Some attribute Mary's misfortune to her status as a single, poor immigrant Irish woman in a time of considerable prejudice against her kind.

This may not be a book for someone interested primarily in a serious examination of infectious disease, epidemiology, or public health. Such readers should turn to Leavitt's Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health. Bourdain says he himself used that book as a road map to Mary's life and times. But if you're unfamiliar with Mary's story and are facing a long line at the airport, Bourdain's brief, highly personal impressions of Typhoid Mary will fill the time nicely. And whether or not you already know something about Mary, don't miss the author's first book, Kitchen Confidential.