Brief Bio:

 I am a History Major at Pitt, and i'm about to enter my Junior Year. History has always been an interesting subject for me and since Pittsburgh is my hometown I like to know as much about it as I can. This is my first time working with the archives and my first internship. 

Information I have added to the Coroner Case file will be marked with my initals, AFS, along with the date that I added the information

Working Notes:

May 19th, 2008. I've finished my 4th set of 50 files through various years of the Coroner casefiles. For the 1890's, it took me about 5 and a half hours to get through 50 files. The handwriting was very hard to read and information was not put in any order and was rarely put into a form, so the entire file had to be read to find any information. Every other file has taken me much less time. The 1900's took me about 4 hours, 1905 about 3 hours and 30 minutes, and 1920 about 2 hours and 45 minutes.

May 23, 2008

I've finished my sample files from 1925 and 1940, and there are a few differences from the earlier files that I have noticed. First, the number of train accidents has gone down greatly. In fact I think that I have not had a train accident in either of those years. In 1940, a few things have come to my attention. First, I have noticed that there are a great number of files with the cause of death being a "Coronary Occlusion." This seems to be a very general term to me and it occurs often enough that myself and a few others believe it was just laziness on the part of the deputy Coroners. I also found that the number people dying in the hospital has risen, 12 out of 50 died in a hospital.

On a personal note, there was a suicide note in one of the files (194001-299) that got some emotion out of me. It was my first time having problems with a file.

June 2, 2008

The overview of the entire coroner case files has wrapped up, ending with the year 1973. Now we have gone back to 1918 to document the whole year and the flu epidemic in particular. At this point we have not come upon the flu yet, since it did not begin until around September of that year, but having a deeper look at 1918 has been interesting. Certain patterns have started to emerge. For instance, more men then women have died in the Hospital, perhaps because the women were alone in the house all day where no one would know that they needed help. Most of the people are also of the lower class, laborers and miners, but the middle and upper class have become more visible with more files to look through. It will be interesting to see what else becomes apparent as I move through the year.

June 11, 2008

I'm about to finish my 2nd box of files for the 1918 project. Having finished January, I moved on to March, but have found little remarkable about this set of files. However, there have been some interesting deaths that i have documented in the Particularly unusual deaths page. There have been quite a few industial deaths where several men have died at once, and of course many train accidents, which have been mostly been handled by the Deputy Coroner George Ambos. For the most part I am just looking forward to reaching September and the flu.

July 1, 2008

I've finished work on the March and June boxes and have begun work on August, and i'm nearly to the flu. However I have not yet seen a case where flu was the direct reason for death, it might have been included in some way but it is usually not part of the Coroner Jury's Verdict.

July 9, 2008

I've finally come upon the flu in the files and have found a few other interesting cases that I have looked into in more depth. One cause of death that happened in August of 1918 was heat prostration, and I have gone into more depth with that topic in the Chronology. The Other case that I found interesting was that of a 10 year old boy. His cause of death was unremarkable (lobar pneumonia), but where he lived and the Juvenile court file that accompanied the file interested me. I have also gone into more detail on the Lobar Pneumonia page.

I've also found that most deaths do not phase me, or even interest me to a large degree now. Instead, the cirmumstances of their lives interest me more. That is the case with the boy who died of Lobar Pneumonia and a few others.

July 11, 2008

During the summer semester at the University of Pittsburgh, I took an internship at the University Archives to work on the Coroner Case Files study. The files included all violent deaths and deaths when the subject died alone or without medical care. All of the files were from the Allegheny county Coroner’s office from the years 1895 through 1973, though I worked for the most part on the year 1918.

The first weeks of the internship, another intern and I went through all the Coroner Case files and did a sample for about every five years from 1895 through 1973. We would compile 50 files from each of the years and update the online Coroner Case Files Wiki. The main purpose of this was to see how long each period would take to file in its entirety. We also took note of any trends, such as major causes of death or any interesting and usual cases.

            Our next project was to process all the files from 1918 and the beginning of 1919. 1918 was the year that the Spanish influenza, a particularly deadly strain of the flu, hit nearly the entire world, Pittsburgh and its surrounding towns included.

The Coroner Case files are organized in such a way that the cause of death can be listed in several areas, but the official cause of death was listed on the Coroner’s Jury Verdict page. What was unusual for the influenza cases was that the cause of death on other pages were listed as Influenza, Influenza and pneumonia, etc., but on the Verdict, it was more often than not listed as a death by pneumonia. Because of this, we had to decide how to sort these files and how to list them on the Wiki. While Pittsburgh was not hit as hard as other cities, such as Philadelphia, the Spanish influenza took over many of the files from October of 1918 through the beginning of 1919.

             Through the research involved, the internship itself was closely related to history courses I have taken at the University. Most importantly, the entire internship was concerned with primary sources. If I was given more time, I could have looked into many of them in a more in depth manner, but even the overview I received from all of them will be helpful to handling primary sources in the future. I have gotten used to the script, which was sometimes hard to read (especially in the early years), and the medical terms that were unfamiliar to me. If another course requires primary sources, I believe I will be better equipped to find them and use them to their full advantage.

            The reports I made on the online database were also related to my coursework. Finding trends, such as one deputy coroner filing the inquests for nearly all the transportation related accidents, required me to look closer at the files. We were also encouraged through the Wiki to look into deaths that we did not understand and include an explanation of what the cause of death actually was. In one such case, the cause of death was listed as “Ludwig’s Angina,” a disease I had never heard of before. In this case I asked my father, a doctor, to explain it to me, and then followed it up with online research on medical websites.

Another case interested me not because of the cause of death, but the location of the death. A young boy, who was listed as mentally retarded and having poor morals, died at the “Torch Hill School.” Once again I went online and, through JSTOR, found that the Torch Hill School was a home for orphaned and troubled boys. The school gave them an education and a place to live.

            Overall the Internship taught me a lot about the history of Pittsburgh. For instance, one always heard about how dangerous it was to work in the steel mills, but I for one never heard why it was so dangerous. There were many cases were men were splashed with molten metal and died from complications from the burns, but what surprised me more were the deaths by asphyxiation. In 1918, I had about twenty-five cases all in a row from workers that died at the Eliza furnace at Jones and Laughlin Steel Co. Due to a malfunction of the furnace, toxic gas were released into the air and twenty five of the men were unable to save themselves.

            In my experience, when learning about a city, it is important to study the violent crimes that were committed there. How many deaths due to violence there were says a lot about the kind of city it is and the kind of people that lived there. In this case, there were not many violent crimes committed in Pittsburgh, even though it is a traditionally blue collar town. Another interesting thing that I noticed in the case files that are murders is that the killers often confessed themselves or the police immediately knew who killed them due to circumstances. There were very few cases where the deceased was killed “by a person or persons unknown.” 

            Another thing that surprised me was the fact that many car accidents where a pedestrian or passenger in a car was killed, the drivers were often not accused of manslaughter. They were mostly listed as accidental even when witnesses say that the driver was driving recklessly.

            Suicides were also often listed as occurring while the deceased was “temporarily insane.” In most cases it seems like they were depressed or distraught over some problem, but that does not make them insane. It seems to me that many of these cases were termed suicides while temporarily insane so that the people could still receive church burials, since it is against church doctrine to commit suicide. Therefore, those that simply committed suicide could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard or receive a Catholic service.

            Previous to my internship, I had not heard of the Spanish Influenza. I cannot figure out why I’ve missed one of the most deadly pandemics of the 20^th century, considering the fact that I recently took an American history class that includes that time period. However, my internship allowed me to learn a lot about the flu and how it affected the city in particular.

             One of the most valuable things I learned at the internship actually had little to do with the actual work that I was involved in. The graduate students that worked in the same room as the undergraduate interns often spoke of their upcoming careers. Most of them were looking to work in library science or in archives. This encouraged me to look more into those carriers since I’m still undecided on what to do with my history degree once I have completed my undergraduate studies.

           While some of the other students were affected emotionally by working on the case files, I found that I didn’t have the problems of becoming overly upset at the deaths. To me, they were simply facts, and I was able to distance myself emotionally from the tragedy of their lives. However, as I travel around Pittsburgh, by bus, car, or walking, I often find myself looking at a street name that I find familiar and I turn to whoever I’m with and say “I know about a bunch of people who died there.”

August 04, 2008