Notes from 1900-1902
The most common method for suicide for women in the early 1900's was the use of carbolic acid.
Other popular suicide methods include ingesting Paris Green.
Observations:
An overwhelming amount of death records from 1900 seem to be industrial. There are deaths caused by falling ore, falling slate, falling coal and falling rock. There are innumerable cases of men being caught in belts, or fans, and being, as one record stated, “whirled to death.” These are probably not easy ways to die. There are records of men working in mills being kicked by horses or men falling from railroad tresses, slipping off scaffolding, trapped in collapsed mines. I would easily estimate that at least 50 percent of the records I have thus far read from 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902 and 1903 have taken place in one of Pittsburgh’s many mills, mines or factories. From this, of course, we can deduce that Pittsburgh was largely an industrial city, a city where the majority of jobs to be found (especially for immigrants—as evidenced by the very many foreign names and European places of birth recorded on the records) were difficult, dangerous and low-paying jobs. It was a place where men and often boys did work themselves to death. Often records have cited boys ages 13-18 losing their lives while working. This does not include the high incidences of deaths from train accidents and traction car mishaps, which I would describe as industrial but will not be discussing in these notes, simply because there are too many and they become slightly redundant.
Another telling historical facet of living in an industrial city has been the emergence of deaths from epidemic. Coincidentally, I have only catalogued files from winters (from which I am including September through March), and while many people are reported dying from bronchial and pulmonary difficulties (some say “congested lungs” or “hemorrhaged from lungs”—probably symptoms of the harshness of winter) contagious and infectious diseases are ultimately claiming quite a few lives. I particularly see evidence of this when the deceased are living in what we may assume are crowded and dirty conditions. For example, while I have come across only three cases of deaths from smallpox, all were contracted in the same workhouse. From February 1903 alone I have catalogued deaths from: Tuberculosis, meningitis, measles and whooping cough. Many of these seem to have a higher incidence in children.
I did not expect the prevalence of undiagnosed infant deaths to decrease as we moved back in time from the 1960s to the 1900s. While I was right with that prediction, I have noticed that the language describing their deaths has changed, which can also probably be expected. In the 1900s, the average infant death is attributed to “spasms” or “heart trouble,” in place of the “Crib Death” or “Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome” description of the 1960s. While this is certainly just an evolution of linguistics and medical diagnoses, it still makes me wonder when physicians and parents became more knowledgeable of such occurrences. There have also been several unfortunate and unrelated childhood deaths—such as the incident where a newborn was bathed mistakenly in lye and died several days later, or the many, many times when babies were abandoned as stillborns or were illegally self-aborted, the several instances of babies suffocating on pillows in their sleep, or the infant who was smashed by her sleeping mother.
I have been consistently interested in the rampant diagnosis of “heart disease” and “heart trouble,” especially in the cases of seemingly healthy men and women in their twenties and thirties. While I am well aware that heart disease is a huge health problem to this very day, I still don’t fully believe that 22-year-old women were dying from heart disease at the rate that these records have recorded. Either many people living in Pittsburgh in 1900 were greatly obese, or for lack of a better diagnosis, the coroners wrongly attributed deaths that were from asthma or cancer to heart disease. Occasionally the weight and height of these deceased are included, and they never seem to really be that remarkably overweight, at least enough to culminate in a young death. I understand that heart disease is also often genetic, but I suppose that I will never be able to find hereditary factors in these death records. I am sure that another contributing factor I do not have access to is their condition of life and the nutrition that they did (or did not) receive. EV 3/07
In the 1900s the technology was new and had a lot of faults and uncertainties, not to mention the worker did not always know how to use the equipment. There was one file where a steel mill worker was killed because he did not set the furnace to the proper temperature, causing it to overheat and explode. This accident resulted in his death and the deaths of several of his coworkers, with a few more injured. Other work-related accidents include men falling from one level to another. In one file, a man fell from a second story into a vat of acid, instantly killing him. While other men were caught in conveyer belts and crushed to death. If a man worked in a mine, he was in danger of being hit by falling slate or being run over by a mine car.
One case did not take place in a steel mill or a mine but outside. A tree cutting company had five workers cutting down a particularly large tree. Two of the men did not speak or understand English well, and when orders were being given to move out of the way for the falling tree, one man who did not understand the order did not move from his position. He was crushed to death by the huge tree.
The files that were thicker and labeled "accidental" were usually Railroad Accidents.
Other types of accidents ranged from people being burnt by hot water or exploding oil lamps. A number of people fell down steps or over bridges because they were intoxicated. Even more people drowned in one of the many rivers of Pittsburgh. Many of the drowning occurred when the men were bathing in the rivers. A few young children playing around the river drowned when they were swept up in the river. The river also claimed the lives of two young men who were boating on the Allegheny when their boat capsized.
As for the so-called natural deaths, heart disease and the heat claimed a multitude of lives in 1902. It seems whenever the coroner could not find a true reason for a person's death they blamed it on heart disease. In some cases, this might have been true but for a number of the people that were in there early to mid thirties that were healthy up until the day they died, that ruling seems a bit skeptical. April to July of 1902 must have been record-setting highs for temperature, because a number of people died from sunstroke. Even some of these deaths seemed a little skeptical to me. I can understand the babies and the elderly succumbing to the heat, but a healthy 20-year-old is a more unlikely death. Other suspicious deaths include the murders of people. There did not seem to be an overabundance of murders, but the investigation process of the murders seemed lacking, to say the least.
A superfluous tidbit of Pittsburgh history that I have picked up in these records is the changing of Pittsburgh's spelling in these years. I noticed early on that some of the headers on doctor's notes and stenographers writing addresses spelled Pittsburgh without an "h" on the end. Like a good native Pittsburgher, I was incensed by their negligence and had to research it. Was this just lazy writing or was this a policy change within Pittsburgh? I discovered that it is not bad grammar: there really was a decision from 1891-1911 to change the spelling. I bring this point up because these records have helped me learn a lot about Pittsburgh--about the beginnings of the North Side, and of course, about industry. For more on the name change, read here.
I have run across a few number of files where the deceased is unknown (John Doe) or the method of death is undetermined in many of the files from the early 1900-1902 era. In one specific instance a man ended up shooting himself, yet he could not be identified by anyone. (190108_057). There are several other instances where train accidents and murders have resulted in John Doe cases or unsolved methods of death. The question that comes to me is just why are these types of files left unresolved? Are there later investigations that solve these type of cases thare are not contained in the death records, or are they still unsolved to this day? Were coroner and CSI methods not advanced enough to solve some of these deaths? In the case where the remains were too damaged or decomposed, such as in many train accidents, I understand the John Doe scenarios. I can only theorize, however, that communication methods were too primitive by this point in time for people to identify many of the deceased when forensic science could not. Many cases of the deceased appeared to be immigrants, in which case it makes sense that their relatives could not be reached.
There is one case of an indivdual hit by a train listed as "Unknown White Man" despite the record also containing the individual's UMWA transfer card with a partly legible name, suggesting that limited efforts were made to indentify unknown decedents.
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