Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [27]
During the heat wave, heat prostrations became public knowledge when they occurred on the streets or were reported to the police. In addition, the New York coroner and the hospitals often provided information concerning victims of the heat. The extensive newspaper accounts of the heat wave and the lists of victims led previous writers to assert that perhaps 400 New Yorkers died during the heat wave, a number reached by adding up the total number of deaths as reported in the papers. Yet as the vast difference in number of deaths between the same periods in 1895 and 1896 indicates (see Appendix A), this total fails to account for about 1,000 extra deaths, including deaths that occurred in the days immediately after the heat wave.
In later years doctors and social scientists would go to great lengths to define exactly what constituted a “heat-related death.” They concluded that indicators of heat stroke leading to death went beyond simple physiological symptoms, such as dehydration, body temperature, and organ failure. Instead, officials and medical experts would consider both physiological and environmental factors in a heat-related death. An elderly man found dead in his chair without a mark on his body may or may not have been a victim of heat. But if he was found in a room with a temperature of 110 degrees during a heat wave, it can be safely concluded that heat was a contributing factor to his death. And if a young man who worked all day stoking a furnace in the basement of a factory fell ill inside his stifling, airless tenement, in this case, too, heat must have been a contributing factor.
A modern observer of the 1896 heat wave can do the same thing. Even though New York doctors or coroners failed to note “heat” as a cause of death in perhaps 1,000 cases, it is only logical to assume that the ten-day heat wave contributed in some way to these deaths among the very old and very young, the poor and sick, and laborers who could simply not afford to stop working.
According to the death certificates filed in Manhattan on August 4, the first victim of the heat wave may have been fifteen-month-old Hyman Goldman. Hyman had arrived from Russia with his family only nine months before. For three weeks the baby had been suffering from what doctors frequently referred to in the nineteenth century as “cholera infantium”—a common diarrhea suffered by children during summer months that often proved fatal. Already weakened by this affliction, Hyman had little reserve strength when the heat settled on his family’s tenement apartment at 55 Broome Street. According to the doctor the direct cause of his death was “Exhaustion.”
Over the next ten days doctors in Manhattan alone would fill out over 2,200 death certificates—almost double the number during the same period in 1895—using various euphemisms for describing victims of the heat. Many infant deaths were listed as caused by “Summer diarrhea” or “Convulsions,” while adults died from “Asthemia,” “Exhaustion,” “Thermic fever,” “Heatstroke,” “Sunstroke,” and “Insolation.” Little Irma O’Brien, only four months and eighteen days old, died later on August 4 from “Tubercular meningitis,” while the doctor listed as the indirect cause of death “Heat.”
Thursday, August 6, found the president of the Health Department, Charles Wilson, collecting statistics concerning the total death rate for New York in July, including the death rate from “diarrheal diseases.” Wilson evidently liked what he saw, as he put his results in a letter to Mayor Strong highlighting the drop in the death rate as a result of better sanitary conditions in the city. In an accompanying table, Wilson placed the total deaths and death rate for July for the years 1892 to 1896, along with the deaths and death rate just from diarrheal diseases. From 1892 to 1896, total deaths in July had dropped from 5,463 and a death rate of 38.37 per 1,000 to 4,238 and a death rate of 26.29. Deaths from diarrheal disease during