Brief Bio:

 I'm a history and English major finishing my last semester at Pitt.  When I graduate, I hope to secure both health insurance and perhaps a low-wage job in a library.  I am particularly interested in: strategic board games, South American history, industrialization, making to-do lists, non-fiction, personal essays and organizing things. 

 Working Notes:

Coroner Files 1960's:

Reading death records has given me several startling (and funny) revelations about dying—in particular, the realization that I do not want to be photographed once I am dead.  I feel I can say this with much certainty after viewing many records from the 1960s that included disturbing and graphic photos of the deceased.  Among many, many others, the deaths I have seen photographed (occasionally against my will) include:

·    A malnourished 2 year-old child

·    A woman’s brain from several angles after she (supposedly) fell down the stairs

·    An naked woman in a hallway who had been abandoned for some time

·    A man who hung himself, photographed as he was found, with the rope still around his neck

·    A woman who was shot by her husband, including several zoomed-in shots of the bullet wounds

I am often amazed by the excess material included in many of the death records, aforementioned photographs included.  This also includes: social security cards, union membership cards, to-do lists that I assume were written by the compilers themselves and accidentally left inside the dockets, interesting newspaper clippings regarding the death (most commonly in the cases of Pittsburgh ‘celebrities’ and mysterious or contested reasons for death), police drawings of the scenes of death, and if the deaths were the result of an industrial accident, blueprints from the company where they worked of the particular site.  I have additionally found the inclusion of witness inquests to be quite interesting, as often the story changes throughout the interviews and stated ‘facts’ are often blatantly and obviously lies.  Perhaps most controversially, the suicide records often include the original suicide notes.  The detail that the records have contained has consistently surprised me—from the list of clothing the deceased was (or wasn’t) wearing to the amount of change in their pockets. 

In retrospect, I suppose I stupidly assumed that at least several of the deaths from the 1960s would be from drug overdose or as the result of some wild lifestyle choice (I suppose, bad misconceptions of the 60s straight from my television).  Aside from the occasional “auto-erotic misadventure,” the deaths have been largely mundane—the kinds of death that obviously happen more often than not.  For the most part, these 1960s deaths are deaths from diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, all of which have mostly served as a warning for me to quickly kick my fitness routine in gear. 

Not surprisingly, there is much medical significance to be found in the records.  Many unexplained crib deaths occurred in the records I reviewed.  Countless illegally performed abortions additionally resulted in the deaths of the mothers themselves (which speaks, of course, to the practicality of providing safe abortions for the women who feel they need them).  Episodes of obese men and women having heart attacks at young ages occurred with enough regularity to frighten me quite a bit. 

Historically, the records from the 1960s have given me an incredible glimpse at the Pittsburgh of old.  They’ve also irreparably altered my sense of Pittsburgh as my home.  As I read of deaths that occur on the street where I live, or at Kennywood Park, or walking across Fifth Avenue in Oakland, or outside a bar on Carson Street—places with at least a semblance of emotional meaning to me—I intrinsically view each place differently.  I read of a man who jumped off the Glenwood Bridge.  He lived in a house on Kennett Square in South Oakland where I have spent many, many days.  This, of course, begs the comment that death does occur everywhere, but until this point I’d rarely paid attention to it. 

 Coroner Files 1900-1903:

Overwhelmingly, the 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, I imagine, are not easy ways to die.  There are records of men in mills being kicked by horses and dying.  There are records of men falling from railroad tresses, records of men slipping off scaffolding, records of men trapped in collapsed mines.  I would easily estimate that at least 50 percent of the records I’ve 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 did work themselves to death—and a place where unfortunately often these men were actually boys.  Often records have cited boys ages 13-18 losing their lives while working.  This, sadly, 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”—obviously 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’ve 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, which is both easily understood and sad.      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.  Of course, there have 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, or 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 attributed deaths that were from, say, asthma or cancer to heart disease.  This is one of those annoying medical histories we will probably never know the answer to.  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’ll 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 didn’t) receive.