In the Declaration of Independence it reads as follows,“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life , liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (US, 1776). During the 1800’s many people immigrated to the United States to elude religious and political persecution, destitution, and warfare. Immigrants desired freedom, economic prosperity, and a sense of tranquility, that they believed, deeply penetrated American soil. In historian Judith Walzer Leavitt’s extraordinary work of nonfiction tilted, Typhoid Mary: Captive to Public Health, she meticulously accounts the life of Irish immigrant Mary Mallon (infamously known …show more content…
I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast- a criminal.It's unjust, outrageous, uncivilized...Why should I banish like a leper ?”(p. 180). Leavitt explores the legal arguments of Mallon’s incarceration. Leavitt writes .” Mary Mallon had been determined to obtain freedom from the early moments of her detention..she resisted strenuously when she was first arrested...and she continued during her years on the island. Mallon and her legal advisor strongly believed that she did not have typhoid disease because she did not display any physical symptoms of the disease. Public health official deprived Mallon of her civil liberties and she sought to obtain justice.To further support her claim, Mallon requested to have private laboratory analysis of her feces and urine by the Ferguson Laboratory in Manhattan. When Mallon wrote George Ferguson regarding the results he responds, “none of the specimens submitted by you , of urine and feces, have shown Typhoid colonies” (p. 74). In 1909, Mary Mallon’s lawyer, George Francis O’Neil filed “a writ of habeas corpus to test the legality of Mallons detention in a court of law ”(p.76) . In contrast, the Department of Public Health argued that according to their laboratory results, Mallon is a healthy carrier of typhoid who she serves as a menace to society and must be isolated from the general population. According to the Greater New York Charter section 1170, “Said board may remove or cause to be removed to [a] proper place to be by it designated , any person sick with any contagious, pestilential or infectious disease”(p.71). As a result, the court favored the claims presented by the Board of Health because Section 1170 granted absolute power over any individual sick with an infectious disease. Moreover, the court's decision violated the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, that is, “No state shall deprive a person of life, liberty, or property,