{"id":2485,"date":"2011-08-02T20:16:11","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T02:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asylumeclectica.com\/grim\/?p=2485"},"modified":"2011-08-02T20:16:11","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T02:16:11","slug":"mfdj080211","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=2485","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour For August 2, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Today&#8217;s Shady Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Although today we think of coroners as esteemed medical professionals, there was a time when they were untrained elected officials.  In New York City, political party bosses regularly fixed elections to reward loyal supporters with the lucrative position.  A 1915 report estimated that the city spent $172,000 annually on &#8220;unqualified coroners, their mediocre physicians and their personal clerks, who spend most of their time on private affairs,&#8221; or lining their pockets.  In addition to drawing their salaries, coroners worked on commission.  They could &#8211; and usually did &#8211; bill the city for every body they examined; one assistant coroner &#8220;investigated&#8221; the same drowning victim more than a dozen times, claiming each time that it had bobbed up at a different location on the Hudson River.  Coroners had been known to allow families to claim bodies only if they agreed to let a certain funeral home, which paid a kickback, handle the arrangements.  Coroners had other sources of income as well.  They sold fake death certificates and thereby covered up murders, criminal abortions, and suicides.  One example involved a man who had been found dead in his bed, with a bullet wound in his mouth and a revolver in his right hand.  The gun contains three loaded cartridges and one exploded one.  The coroner gave the cause of death as &#8220;rupture of thoracic aneurism&#8221;.   <\/p>\n<p>Culled from:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/theasylumeclecti\/detail\/014311882X\">The Poisoner&#8217;s Handbook<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s Shady Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Although today we think of coroners as esteemed medical professionals, there was a time when they were untrained elected officials. In New York City, political party bosses regularly fixed elections to reward loyal supporters with the lucrative position. A 1915 report estimated that the city spent $172,000 annually on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}