Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [42]
The Bellevue patient was Charles Littman, a relatively young man at thirty-five, who fell unconscious at his carpenter shop. Littman was lucky that the ice bath worked. It was considered the best way to relieve sunstroke. Yet even at Bellevue doctors ran the risk of lowering Littman’s temperature too quickly and causing hypothermia. The other treatments of the day indicated concern with regulating high blood pressure. Bleeding was intended to reduce the volume of blood in a patient’s body and thus the blood pressure. Aconite, also known as wolfsbane (Germans once used the highly toxic herb to poison wolves), was used to slow the heart. All of these treatments, including the administering of sedatives or stimulants of any kind, are today considered ill-advised as cures for sunstroke.
Unfortunately, the ice available to doctors for treating sunstroke was not available to average New Yorkers. As home refrigerators did not achieve widespread use until the First World War, Americans relied on large wooden iceboxes, usually lined with tin or zinc, to keep food cool and fresh. Ice was bought from commercial producers or ice harvesters, who cut ice from the rivers during winter and stored it in large blocks insulated with sawdust to reduce melting.
By 1896 Charles Morse, an ice magnate from Maine, controlled most commercial ice production in the city. His business practices kept prices high and ice out of reach of the city’s poor. Having no means of preserving food in the killer heat simply exacerbated the plight of the poor, already living in nightmarish conditions in the steaming tenements. Morse’s hometown newspaper called him “the man who made millions while poor people suffered for ice” and claimed the high price of New York ice increased the city’s death rate by 5 percent.
During the heat wave, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers did not have access to a refrigerator or freezer. They could not drink a cool glass of water to relieve their suffering or rub an ice cube across their hot, dry skin. Brick tenements baked their inhabitants and quickly putrefied meat and curdled milk.
Ice became a precious, life-saving commodity. With this in mind the New York Herald initiated a Free Ice Fund, soliciting contributions for ice to be distributed in the Lower East Side tenement districts. As of Thursday, August 6, the Fund had raised nearly $12,000, with many of the contributions trickling in $1 or $2 at a time. The free ice stations run by the Herald had been besieged by the women of the tenements. “They went away,” the Herald reporter observed, “lugging pans of ice, and followed by children who touched the cold tin as they walked along. To such as these, who had no means of preserving their food from the action of the burning heat, ice was a blessing.” Simple and short-lived as it was, the gift of ice was crucial to the tenement dwellers’ survival in the heat.
A similar charity designed to relieve the summertime suffering of the city’s youth was the New York Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund. In 1877 New York clergyman Willard Parsons established the fund, placing sixty children with families in Sherman, Pennsylvania, for the summer. Parsons turned over the running of the charity to the Tribune the same year, and the newspaper ran the fund for the next eighty-five years. (An independent charity now, the Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to more than 1.7 million children from New York’s poorest neighborhoods.)
In 1896 the Fresh Air Fund was especially active, sending thousands of mothers and children out of the city, if only for a day.