Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [116]
ALEXANDER RENHART, fifty-seven, was born in Germany, was married, and worked as a janitor in an office building on Beekman, where he also lived. He died of “excessive heat” and “heart failure.”
EDWARD KEENAN, forty, was yet another Irish immigrant felled by heat. He worked as a plasterer and lived in a tenement. His doctor listed “coma” and “sunstroke” as causes of death but in a flourish of French also wrote “coup du soleil.”
MARY BUSCHNER had arrived from Germany only five weeks before and had been fortunate to find work as a domestic. Evidently the work, in addition to life in a tenement, took its toll, as she died at only age seventeen of “cardiac failure” and “sunstroke.”
LOUISA HOPKINS, fifty-seven, was a married housewife living in a tenement. One of three native-born black Americans to die in Manhattan that day, the attending doctor listed her color as “Ethiopia” and her death as caused by “asthemia” and “cerebral apoplexy due to heat.”
ANNIE SULLIVAN was born in a tenement to native-born parents. Possibly because of the heat, her mother gave birth prematurely, and little Annie lived only seventeen hours. Most likely the same doctor who attended Annie’s birth filled out her death certificate, listing her death as caused by “premature birth” and “exhaustion.”
SISTER MARY of the Roman Catholic Marianites of the Holy Cross had come from Brittany, France, to work at the Asylum of St. Vincent de Paul on West Thirty-Ninth Street. The asylum was established, according to King’s Handbook of New York City, “for the reception, care and religious and secular education of destitute and unprotected orphans of both sexes, preferably of French birth or parentage, over four years old.” Only twenty-three years old, Sister Mary died of “syncope and coma from heat prostration.”
ANNIE BOTCHKISS was born to Russian immigrants on August 6 in a rear tenement at 66 Market Street. She died after only five days of “collapse” and “insolation.”
DIETRICH PRUSHEN, fifty-three, from Germany, died at Bellevue Hospital from “insolation.”
PETER F. KAINE, thirty-three, a widower and the son of Irish immigrants, would have celebrated ten years on the New York police force at the end of the month. He died at home of “insolation” and “pulmonary aedema.” At the time of his death the doctor noted that Peter’s body temperature was 109 degrees.
Another police officer and son of Irish parents died at Roosevelt Hospital. Listed on his death certificate by the attending doctor as “JOHN W. GOOD-WIN,” but by the New York police as “James Goodison,” he was forty-two and died of “thermic fever.”
JAMES P. DOANES, fifty-nine, from Ireland, died of “sunstroke.” At the time of his death the doctor noted, “temperature in rectum 110 ¾ Fah.”
JACQUES GILLES, forty-one, from France, worked as an artist and died of “insolation.”
CATHERINE SOPHIA FREEMAN, twenty-six, was born in Germany, was married, and worked as a housekeeper. She had apparently just given birth, as the doctor listed as her cause of death “prostration from heat” and “lying in period.” For women in the late nineteenth century, especially poor immigrants living in tenements, who were frequently unable to pay for a doctor, surviving the actual birth was only the first step toward recovering health and strength. The “lying-in period” after birth could be long and dangerous, both for the mother and for the newborn baby. At least one charity in the city dedicated itself to such cases. The New York Female Asylum for Lying-In Women was founded in 1827 to “provide free accommodation and medical attendance during confinement, to respectable indigent married women. It also gives the same aid to similar cases at their homes, and trains wet nurses for their profession.” The training of wet nurses was of particular importance for the Freemans, now that Catherine had died and left the surviving Freeman baby without a source of milk. Doctors frequently listed