Category Archives: Ghastly!

Today’s Appalling Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

European expansion produced the ‘Columbian exchange’, a highly unequal disease trade-off in which Columbus may have brought one killer disease back from the Americas: syphilis. This broke out in 1493-4 during a war between Spain and France being waged in Italy. When Naples fell to the French, the conquerors indulged in the usual orgy of rape and pillage, and the troops and their camp-followers then scattered throughout Europe. Soon, a terrible venereal epidemic was raging. It began with genital sores, progressing to a general rash, to ulceration, and to revolting abscesses eating into bones and destroying the nose, lips and genitals, and often proving fatal.

Man suffering from syphilis, 1868

Initially, it was called the ‘disease of Naples’, but rapidly became the ‘French Pox’ and other terms accusing this or that nation: the Spanish disease in Holland, the Polish disease in Russia, the Russian disease in Siberia, the Christian disease in Turkey and the Portuguese disease in India and Japan. For their part, the Portuguese called it the Castilian disease, and a couple of centuries later Captain Cook (1728-79), exploring the Pacific, rued that the Tahitians ‘call the venereal disease Apa no Britannia – the British disease’ (he thought they’d caught it from the French).

That some of the Spaniards at the siege of Naples had accompanied Columbus suggested an American origin for the pox (or ‘great pox’, to distinguish it from smallpox). It certainly behaved in Europe like a new disease, spreading like wildfire for a couple of decades. ‘In recent times’, reflected one sufferer, Joseph Gruenpeck (c. 1473-c.1532):

I have seen scourges, horrible sicknesses and many infirmities affect mankind from all corners of the earth. Amongst them has crept in, from the western shores of Gaul, a disease which is so cruel, so distressing, so appalling that until now nothing so horrifying, nothing more terrible or distgusting, has ever been known on this earth.

Syphilis, we now know, is one of several diseases caused by members of the Treponema group of spirochetes, a corkscrew-shaped bacterium. There are four clinically distinct human treponematoses (the others are pinta, yaws and bejel) and their causative organisms are virtually identical, suggesting all are descendants of an ancestral spirochete which adapted to different climates and human behaviors.

What caused this terrible outbreak? Many epidemiological possibilities have been mooted. It is feasible that some American treponemal infection merged with a similar European one to become syphilis, with both initial infections subsequently disappearing. Others maintain that venereal infections had long been present in Europe but never properly distinguished from leprosy; treponemal infections (pinta, yaws, endemic and venereal syphilis) had, it is suggested, initially presented as mild childhood illnesses, spread by casual contact and producing a measure of immunity. With improved European living standards, treponemes dependent on skin contact had become disadvantaged, being replaced by hardier, sexually transmitted strains. Thus an initially mild disorder grew more serious. A related theory holds that the spirochete had long been present in both the Old World and the New; what would explain the sixteenth-century explosion were the social disruptions of the time, especially warfare.

Like the pox itself, the debate raged — and remains unresolved to this day. But whatever the precise epidemiology, syphilis, like typhus, should be regarded as typical of the new plagues of an age of conquest and turbulence, one spread by international warfare, rising population density, changed lifestyles and sexual behavior, the migrations of soldiers and traders, and the ebb and flow of refugees and peasants. While Europeans were establishing their empires and exporting death to aboriginal peoples, they were caught in microbial civil wars at home. Bubonic plague bounced from the Balkans to Britain, malaria was on the increase, smallpox grew more virulent, while typhus and the ‘bloody flux’ (dysentery) became camp-followers of every army. Influenza epidemics raged, especially lethal being the ‘English sweat’ (sudor Anglicus) which struck in 1485 (delaying Henry VII’s coronation), 1507, 1528, 1551 and 1578, and was described by Polydore Vergil, an Italian diplomat in London, as ‘a pestilence horrible indeed, and before which no age could endure’. John Caius’s (1510-73) A Boke of Conseill against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweat or Sweating Sickness (1552) noted the copious sweating, shivering, fever, nausea, headache, cramps, back pain, delirium and stupor. It came to crisis within twenty-four hours, with very high mortality. It was thought even worse than the plague, for plague:

commonly giveth three or four, often seven, sometimes nine… sometimes eleven, and sometimes fourteen day’s respect to whom it vexeth. But that [the sweating sickness] immediately killed some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors, some in one hour, many in two it destroyed, and at the longest, so they that merrily dined, it gave a sorrowful supper.

The ‘English sweat’ remains a riddle. Such calamities form a doleful backdrop to the Renaissance.

The English Sweat – famous ska band!

Culled from: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

Post-Mortem Portraits Du Jour!

Culled from: Sleeping Beauty I

Today’s Cheap Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In public affection the landlord’s rating was comparable to that of the kidnapper; and the richer he was, the more likely he was to deserve it. His victim, the tenant, is today protected by the law, but in the 19th century he was vulnerable, ignorant and utterly misused.

New York’s soaring population—augmented by the continuing influx of Europeans—aggravated the housing shortage and inflated real estate values. Keen as foxes to the scent of weaker game, speculators piously came to the rescue by building the cheapest form of tenements.

Cracked walls, sagging floors, and a total absence of fire exits were features of these neglected buildings, whose dingy over-crowded rooms drew extortionate rents. Landlords bullied poor and middle-class families with yearly rent increases and unpardonably brutal evictions. [Everything old is new again, eh? – DeSpair]

For New Yorkers who became casualties of the rent spiral the boarding house offered a solution, though not an ideal one. For $3 to $5 a week the clerk or working girl could find refuge here, along with childless couples, adventurers and ne’er-do-wells. Together they comprised a true cross section of America’s transient population—a culture of the homeless who were bound to a fixed place by neither blood nor tradition.

No invention of the Gilded Age, the boarding house had flourished before the Civil War in frontier cities and towns as a vital element in the nation’s growth. Charles Dickens, among others, missed their significance when he waspishly compared America’s rootless ways with those of the English.

Domestic moralists saw them as a threats to Victorian rectitude that loosened family ties and encouraged sinful liaisons. No doubt these dangers existed, but for legions with meager resources the boarding house was home.

The need for the apartment house existed for many years before its evolution. The boarding house and tenement were too little; the townhouse, too much. The intense frustration of city life literally forced the development of the apartment building, which was to convert millions of Americans into “cliff dwellers.”

The flight from private dwellings began with the well-to-do, whose townhouses had become a financial burden. Richard M. Hunt created the prototype of a new style of housing in his Stuyvesant Apartments on 18th Street in New York. Contrary to dire predictions that New Yorkers would never consent to live “on mere shelves under a common roof,” this building and similar ones that followed it proved very successful. Class privilege was safeguarded by rents up to $3000 for seven rooms.

Reassured by the acceptance of communal living by the wealthy, real estate entrepreneurs built lower-rent apartment houses for the middle class. But these structures, which soon mushroomed in American cities, were little more than glorified tenements; and the style of living that was a pleasure for the rich became, in imitation, a curse to the wage earner. As a contemporary observed, “Reasonable apartments are not good, and good apartments are not reasonable.”

Families were shelved in layers, sharing floors that were subdivided into several apartments, three or four tiny rooms providing no insulation from the neighbors’ cooking smells or babies’ squallings. Garbage removal and sanitary facilities were comparably wretched and overcrowding made the buildings “more difficult to manage that n the tenement houses of the slum districts.”

As the size and number of apartment buildings increased, so too did the danger that a fire would turn them into blazing prisons. Of course, they were not the only firetraps, but they accounted for the heaviest loss of life in the great conflagrations of the period. Between 1870 and 1906 four American cities—Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco—burned to the ground, a record unmatched anywhere else in the world. Boston’s assessment of its yearly fire damage—$1 to $1.5 million—was ten times greater than that of a European city of comparable size.

The frequency and destructiveness of fires in American cities were blamed on shoddy construction and the use of flammable materials in the construction of “fireproof” apartments. Even as late as 1904, after steel had replaced the less heat-resistant cast iron for building, 7000 lives were lost in city fires.

Nowhere is the fireman more celebrated than in the Untied States. And for sound, historical reasons.

Culled from: The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible!

Vintage Illustration Du Jour!

A woman’s face, badly affected with lesions of impetigo on the nose, cheeks and upper lip.

Culled from: The Sick Rose

Today’s Waterlogged Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

James Larson, an eighteen-year-old from Forest City, Iowa, spent his second summer in 1954 in charge of motor and rowboats at the Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park. Perhaps he wanted the job so much that he hid from his employers that he could not swim, or maybe he truly believed that if push ever came to shove he would survive by instinct. When he slipped while closing a window on  a boat and fell into the lake, however, he realized instantly the severity of his error. He yelled for help and got it—people came running to his aid and pulled him out of the water within five minutes—but during his ordeal in the water, he hit his head on the bottom of the boat. The blow knocked him out, and even though a doctor staying at the hotel worked for nearly three hours to revive him, she could not bring him around.

Many Glacier Hotel beside the fatal lake

Culled from: Death in Glacier National Park

Vintage Crime Scene Photo Du Jour!

Tony Moreno, alias Dominick “The Rat” Russo, felt secure enough in his position as gang chief of Cicero, Illinois, to sun himself on his own turf. Moreno, described as a “pupil of Capone,” was not protected by his mentor once Capone was in prison. On August 2, 1933, gunmen fired four bullets into Moreno’s chest. The pool of blood and the gazing crowd are standard fixtures in photos of gangland slayings. The pointed shoes and dangling hand make Moreno a much more elegant corpse than most dead mobsters.

Culled from: Shots in the Dark

Today’s Filthy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Typhus fever is entirely different from typhoid fever. The latter is a water-borne disease caused by a bacillus. Typhus fever is a disease of dirt. The causative organism, Rickettsia prowazekii, belongs to a class of organisms which lies midway between the relatively large bacteria, easily seen under a high-powered microscope and which produced diseases such as typhoid, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and the viruses, which produce such diseases as smallpox and measles and which are so minute that they can be identified only with an electronic microscope. The organism is carried by lice. Lice is often found on animals or in the cracks and crannies of old buildings, but they can also infest unwashed bodies and the seams of dirty clothing.

Rickettsia prowazekii – ain’t it cute?

This is why typhus acquired the name of gaol fever and, since fevers were supposed to be caused by bad smells, this is the reason why English judges customarily would bear small nosegays of sweet-smelling flowers. The disease originated in the filthy prisons and spread from the felon in the dock to the judge upon the bench. Three such ‘assize epidemics’ occurred in the sixteenth century. These epidemics were late incidents in the history of typhus. The origin of the disease remains obscure. One theory holds that it originated in the East as an infection of lice and rats but subsequently became an infection of lice and men. (Of Lice and Men – I think I read that in 10th grade. – DeSpair)  Cyprus and the Levant were probably the first focus of spread to Europe, the earliest known severe outbreak being in the Spanish armies of Ferdinand and Isabella during 1489-90.

Since typhus is a campaign and dirt disease, particularly liable to occur in conditions where a number of people are herded closely together, wearing the same clothes for prolonged periods, and lacking means of ensuring bodily cleanliness, it sometimes had profound effects upon the fortunes of war. A remarkable example is the relatively small and localized epidemic which destroyed a French army besieging Naples in July 1528, thus making a decisive contribution to the final submission of Pope Clement VII to Charles V of Spain. Typhus also forced the Imperial armies of Maximilian II to break off the campaign against the Turks in 1566. Soldiers carried typhus fever across Europe during the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 and it was during this period that the disease became firmly established.

Typhus remained endemic in the whole of Europe from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, but it was only in conditions of warfare, extreme poverty or famine that major outbreaks occurred. The United States was not infected until early in the nineteenth century; a great epidemic occurred at Philadelphia in 1837. But the history of typhus is complicated by the existence of more than one form of the disease. ‘True’ typus fever, characterized by high fever, delirium, a crisis, and a blotchy rash, is very dangerous. Other less dangerous variants are Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Brill’s Disease—a mild type which occurred among New York Jews and was described by Nathan Edwin Brill in 1898—and the Trench Fever of the First World War. This last variant, which was very prevalent among German and Allied troops, apparently replaced ‘true’ typhus in the armies it infected, for ‘true’ typhus did not occur among them, though it wrought havoc among the Servs and Russians. After the Russian revolution and the civil war which followed, famine and disease devastated almost the whole country. Approximately 20 million cases of true typhus occurred in European Russia alone between 1917 and 1921, with from 2.5 million to 3 million deaths.

True Typhus rash

The mode of transmission of typhus by the bite of the infected body louse was first described in 1911. H. da Roche Lima isolated the causative organism in 1916 and named it after an American, Howard Taylor Ricketts, and an Austrian, Stanislaus Joseph von Prowazek, both of whom died while investigating the disease. Since then improvements in hygiene and the use of DDT to kill lice have brought typhus under control, but mystery still surrounds this disease, for it seems that very special conditions are necessary before it will flourish in a virulent form, even when there is gross infestation with lice. Typhus seems to require concomitant malnutrition and sordid living conditions before it will produce a lethal epidemic.

Clipping hair of a boy infested with lice at a bathing station in Warsaw, 1917.

Culled from: Disease in History

Crime Scene Du Jour!

Scene of Dutch Schultz Shooting at the Palace Bar and Grill, Newark New Jersey, 1935

In 1935 Lucky Luciano ordered a hit on fellow gangster Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer and his “aides” after Schultz announced his intention to kill the anti-mob prosecutor Thomas L. Dewey. Luciano feared this murder would draw unwanted attention to the racketeers, so he put out an order to silence Schultz. Along with three other gangsters, Schultz was gunned down in a Newark, New Jersey, restaurant.

Culled from: Police Pictures

Today’s Deported Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Twenty-eight Mexican nationals got into an old, twin-engine DC-3 on the cold and clear Tuesday morning of January 28, 1948. The twenty-seven men and one woman were being deported back to their home country because they were working illegally in California as agricultural workers. The deportees had the choice of taking a bus, train, or airplane back to El Centro, California. The novelty of flying and the speed of the flight sounded much better than a long, cold, and bumpy ride.

The DC-3 was owned by Airline Transport Carriers, an  air carrier that flew only flights chartered by various government agencies. The flight on that cold January day was chartered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to fly the deportees to the INS Deportation Center in El Centro.

For reasons that remain unknown, Captain Frank Atkinson and co-pilot Marion Ewing took the wrong airplane for the flight. They were supposed to take a DC-3 that was certified to carry thirty-two passengers, but instead took a DC-3 that had seats for only twenty-six passengers and was seven hours overdue for a routine and required safety inspection. The thirty-year-old Atkinson had more than 1,700 hours of flight time and Ewing had more than 4,000 hours. Both had been U.S. Army Air Corps pilots during World War II. Along with the flying crew, Atkinson’s wife Bobbie flew along to serve as a flight attendant. The flight to Oakland was routine, and nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Greeted in Oakland by INS guard Frank Chaffin, the crew found out that there were more passengers than seats in the plane. It is not known if Captain Atkinson realized then that he had flown the wrong airplane or if he had been aware of the fact all along. He apparently did not care, as the plane was flying light. The flight was to travel to Burbank for refueling before heading off to El Centro. Atkinson loaded the evicted Mexicans and their guard into the plane. Three of the migrant workers had to sit on luggage. The DC-3 was slightly overloaded as it bounded down the runway and over the San Francisco Bay.

At approximately 10:30 a.m., workers at the Fresno County Industrial Road Camp, located twenty-one miles northwest of the town of Coalinga, noticed the DC-3 overhead, trailing white smoke from its port engine. Many of the one hundred men at the camp were veterans of World War II and had seen many airplanes in trouble.

Suddenly, the work crew saw the left wing ripped away from the fuselage along with nine passengers, who had jumped out through the gaping hole in the fuselage. The plane caught fire and spiraled to the ground, exploding in a huge ball of fire. The workmen ran to the scene to rescue any survivors, but the only thing that they could do was put out the fires that the blazing aircraft had sprayed over the dry Los Gatos Canyon.

The fiery wreckage was spewed over a two-hundred-yard area. Bodies—some still strapped in their seats—littered the terrain, along with suitcases and shoes. The wing, together with the bodies of the nine jumpers, was found a half mile from the crash site. The majority of the dead were found in the front of the aircraft’s burnt-out hull.

The investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Authority found that a fuel leak in the port engine fuel pump ignited a fire and, due to the extremely fast-moving in-flight air, acted like a cutting torch, burning through the wing span, causing the wing to be torn away.

The people of Fresno turned out for the mass funeral of the twenty-eight Mexican nationals at Holy Cross Cemetery. Catholic mass was said by Monsignor John Galvin of Saint John’s Cathedral and Father Jose de Gaiarrgia of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Twenty-eight identical gray caskets were laid to rest into an eight-four-foot-long mass grave, flanked by officials from Mexico and the United Sates and their respective flags. Twelve of the victims were never identified.

Legendary songwriter Woody Guthrie read about the disaster at his home in New York City and became infuriated that the newspapers had omitted the names of the deportees. He wrote a poem called “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” that lamented that fact. If Woody had read the Fresno Bee, he would have seen that everyone who was identified was named in the Fresno paper, the closest city to the accident.

Mass Burial

Culled from: Death In California by my friend David Kulczyk

Ghastly!

Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945.  Here’s one of his haunting images from the book Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.

Today’s Noticeable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Matthew Lovat was a mentally unstable eighteenth-century Italian shoemaker.  His mental condition first showed itself when he castrated himself as a young man. The ridicule that this aroused in his native village of Casale forced him to move to Venice. A year later he tried to crucify himself in the street but was stopped when he attempted to nail his left foot to a wooden cross. He returned to Casale and began work making ;a second cross, which he attached to a rope suspended from the ceiling of his third-floor room.

With the cross laid flat on the floor, Lovat stripped off save for a handkerchief girding his loins. He donned a crown of thorns. Slipping his feet into a specially made bracket, he proceeded to hammer a nail through his feet into the wood of the cross. He tied his body securely to the shaft of the cross to prevent him slipping off and imitated Christ’s spear wound by cutting himself with a knife. Next, using his free hands, he edged the cross towards the window ledge, until it overbalanced and fell vertically out into the street. Thus suspended, Lovat used his left hand to nail his right into the cross; predictably he found it impossible to nail his left, despite the fact that he had previously pierced the palm with a nail. Equally predictably,  his actions did not go unnoticed by passers-by, who rushed to his rescue.

Lovat’s third attempt at suicide was successful but more orthodox. He starved himself to death in a lunatic asylum.

Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears

Mütter Museum Specimen Du Jour!

Untitled from the Mütter Series ©2000 Candace diCarlo

Foetus, approximately twelve-weeks, cleared and stained with alizarin, preserved in glycerin.

Culled from: Mütter Museum

Today’s Unpleasant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

German submarine U-20 was the U-boat that sank the Lusitania.  Here is an excerpt about life about the submarine, from Erik Larson’s typically brilliant book, Dead Wake:

Under commander Walther Schwieger, U-20 had at least one dog aboard. At one time, it had six, four of them puppies, all dachshunds, the unexpected product of an attack off the coast of Ireland.

On that occasion, following cruiser rules, Schwieger chased and stopped a Portuguese ship, the Maria de Molenos. After waiting until its crew got away, he ordered his gun crew to sink the vessel. This was his favored mode of attack. He saved his few torpedoes for the best and biggest targets.

His gun crew was fast and accurate, and fired a series of shells into the freighter’s waterline. Soon the ship disappeared from view, or, as Zentner put it, “settled down for her bit of vertical navigation.”

Amid the usual debris left adrift on the surface, the men spotted a cow, swimming, and something else. The bearded accordion player saw it first and shouted, “Ach Himmel, der kleine Hund!”

He pointed to a box. A tiny head and two paws protruded over its edge. A black dachshund.

U-20 approached; the crew lifted the dog aboard. They named it Maria, after the sunken freighter. They could do nothing for the cow, however.

U-20 already had a dog aboard, a male, and in short order Maria became pregnant. She bore four puppies. The accordion player became the dogs’ caretaker. Deeming six dogs too many for a U-boat, the crew gave three puppies away to other boats but kept one. Zentner slept with one on his bunk, next to a torpedo. “So every night,” he said, “I slept with a torpedo and a puppy.”

U-20, second from left

That Schwieger was able to conjure so humane an environment was a testament to his skill at managing men, because conditions in a U-boat were harsh. The boats were cramped, especially when first setting out on patrol, with food stored in every possible location, including the latrine. Vegetables and meats were kept in the coolest places, among the boat’s munitions. Water was rationed. If you wanted to shave, you did so using the remains of the morning’s tea. No one bathed. Fresh food quickly spoiled. Whenever possible crews scavenged. One U-boat dispatched a hunting party to a Scottish island and killed a goat. Crews routinely pillaged ships for jam, eggs, bacon, and fruit. An attack by a British aircraft gave one U-boat’s crew an unexpected treat when the bomb it dropped missed and exploded in the sea. The concussion brought to the surface a school of stunned fish.

The crew of U-20 once scavenged an entire barrel of butter, but by that point in the patrol the boat’s cook had nothing suitable on hand to fry. Schwieger went shopping. Through his periscope he spotted a fleet of fishing boats and surfaced U-20 right in their midst. The fishermen, surprised and terrified, were certain their boats would now be sunk. But all Schwieger wanted was fish. The fishermen, relieved, gave his crew all the fish they could carry.

Schwieger ordered the submarine to the bottom so his crew could dine in peace. “And now,” said Zentner, “there was fresh fish, fried in butter, grilled in butter, sautéed in butter, all that we could eat.”

Commander Schweiger

These fish and their residual odors, however, could only have worsened the single most unpleasant aspect of U-boat life: the air within the boat. First there was the basal reek of three dozen men who never bathed, wore leather clothes that did not breathe, and shared one small lavatory. The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel. This tended to happen to novice officers and crew, and was called a “U-boat baptism.” The odor of diesel fuel infiltrated all corners of the boat, ensuring that every cup of cocoa and piece of bread tasted of oil. Then came the fragrances that emanated from the kitchen long after meals were cooked, most notably that close cousin to male body odor, day-old fried onions.

All this was made worse by a phenomenon unique to submarines that occurred while they were submerged. U-boats carried only limited amounts of oxygen, in cylinders, which injected air into the boat in a ratio that depended on the number of men aboard. Expended air was circulated over a potassium compound to cleanse it of carbonic acid, then reinjected into the boat’s atmosphere. Off-duty crew were encouraged to sleep because sleeping men consumed less oxygen. When deep underwater, the boat developed an interior atmosphere akin to that of a tropical swamp. The air became humid and dense to an unpleasant degree, this caused by the fact that heat generated by the men and by the still-hot diesel engines and the boat’s electrical apparatus warmed the hull. As the boat descended though ever colder waters, the contrast between the warm interior and cold exterior caused condensation, which soaked clothing and bred colonies of mold. Submarine crews called it “U-boat sweat.” It drew oil from the atmosphere and deposited it in coffee and soup, leaving a miniature oil slick. The longer the boat stayed submerged, the worse conditions became. Temperatures within could rise to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can have no conception of the atmosphere that is evolved by degrees under these circumstances,” wrote one commander, Paul Koenig, “nor of the hellish temperature which brews within the shell of steel.”

The men lived for the moment the boat ascended to the surface and the hatch in the conning tower was opened. “The first breath of fresh air, the open conning-tower hatch and the springing into life of the Diesel’s, after fifteen hours on the bottom, is an experience to be lived through,” said another commander, Martin Niemoller. “Everything comes to life and not a soul thinks of sleep. All hands seek a breath of air and a cigarette under shelter of the bridge screen.”

All these discomforts were borne, moreover, against a backdrop of always present danger, with everyone aware they faced the worst kind of death imaginable: slow suffocation in a darkened steel tube at the bottom of the sea.

Culled from: Dead Wake

Vintage Crime Scene Du Jour!

“Homicide, John Flood – July 3, 1917″
6.25″ x 8.25” glass-plate negative

PATROLMAN SLAIN WHILE WIFE WAITS

Patrolman About to Buy Funeral Wreath. He Is Called to Flat to Quell Row.

TWO WOMEN ARE HELD

Missing Pugilist Sought—Policeman Was Beaten to Death

Ten minutes after he left his wife waiting at Avenue A and Seventy-eighth street yesterday afternoon while he answered a summons of an apartment house disturbance. Patrolman John P. Flood of the East Sixty-seventh street station lay dead in the kitchen at 602 East Seventy-seventh street with a double fracture of the skull. When the policeman was found his assailant had fled. The police have sent out a general alarm for Milton Blier, a pugilist.

It was only half an hour before Flood’s duty ended, and his wife was waiting with him so they might purchase some flowers for the funeral of a little girl friend, when a hysterical woman rushed up and cried to the patrolman, whose three years in the neighborhood had made him well known:

“Come to my apartment quick, John. There is trouble.”

Patrolman goes to Death

Flood rushed away with the woman, whom beknown as Miss Kitty Mannix of the John Jay apartment house, at 502 East Seventy-seventh street. She explained to the patrolman, so she told the police afterwards, that she believed a prizes fighter, known as Milton Blier (alis Blaha), was waiting for her, and that she was afraid to enter her apartment. After she warned Flood that the man would probably cause trouble, the woman unlocked the door and the patrolman entered.

Miss Mannix said she went down the stairs to wait with her sister. The patrolman did not return, and believing she heard groans, she hurried to the office of Miss Emma Kelcourse, agent for the apartment house, at 510 East Seventy-seventh street who in turn reported to Julius Schneider, superintendent of the row of buildings. He went to the apartment and found Patrolman Flood lying unconscious on the floor, with blood splattered about the room, two or three broken plates, but no furniture upset. A physician of Flower Hospital found the policeman dead when he arrived a few minutes later.

Census Card is Clue

A State military census registration card led to the discovery of Miss Mannix, who disappeared immediately after she had reported to the house agent. On the card her name was Mrs. James O’Connor, and it was learned later that she was the wife of James O’Connor, with whom she has not been living for three years. The police found her in her mother’s laundry on the East Side. With Margaret Haskegen, her sister, of 419 East Sixty-fourth street, with whom she spent the night while in fear of going home, Kitty Mannix (Mrs. O’Connor) is being held by the police as a material witness.

After questioning the two women last night the police sent out a general alarm for Blier, a prizefighter, who is described as 23 years old, weighing 130 pounds, medium height and fair complexion. His home was in the neighborhood of Eightieth street and Second avenue.

The assailant is believed to have taken the weapon with which he killed the policeman with him. Coroner Healy said the wounds looked as if Flood had been struck on the forehead with a hammer and on the back of the head with a small axe.

Patrolman Flood lived at 426 West Fifty-First street with his wife and three children. He also supported the children of his brother-in-law. He joined the force in July 1902. He was known among the fellow patrolmen of the Sixty-seventh Street for his mild manner and good nature.

Patrolman John Flood

Culled from: Murder in the City

Incidentally, last year a street was named in honor of Flood, and in 2019 his unmarked grave was given a proper headstone:
https://patch.com/new-york/upper-east-side-nyc/officer-killed-1917-gets-honored-yorkville-street-naming

Today’s Frostbitten Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Civic disaster requires a hero. Minnesotans found or created one in a young storm survivor they christened “Minnesota’s Frozen Son.” Michael J. Dowling was fifteen when he came within an inch of freezing to death in one of the blizzards of the winter of 1880-81 (known as the “Snow Winter” because of the immense and frequent snowstorms). Dowling’s frostbite was so advanced that he lost both legs below the knees, his left arm below the elbow, and all the fingers and most of the thumb on his right hand. But Dowling was a fighter. He lived on to become a teacher, newspaper editor, and eventually speaker of the house of the Minnesota State Legislature. “It is what one has above the shoulders that counts, ” he always told his fellow amputees.

Culled from: The Children’s Blizzard

Vintage Medical Photo Du Jour!

“A Morning’s Work,” 1865
Reed Brockway Bontecou, M.D., Washington D.C.
Albumen print, 6 x 4 1/2 in.

This photograph graphically documents the devastation of the Civil War. More than 625,000 men died (one of every four who fought), and more than 400,000 were wounded. Chronic diarrhea and infections such as dysentery killed tens of thousands of people in the years following, as a ravaged generation and a young nation continued to pay the costs of the war.

Reed Brockway Bontecou, M. D. (1824-1907), Surgeon in Charge at Harewood United States Army General Hospital in Washington, D.C. was an avid proponent of photography and documented his cases for inclusion in the newly established United Sates Army Medical Museum. This image, labeled “A Morning’s Work” by Dr. Bontecou himself, reflects the typical number of amputations he performed in a single morning.

Culled from: A Morning’s Work