People didn’t use to know there was such a thing as heat exhaustion. They would literally work until they dropped. One of the 1936 heat wave stories was of a farmer, 50ish, who worked half the morning baling hay, complained of a headache, collapsed and died - just like that.
Just a nitpick here. 1950 was in the heyday of newspapers. Even modest-sized cities had 2 or more papers. And they competed for news just like CNN and Fox News do today. And as samclem says, they did cover heat related deaths.
Now that you’ve been told your figure for newspapers was low, I’ll tell you that your figure for TV channels is high. I doubt many, if any, places had more than three channels (the networks ABC, NBC, & CBS) in 1950. Lots of places could only get one or two, and some got none.
TV was next to no good for news then, either. The networks ran a few magazine-type shows where they’d show film; that was about it except for planned live events. TV was so new that program budgets were about zip, and there weren’t any such things as news departments. Radio was much better at news, especially local news.
Not much to add… just that the first A/C was installed in the White House late in FDR’s administration, IIRC, and he didn’t like to use it, as he thought it made things too cold even in sweltering Washington, DC summers (the controls were probably so rudimentary that he was right).
Right, but when we’re talking before the modern age, as the OP seemed to be describing, most people were not living in cities as dense as New York. What’s enough bodies to overwhelm the morgue in New York might be two or three in a small town. I’m just proposing that, while heat probably killed people just as easily then as now, it was still not an enormous killer overall and statistics-gathering infrastructure probably didn’t exist before, say, the late 19th century, for such numbers to even be determined.
Interestingly, though, while large cities were not the center of American life a century ago, Manhattan was actually more densely populated than it is now. Modern transportation - and general improvements to our standard of living - have allowed places like that to lose some of their population density. Of course, public health being what it was, it’s hard to imagine a few deaths from heat waves would have been a blip on the radar, given that New York, like all large cities, was such a dreadfully unhealthy place to live that it actually had a natural population decline due to infectious disease. It’s only migration to the cities that maintained their populations. Thank goodness we have sewers nowadays.
Nitpick: I had a tv in 1947. The Dumont network had two stations, one in DC and one in NY. So these two metro areas could get 4 channels.
Human Biology was precisely the same, pre-AC.
So, yeah.
OMG. Quite impressive. 
k3wl!!1! What was that like?
Chicago had summer a few years ago in which, if I remember correctly, about 700 deaths were attributed to heat. In light of the posts here, particularly Gabriella’s, I’m still confused. Would this not have happened 80 years ago? Did these people not succumb to the heat? At the turn of the 20th century, when there were so many people living in tenaments in New York, didn’t people live in cramped quarters with no A/C? Didn’t many people die of heat related problems?
Okay, my ignorance about newspapers in the '50s has been successfully fought! That’s why I love this place! 
And in August 2003, over 10,000 people died in France due to the heat.
10,000!!! Are you sure?
People died of a LOT of things 50 or 100 years ago that aren’t so common today. Now, we have a lot more frail people able to live quite a few years - or until the infrastructure that allows them to survive collapses. I suspect that in the past a lot of people prone to heat-death expired over the course of any given summer. A/C allows them to survive years, until it quits, then a bunch of them all die at once.
Oh yes. Yes they did yes they did yes. Their deaths were not automatically marked “heat”. Their deaths were attributed to “consumption” or “apoplexy” or “weak heart” or whatever the diagnosis du jour was.
But they were due to heat.
There is a an excellent book about the Chicago Heat wave of 1995 by Eric Klinenberg, “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster”. Dying Alone in the Heat Wave, an interview with Eric Klinenberg
What interested Klinenberg was the pattern of deaths from heat, why some areas had a lot of deaths, but a similiar population in a nearby area had many fewer deaths.
He traces a number of intertwining reasons for the patterns, but some of the issues which he identifies are elderly people living alone, disconnected from their communities, in areas which discourage them from using public spaces (areas which might have gang problems, little public transport, vacant public spaces or even things such as rough pavements which make it dangerous for old people to walk).
So one of the risk factors for death from heat is being poor, elderly, living alone, having little connection with your community and not being able to access public spaces, such as air-conditioned shopping centres. It was not just the heat which killed people, but some quite specific conditions, which included the political and economic environment.
It might be that while heat has always killed some people, big city urban conditions, which are relatively recent, bring together a number of preconditions which increases the chances of vulnerable populations dying from heat in large numbers.
Klinenberg’s book is well worth reading if you’re interested in the issue, it’s an exemplary piece of social research.
Believe it or not, this is probably a rather correct figure. Startling to many of us. How could it happen.
For an answer, read the post just before this by blackhobyah. Aged people, left alone.
Europe goes on vacation in the Summer. Old people are left home alone. The heat. It killed. Big time. Reported in all the press. I can give cites. France seems to not have experienced this kind of killer heat before. They weren’t prepared/aware. Other European countries seemed to have been more used to it, and suffered less.
That’s correct. The number was estimated by comparing the number of deaths during the heat wawe with the usual/average/expected number of deaths during previous years. Deaths actually attributed to heat with certainty (on the death certificate) were much lower (some hundreds IIRC), probably for the reasons ** gabriella ** mentionned previously. By the way, I remembered reading her post that the morgues were overcrowded too and in Paris they had to rent refrigerated spaces to keep the bodies.
There has been at the time a major uproar, especially since the government didn’t react to the situation when the bells were rang by overloaded health professionnals, hospitals and emergency services, but only when it began to make the prime time news (hence when most deaths had already occured). Retirement homes were also vindicated (lack of personnel especially during vacation time, lack of attention paid to the consequences of heat for elderly residents). Now, when there’s an heat wawe (like the last week, for instance), there are ample warnings, news about it, emergency plans, etc… as a result.
This heat wawe had been the worst for more than 50 years, and besides, air conditioning in homes is relatively rare, over here.
As mentionnd by previous posters, most of the victims were elderly people without social/family connections. I remember for instance that a kind of official ceremony was held for the burial of a particularily large number of unclaimed bodies.
Also, it seems that a significant part of these deaths were actually of people who were in poor health and would probably have died in short order (still based on statistics : the number of deaths for the month of august had been much higher than it should have been, but the number of deaths for the whole year didn’t show nearly as large a difference. I don’t remember the figures, though). In a sense, the heat wawe “accelerated” rather than “caused” the death for many people.
Thanks, Clairobscur, that’s true and helpful. I didn’t have those statistics.
In one jurisdiction where I worked in the US, they would only certify a death as due to heat if the rectal temp of the body was elevated when it arrived at the medical examiner’s office. This meant that no one decomposed was certified as due to heat (since they’re all at room temperature - usually below 37 even in un-airconditioned rooms). And most of the old people had decomposed by the time they were found.
This was not done out of stupidity, but cleverness. The powers that be didn’t want a fuss over a killer heat wave. And they were funding a new morgue at the time. So when only ten bodies in a whole summer are certified as due to heat… you get the picture.
By the way: It’s gabriela with one L - the Spanish spelling.