NYC Coroners' Reports 1823-1842: A rash of suicides

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I copied a handful of pages from the New York City Coroners’ Reports files from 1823-1842, and one thing that’s jumped out at me immediately is that there’s a pack of suicides. I’m serious, deaths ruled suicides have to be the second or third most common cause of death in these reports, after ‘intemperance and exposure’ (ie getting drunk and passing out on the cold NYC streets). There’s also a bunch of deaths by falling from high places, which come to think of it, some of those might’ve actually been suicides as well, even if not ruled as such.

I wonder why people were killing themselves left and right in the 19th century?

Here’s just a samplying:

Arrowsmith, Peter, suicide by hanging. 9 June 1829.
Ashfield, William, suicide with pistol. 2 June 1823
Avery, Joel, suicide by cutting throat with razor. 4 August 1823
Armstrong, Charlotte, suicide by narcotic poison. 22 January 1830
Armstrong, Hugh, suicide by jumping into river. 20 August 1839
Allen, Elizabeth, suicide by laudanum. 12 March 1835
Allman, James, suicide by cutting throat with razor. 11 February 1832
Babcock, Marlborough, suicide by drowning. 7 August 1826
Bacot, Peter, suicide with pistol. 31 August 1836
Bagley, John, suicide by laudanum. 19 October 1842
Bailey, Mary, suicide by arsenic. 26 March 1840
Baker, John, suicide by cutting throat with a case knife. 2 June 1840
Balentine, Mary, suicide by narcotic poison. 21 September 1832
Banta, David, suicide with pistol. 2 May 1825
Barclay, Julia, suicide by laudanum. 3 September 1840
Barlow, Eveline, suicide by opium. 6 February 182–
Barnes, Mrs. [no name given], suicide by laudanum. 3 August 1824.
Barnes, Samuel, suicide by hanging. 2 April 1842
Barton, Barnebeau, suicide by laudanum. 4 August 1823
Batts, Robert P., suicide by laudanum. 28 August 1836
Baumy, Louis Anthony, suicide by opium. 7 May 1829.
Beam, George, suicide by narcotic poison. 25 March 1841
Beard, Catharine, suicide by drowning in the cistern. 9 August 1837
Becket, Nancy, suicide by laudanum. 22 November 1838

These are NOT all the suicides either, not even just from the pages I copied, and as you can see, these come from just the A’s and B’s, I haven’t copied any of the other letters in the reports yet.

In the case of Julia Barclay, she was a mother of two, the youngest being eight months of age. Post-partum depression, maybe? Mary Bailey was a mother of five, the eldest being 15. Quite a few of these people were young – Mary Balentine was only sixteen.

In other reports, the most common deaths for children were ‘accidental burning’, ‘accidental drowning’, and ‘suffocation’ from being overlaid (their mother or father rolling on top of them during the night and smothering them to death). One baby boy, the unnamed son of Mary Baker, was drowned in the sink by his own mother in 1838.

2

May be a bias. Not all deaths required an autopsy. It would seem likely that it would be required for suicides, accidents, and murders.

There wouldn’t be a lot of deaths by falling from high places because there were few high places in NYC in that period.

3

Even a fall of a couple of stories is enough to do someone in, and there’s several people who died in this manner from the coroners’ reports.

Barrington, William, fall from 2nd story window of NY Hospital. 25 February 1827
Barry, Edward, fall from 4th story window of Clinton Hall. 22 June 1830
Bartlett, Benjamin, fall from 3rd story of house at 94 Broadway. 14 September 1831
Bartley, Michael, fall from upper to lower story of house in Spruce St. 16 January 1837
Barton, John, fall from scaffolding. 23 September 1837

Notice how these are all in alphabetical order – because they’re all from ONE PAGE in the report I copied. This is one measely page out of ten, and that’s just ten out of hundreds in the coroners’ reports.

4

While it may seem like a lot when read line by line, it would be more usefull to find out how many suicides there were in relation to the size of the population.

5

I googled “suicide rate” and got this fact sheet from the NIMH that says it was the 10th leading cause of death in the US in 2007. Following the link, it was (again in 2007) fourth in the age group 10-14, 3rd in ages 15-24, 2nd in ages 25-34, 4th in ages 35-44, and 5th in ages 45-54. The other causes around those levels or higher are accidents (usually #1 until age 45), cancer, homicide, and heart disease.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that you’d see so many suicides listed back then, because we actually still have a considerable number.

6
  • faints from envy * Where and how and why did you come across this wonderful morbid cache?
7

And we don’t typically list the cause of death in obituaries anymore: especially not if it’s suicide.

8

A large number of them are drug overdoses considered as suicide. Like now, the difference between intentional and unintentional overdoses may not be clear. In any event, I understand that NYC in the 19th century was a hellhole for the impoverished. I wouldn’t be surprised to find death by old age to be rare among that group.

9

I dunno that this is terribly surprising. Life, particularly in NYC, probably sucked hard in the 1820’s. No social safety nets, pretty restrictive social taboos, very little in the way of medical relief for life’s common ailments. No anti-depressants, no birth control.

Basically, if you were poor, pregnant out of wedlock, sick, or addicted to opium, there just wasn’t much chance of things getting better for you. Even if you were healthy and working, life was probably a series of 16 hour days slaving away in Bob Cratchit like conditions.

10

This is what I was going to say. Does the report also include deaths due to accidental drug overdose? Otherwise I would imagine that most of the suicides by opium, laudanum, and narcotic poison are actually overdoses or people who died from drug abuse. I can see that at that time, those cases may have been classified as suicide, since the person deliberately took the drug, even if they didn’t intend death to be the result.

11

The wonders of NY public records, darling. Anyone you want me to look up for you next time I go and dig around? I might find the parents or grandparents of some of the early Ziegfield and silent film stars, provided they were native New Yorkers, of course.

Considering my own family history, is it any wonder I’m fascinated with suicides, schizophrenics, the mentally ill, the outcasts of society? My own grandfather went to prison for homicide.

12

Its hard to tell exactly what the criteria was at the time – if there was any firm, across-the-board criteria – for what was counted as a suicide, an accident, etc. There are deaths classified as “by laudanum” with no mention of suicide, such as that of Lydia Bardley, age 22, a widow. Some deaths are listed merely as “unknown causes” or “natural causes.” Accidents seemed to have killed a lot of people, as there’s lots of deaths due to falls, drowning, catching on fire (a real danger when women wore long dresses as they cooked) without, again, any mention being made of it being self-inflicted. The deaths that don’t fall into any of those categories are generally either people drinking themselves to death or various diseases. My favorite cause of death is “Visitation of God”, ie unknown causes.

13

Thank you dear–my current book is all researched, though, and I don’t know if there is going to be a next book. Any research would be just for kicks.

14

How many of the laudanum and opium deaths were ODs rather than suicide?

15

The thing that gets me are the suicides by slitting one’s own throat. I remember reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Have His Carcase and thinking surely no one would ever slit his own throat. Apparently I was wrong. It would take some determination to do that.

StG

16

Assuming that they slit their own throat. In the 19th century I doubt much effort was spent determining whether or not a homicide might have occured.

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Or someone seriously nuts.

18

People can and will do HORRIBLE things to themselves – people have clawed out their own eyes before. I’m beyond thinking there’s something people won’t do to themselves if its physically possible.

Did anyone read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? It’s set later, just before WWI, but there’s a bit where the protagonist’s mother forces the coroner to list “pneumonia” as the cause of death on her husband’s death certificate, even though he really died of drunkeness plus exposure. Her rationalization is that the shame of knowing that their father died a drunkard would be too much for her children. I’m sure that even 80-100 years earlier, the families would’ve been pressuring the coroner to list the death as accidental for similar reasons. That the coroners apparently felt that the deaths were clearly suicides has to count for something.

19

Well, in the Sayers book they talk about it as if it were a common method of suicide. (Of course, it’s a mystery novel, so obviously that isn’t what happened, but it wasn’t unusual enough for it to be obvious that it wasn’t.)

20

Poor Catherine Beard! A cistern–in August, yet!–was her only out?