Category Archives: Sundry

Today’s Flickering Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the wake of the heat flash and the blast wave from the atomic bomb set off over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on Monday, August 6, 1945, came fire, caused partly by the direct radiated heat from the bomb, partly by other causes – gas leaks, electrical sparking and so forth. A nightmare was faced by the wounded who had survived the flash and the blast but who were trapped in the rubble of the devastated city. Yamaguchi, a ship designer, was about one and a half miles from ground zero:

As the dust blew away and my surroundings became visible, I saw what seemed to be thousands of tiny, flickering lamps all over the street and in the fields. They were little circles of flame, each about the size of a doughnut. Myriads of them were hanging on the leaves of the potato plants.

Air rushing in to feed the flames of these many fires caused a firestorm to develop. As was noted by the British survey, fires burnt with an unusual ferocity and thoroughness and many injured burnt to death, unable to escape them. Survivors became frantic in the struggle to get away from the flames and this created its own series of tragedies:

As I went further, I came upon a reservoir used for the prevention of fire. In the reservoir there were numberless corpses piled one upon another. It was a hill of dead bodies in green. All of these people must have jumped into the reservoir because of the heat.

A rare image of the Hiroshima firestorm.

At the moment that the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, it is thought that there may have been about 320,000 people present in the city. The heat flash, the blast wave and the subsequent fires probably accounted for 80,000 of them in the first few hours, but those that survived were, as the Los Alamos scientists thought, in a ‘new world’:

Although I knew the city well, it was actually difficult to find my way, for all the familiar landmarks had gone, and the streets I had often walked were now buried in debris and ashes.

The survivors were now faced with the problem of trying to avoid the flames and go to the aid of friends, family, loved ones and strangers; or simply to escape:

The whole city was burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we could hear the sound of big things exploding… The fires were burning.  There was a strange smell all over.  Blue-green balls of fire were drifting around. I had a terrible lonely feeling that everybody else in the world was dead and only we were left alive.I was determined not to escape without my mother. But the flames were steadily spreading and my clothes were already on fire and I couldn’t stand it any longer. So screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ I ran wildly into the middle of the flames. No matter how far I went it was a sea of fire all around and there was no way to escape. So beside myself I jumped into our water tank. The sparks were falling everywhere so I put a piece of tin over my head to keep out the fire. The water in the tank was hot like a bath. Beside me there were four or five other people who were all calling someone’s name. While I was in the water tank everything became like a dream and sometime or other I became unconscious… Five days after that I learned that mother had finally died just as I had left her.

I left my mother there and went off… I was later told by a neighbor that my mother had been found dead, face down in a water tank… very close to the spot where I had left her… if I had been a little older or stronger I could have rescued her… Even now I still hear my mother’s voice calling me to help her.  (Schoolgirl)

Culled from: Eye-Witness Hiroshima

An Incredible Tale!

I have an incredible tale to share with you, so strap-on your seatbelt!

It all began when my dear friend Eleanor posted the following photo and caption on my Facebook page:

Wish they all could be Minnesota girls!

Just look at that smug smirk!  What sort of mayhem do you suppose our Bertha was involved in? I suggested perhaps she kicked a man in the nether regions with her pointy boots; my friend Jim suggested perhaps she’d poisoned her husband; I suggested that would still be called “murder”, not “mayhem”.  We continued our debate for awhile until I thought, why not do some sleuthing?  I had a name and a year after all, so I went to Newspapers.Com and found the following clue from a 1908 San Jose, California newspaper:

At this point, we knew that she may have been a native of Minnesota, but she did her crime in San Jose.  We also had a date of the crime, so I did some more searching and found this:

The clues of exactly what sort of mayhem Bertha did are abundant here!  “Every person who unlawfully and maliciously deprives a human being of a member of his body or renders it useless… is guilty of mayhem.”  Additional clues come from the description of the attack:  “Mrs. Boronda without warning attacked her husband in the dark with a razor, maiming him fearfully.”

At this point I thought, did she Bobbitt him???  I think she Bobbitted him!!!

And lo and behold!

Indeed, she Lorena’d before Lorena!  Now we know why her mug looked so smug!

On Ancestry I found additional photos from the San Quentin mug shot collection.  I know, RIGHT???  THERE’S A SAN QUENTIN MUGSHOT COLLECTION ONLINE!  SQUEE!!!  Stay tuned for ‘Beaucoup De Détenus Du Jour!”

Additional sleuthing found that she was divorced by her much-abused husband in 1923.  Yeah, I know – he stayed marry to her for an additional 16 years after she “frightfully maimed” him?  Bit of a pushover, wasn’t he?  Of course, I suppose he didn’t have a lot to offer a girl after, you know…

Bertha remarried but apparently didn’t re-Bobbitt.  She died in 1950 at the age of 72.

Find-A-Grave Entry

“She was just a saleslady from Minnesota…”

As for the much-suffering Narciso, he did remarry and he ended up living until 1940, when he died at the age of 72.
Find-A-Grave Entry

Memento Mori!

Michael Marano recommends a page from MessyNessyChic.Com which details some glorious memento mori that we all wished we had in our collection.  Try not to be too jealous!

A Brief Compendium of Mesmerizing and Macabre Memento Mori

Today’s Way Out Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Talented, way-out Ernie Kovacs – whose range of comedy characters included lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils – once said, “I like to be onstage because nobody can bother me there. Lawyers, process servers, insurance salesman – anyone.” While he would make several movies, it was on TV that the burly Kovacs best demonstrated his rich and inventive comedy, most of which he wrote himself.

He and actress Edie Adams married in 1954 and moved to California in 1959 when Columbia Pictures signed Kovacs to a four-year contract at $100,000 a picture.  In 1960 he appeared on screen in five features, ranging from Our Man in Havana to Strangers When We Meet. In what proved to be his last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), he was cast as a menacing villain.

Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs

In early 1961, Kovacs was acting in a TV pilot (A Pony for Chris with Buster Keaton) and was discussing a feature-film production deal with Alec Guinness. Then came January 12, 1962, the day that ended everything for Kovacs.

The Kovacs were invited to director Billy Wilder’s apartment on Wilshire Boulevard to celebrate the christening of Milton and Ruth Berle’s new son, Michael. Edie drove to the party alone in her Corvair station wagon, since Ernie had been busy working on the TV pilot all day and was to meet her there. He drove to Wilder’s place in his white Rolls Royce. At 1:20 A.M., Ernie and Edie left the get-together. He offered French movie star Yves Montand a ride, but Montand decided to go with the Berles. Slightly drunk, Ernie drove off in the station wagon (which Edie hated to drive), asking his wife to drive the Rolls home. As he roared through the wet night, his vehicle smashed into the concrete triangle at the intersection of Beverly Glen and Santa Monica Boulevard. The impact spun the car around and wrapped it around a pole. Kovacs died instantly of a basal skull fracture. He was found dead with a Cuban cigar a few inches from his hand. Had he not been momentarily distracted while trying to light the stogie, he would have been 43 on January 23, 1962.

Unaware of the tragedy, Edie had driven home. When she heard the bad news, she refused to believe her husband was gone until Jack Lemmon went to the morgue and confirmed that he was indeed dead. Edie asked Lemmon to put several Havana cigars in Ernie’s pocket before the burial.

The funeral was held on January 18, 1962, at the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church, and attended by a host of celebrities. Pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Billy Wilder, and Dean Martin. The comedian was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California, where his marker reads: “Ernie Kovacs 1919-1962. Nothing in Moderation. We all loved him.” The hard-working Edie was saddled with $600,000 in gambling and tax debts that took her years to pay off.

Kovacs dead at the scene

The battered Corvair

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Anonymous/AP/Shutterstock (6628352a)
Dotted line in this view of Santa Monica Boulevard course taken by a skidding station wagon driven by comedian Ernie Kovacs and the power point into which he crashed, Los Angeles, Calif. Kovacs died in the wreckage. He was enroute home when the vehicle went out of control on wet pavement
Ernie Kovacs Crash Site 1962, Los Angeles, USA

Scene of the Crash – it looks nothing like this now.

Culled from: The Hollywood Book of Death

Today’s Tortur’d Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 17th century England there was an interpretation of the law by many accused persons that while their goods and chattels would be forfeit to the king on being executed, nevertheless should they die while being persuaded to plead, their worldly goods would pass to their families, as no death sentence had been passed on them by the court. The historian Holinshead reported it as:

Such fellons as stand mute and speake not at their arraignmente are pressed to death by huge weights laid up on a board that lieth over their brest, and a sharp stone under their backs, and these commonlie hold their peace, thereby to save their goods unto their wives and children; which if they were condemned, should be confiscated to the king.

One man who was prepared to die slowly and painfully rather than deprive his successors of their birthright was George Strangeways, a Royalist major in the Civil War.  Rather than have his estate confiscated by the victorious Roundheads, he leased it to his sister Mabellah, with whom he lived. Mabellah, however, got married, and George, fearing the loss of his possessions to the newcomer, murdered him. Determined to defy the authorities to the bitter end, he remained mute at his trial in February 1658. The court sentenced him to be pressed, but vindictively ordered that the planks on which the victim usually lay should be omitted, so that by lying on an earthen floor, death would be delayed.

Another unfortunate soul being pressed to death.

The press at that time was a triangular board, the acute angle of which was positioned over the victim’s heart, and George Strangeways’ suffering must have been extreme, before the merciful end came.

He was prohibited that usuall Favour in that kind, to have a piece of Timber layed under his back to Accelerate its penetration, and the Assistants laid on a first weight, which finding it too light for a sudden Execution, many of those standing by added their own weight to disburthen him of his pain. In the space of eight or ten minutes at the most, his unfettered Soul left her tortur’d Mansion. And he from that violent Paroxisme fell into the quiet sleep of Death.

Culled from: Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers

Today’s Pestilent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

This is the story of a man whose ideas could have saved a lot of lives and spared countless numbers of women and newborns’ feverish and agonizing deaths.

You’ll notice I said “could have.”

The year was 1846, and our would-be hero was a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis.

Semmelweis was a man of his time, according to Justin Lessler, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Ignaz Semmelweis: Man Before His Time

It was a time Lessler describes as “the start of the golden age of the physician scientist,” when physicians were expected to have scientific training.

So doctors like Semmelweis were no longer thinking of illness as an imbalance caused by bad air or evil spirits. They looked instead to anatomy. Autopsies became more common, and doctors got interested in numbers and collecting data.

The young Dr. Semmelweis was no exception. When he showed up for his new job in the maternity clinic at the General Hospital in Vienna, he started collecting some data of his own. Semmelweis wanted to figure out why so many women in maternity wards were dying from puerperal fever — commonly known as childbed fever.

He studied two maternity wards in the hospital. One was staffed by all male doctors and medical students, and the other was staffed by female midwives. And he counted the number of deaths on each ward.

When Semmelweis crunched the numbers, he discovered that women in the clinic staffed by doctors and medical students died at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives’ clinic.

But why?

Semmelweis went through the differences between the two wards and started ruling out ideas.

Right away he discovered a big difference between the two clinics.

In the midwives’ clinic, women gave birth on their sides. In the doctors’ clinic, women gave birth on their backs. So he had women in the doctors’ clinic give birth on their sides. The result, Lessler says, was “no effect.”

Then Semmelweis noticed that whenever someone on the ward died of childbed fever, a priest would walk slowly through the doctors’ clinic, past the women’s beds with an attendant ringing a bell. This time Semmelweis theorized that the priest and the bell ringing so terrified the women after birth that they developed a fever, got sick and died. [Leave it to a 19th century man to think a woman who survived the rigors of childbirth would be scared to death by the ringing of a bell! – DeSpair]

So Semmelweis had the priest change his route and ditch the bell. Lessler says, “It had no effect.”

By now, Semmelweis was frustrated. He took a leave from his hospital duties and traveled to Venice. He hoped the break and a good dose of art would clear his head.

When Semmelweis got back to the hospital, some sad but important news was waiting for him. One of his colleagues, a pathologist, had fallen ill and died. It was a common occurrence, according to Jacalyn Duffin, who teaches the history of medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

“This often happened to the pathologists,” Duffin says. “There was nothing new about the way he died. He pricked his finger while doing an autopsy on someone who had died from childbed fever.” And then he got very sick himself and died.

Semmelweis studied the pathologist’s symptoms and realized the pathologist died from the same thing as the women he had autopsied. This was a revelation: Childbed fever wasn’t something only women in childbirth got sick from. It was something other people in the hospital could get sick from as well.

But it still didn’t answer Semmelweis’ original question: “Why were more women dying from childbed fever in the doctors’ clinic than in the midwives’ clinic?”

Duffin says the death of the pathologist offered him a clue.

“The big difference between the doctors’ ward and the midwives’ ward is that the doctors were doing autopsies and the midwives weren’t,” she says.

So Semmelweis hypothesized that there were cadaverous particles, little pieces of corpse, that students were getting on their hands from the cadavers they dissected. And when they delivered the babies, these particles would get inside the women who would develop the disease and die.

If Semmelweis’ hypothesis was correct, getting rid of those cadaverous particles should cut down on the death rate from childbed fever.

So he ordered his medical staff to start cleaning their hands and instruments not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. Chlorine, as we know today, is about the best disinfectant there is. Semmelweis didn’t know anything about germs. He chose the chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by those little bits of corpse.

Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in chlorinated lime water before operating.

And when he imposed this, the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically.

What Semmelweis had discovered is something that still holds true today: Hand-washing is one of the most important tools in public health. It can keep kids from getting the flu, prevent the spread of disease and keep infections at bay.

You’d think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren’t thrilled.

For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis’ hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women.

And Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies.

Eventually the doctors gave up the chlorine hand-washing, and Semmelweis — he lost his job.

Semmelweis kept trying to convince doctors in other parts of Europe to wash with chlorine, but no one would listen to him.

Even today, convincing health care providers to take hand-washing seriously is a challenge. Hundreds of thousands of hospital patients get infections each year, infections that can be deadly and hard to treat. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hand hygiene is one of the most important ways to prevent these infections.

Over the years, Semmelweis got angrier and eventually even strange. There’s been speculation he developed a mental condition brought on by possibly syphilis or even Alzheimer’s. And in 1865, when he was only 47 years old, Ignaz Semmelweis was committed to a mental asylum.

The sad end to the story is that Semmelweis was probably beaten in the asylum and eventually died of sepsis, a potentially fatal complication of an infection in the bloodstream — basically, it’s the same disease Semmelweis fought so hard to prevent in those women who died from childbed fever.

Culled from: NPR

Something Interesting

The always-wonderful Michael Marano wrote to share a wonderful way to waste a few hours: the Livejournal (remember that?) page All Things Amazing.  If you’re fond of eclectic photographs and ephemera, please visit!

Today’s Deadly Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In October 1926 Chief Medical Examiner Charles Norris issued his yearly analysis of deaths in New York City. He’d instituted that procedure when taking office. Insurance companies around the country now requested the report.

This one confirmed that automobiles and their often-drunken drivers remained the city’s greatest killers, taking 1,272 lives in a year. There had also been 984 suicides (almost 400 by illuminating gas), 356 murders (mostly shootings), and 696 alcohol-related deaths. There was also the elevator problem: 87 people had died in elevator accidents during the year – 47 falls into open shafts, 36 crushed by the doors, three killed when cables broke and the machines fell.

Murdermobiles!

Then six people had been killed playing baseball, six people had died in sleighing accidents, football had killed one, three had died in fistfights, and eight people had lost their lives in diving accidents. The list could go on and on – and did. The medical examiners’s office counted a total of 4,481 deaths from such non-natural causes that year, which – as Norris also noted – was pretty average for the city.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

Atrocious Archives!

If you’re bored, why not peruse the NYC Department of Records Online Collections?  So much to obsess over!

Almhouse Ledgers!
Bodies in Transit Registers!
Fire Department Photos!

and, most fascinatingly of all,
NYPD & Criminal Prosecution

(Thanks to Michael Marano for the tip.)