Today’s Bulging Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
During the New York City heat wave of August, 1896 most people stuck close to the shore and the surf. Reports of drowning came from all over the region. Fifteen-year-old William Brown was swimming in the Hudson with some friends when he suddenly threw up his hands and went under. As all the boys had been playing games and “cutting all sorts of antics,” no one paid much attention until his friend noticed that he had not come back up for air. They tried diving for Brown but unable to find him, they ran to a nearby police station for help. His body was soon discovered. Two died in Newark, bodies were found in the North and Hudson Rivers, and a little girl nearly drowned after wading in the East River.
Cooling off at Coney Island in the Summer of 1896
The strangest drowning of the day (Saturday, August 8) occurred when F.R. Schultz, a baker, choked on his false teeth while bathing at Rockaway Beach on Long Island. Although he was swimming in shallow water at the time, he was unable to help himself and was dragged from the surf by a lifeguard. As the lifeguard tried to resuscitate Schultz, he noticed a bulging in the man’s throat. Pushing his finger down the throat, the lifeguard found a plate with two false teeth on it. By this time Schultz was already dead.
Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town
Holocaust Victim Du Jour
The Euthanasia Program (Aktion T4) was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. It predated the genocide of European Jewry (the Holocaust) by approximately two years. The program was one of many radical eugenic measures which aimed to restore the racial “integrity” of the German nation. It aimed to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered “life unworthy of life”: those individuals who—they believed—because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state.
Approximately 300,000 people were murdered between 1934 and 1945. Here is one of them:
Leopoldine Schlager was born in 1898. She lived in Mürzzuschlag, Styria (Austria), until 1928, when she was admitted to the Am Feldhof state mental hospital in Graz. She was murdered in the Hartheim killing centre in 1941. This picture shows Leopoldine circa 1920.
Culled from: Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated: The Sick and the Disabled Under National Socialism