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.)
Six sleighs a-slaying….