Brief Bio:

I am a history major at Pitt, finishing up my last semester. After graduation I am going to take a semester off to plan my wedding and move but come January I will be back to school working on my graduate degree in secondary education. I am originally from Hazleton, a small town in northeastern Pa, but I lived in Harrisburg for a few years and then my junior year of high school my family and I moved to Pittsburgh. When I am not at school I am usually at work, my second home or driving my two soon to be step children around.

Working Notes:

1960 Coroner Files:

Going through the files from the 1960’s I found a few interesting things among the number of natural causes of death. Before I go into the interesting files the natural causes of death deserve some attention. Those that died of natural causes during the 1960’s were between the ages of 60 to 80. More being toward the sixty- to- seventy ranges then the eighties. These people mostly died from heart attacks or simply states they did not feel well went to lay down and never woke up again. A number of others passed away at hospitals after being ill for a while but I found that majority of people did not know they were sick and were not receiving treatment from a doctor. Now, to take a look at some of the interesting coroner files.

            A few files I looked out stood out to me among them were a number of industrial accidents, suicides, and one is something a person would only think to see on television. I had a few industrial accidents that involved men falling into a vat of acid and dying from the severe burns that acid can cause. Other industrial accidents involved people being struck by falling objects and dying from the head trauma. Suicide is never an interesting topic no matter how it is distorted it is always a sad thing. I found a number of suicide notes that instructed their loved ones what to do afterwards but I found it odd that the majority of them did not give a definite reason as to why they would kill themselves. It seemed that the method most often used to commit suicide was carbon monoxide poisoning. I deduce this is because it is painless, most often the person will just fall asleep never to wake again. One particular person to do this did so in her garage while her 3 sons were still in the house. The mother did not take into account that the gas would penetrate through the house and also kill her sons. Reading this file made me extremely sad to think that someone was so unhappy and desperate that she neglected to think of all the possibilities in doing so and took the lives of her children as a consequence. To move off of this topic one file I read actually had a man die during the act of intercourse. He was a relatively young man in his early 30’s and according to his wife they were in the act when he began to breath really hard and suddenly collapse on top of her. At first she mistook this as him climaxing but soon she realized what had occurred. Another file had a boy about 14 die from electrocution when he was swimming at a friend’s house and had a radio out on the deck with the wire hanging over a metal fence. When the boy got out of the pool to play with the dog he was still dripping wet and grasped the fence causing him to be electrocuted. In addition to these files I found a number of automobile accidents that did not have information on them. As I got later into the sixties I noticed files started to be labeled as drug files, this was towards 1968-1969. Prior to this I did not see any drug files. Finally, there were also a few homicide files throughout the 60’s but I did not see an overwhelming amount of them.

            In conclusion throughout the 60’s people just like in every other generation died from a number of causes, from automobile accidents, to work accidents, to suicides. In looking at how they died though and seeing what they were doing when they died allows people to examine how society was i.e. working conditions.

 1900's Coroner Files:

The 1900’s in Pittsburgh was a period of industrialization. Pittsburgh was the steel capital of the world bringing thousands of immigrants here to find work in hopes to fulfill the American dream. Some of the people looking to find the American dream would fall short and parish in the steel mills. Others would die in mines, train accidents, or a variety of other types of accidents, while others died from heart disease (or at least that is what the coroner claimed), spasms, and some took their own lives. This is not a complete list of ways people died there were also a number of murders and other types of deaths.

            Industrial deaths or work related deaths occur all the time, even in today’s society, over a hundred years later. The difference is in how often these accidents occur. In the 1900’s 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.  I had one file were a steel mill worker was killed because he did not set the furnace to the proper temperate, causing it to over heat and explode. This accident ended up killing himself as well as a few other workers and injuring others. 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 would be caught in conveyer belts and are crushed to death. If a man worked in a mine, they ran the risk of having slate fall on them or being run over by a mine car. One case that sticks out in my head did not take place in a steel mill or a mine but outside. A tree cutting company was working doing just that when a group of workers were working on cutting down a particularly large tree. The job required five men to help, two of the men did not speak or understand English well and when orders were being given to move out of the way that, the tree was going to be falling one man not understanding the order did not move from his position. The man ended up being crushed to death by the huge tree. I would presume that miscommunication was a major obstacle employer and workers had to contend with.

            The files that were thicker and labeled “accidental” were usually railroad accidents. People would be run over by trains all the time either because they were supposedly trespassing or because of faulty gates. One woman was walking along side train tracks with her daughter when a train came and run both of them over. The investigation carried out by the coroner’s office showed that the women and her child were trespassing and should not have been on the track. This means that the train driver would not get in any trouble for hitting the two women. Yet, in another accident, there was a faulty gate meaning the people did not know a train was coming and proceeded to cross the bridge of train tracks. In this case, the driver was not repremandated but instead the company was for not making sure the gate was operating correctly. The case that stands out the most in my mind is a train accident that could have been avoided if there was better communication. A controller did not understand his orders and cut off the last few cars of a train causing those cars to crash into other train cars. The train cars that the cut off cars ran into were caring some type of flammable substance causing the train to explode. The train did not explode once, or even twice but five times. This accident claimed the lives of 32 passengers. Most of the passengers were men but there were a few women and children. It was hard going through all of the passengers files because if the communication had been better the accident would have never occurred. This type of accident could still occur today though there a number of other safety features that are on trains today that did not exist in the 1900’s but as previously stated communication are a major obstacle.

            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 persons 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 twenty year old seems suspicious. Other suspicious deaths include the murders of people. There did not seem to be an over abundance of murders but the investigation process of the murder seemed lacking to say the least. If there was not an eyewitness or if the person was not a person in high standing the case usually went cold and just went down as a murder.

            In conclusion, people in the 1900’s perished in the steel mill, mines, train accidents, or a variety of other types of accidents, while others died from heart disease (or at least that is what the coroner claimed), or murder. This is just a short list of the ways people met their fates in the 1900’s. Many other people did not even make it to their first birthday because they died from what was characterized as “spasms.”  How a person died, meaning the circumstances in which they were in that caused them to die can show us how they lived. In some cases, the accidents that took the lives of so many workers actually benefited the workers of today. If it were not for those accidents then new ways to do things and new safety precautions would not have come into existence.