JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This rather nicely-designed and withdrawingly-titled pamphlet really packs quite a few surprises in its rather simple but innovative approach to controlling disease and epidemics in urban settings.

Mr. Soper (1870-1948) had a long career in public health service in NYC as a sanitary engineer, and was a pioneer in a number of different areas within that discipline. That said, he is probably best remembered for his work on the typhoid epidemic(s) in New York, including the infamous 1906 outbreak in which he was able to find its root cause, located in Ms. Mary Mallon. (Ms. Mallon was a very unfortunate person, and was a doomed non-affected asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever–she is better known as “Typhoid Mary”. Over time she would be quarantined though she would leave, taking jobs as a cook/bottle washer/laundress and such, and would wind up spreading typhus on multiple occasions. Eventually she would be kept/quarantined on North Brother Island in the East River, a place she would stay, kept out of the public, from 1915 until her death in 1938.)

In any event, Soper’s work on street cleaning was essential thinking on how to maintain health standards in tight quarters of highly-populated places. And in there, in a ghostly whisper, was the unfortunate Ms. Mallon, never far from being part of the general epidemiological conversation.  

Notes:

“(Soper) received his degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1895 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1899. He was the managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, which later changed its name to the American Cancer Society, from 1923-1928.”–Wiki

See also the full text for “The Work of a Chronic Typhoid Germ Distributor”, George A. Soper, Ph.D.
1907 https://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/disease/docs/soper.html