TITLE IV
Chief Medical Examiner
| Section | 1570. | Organization of office; officers and employees. |
| 1571. | Violent and suspicious deaths; procedure. | |
| 1571-a. | Autopsies; findings. | |
| 1571-b. | Report of deaths; removal of body. | |
| 1571-c. | Records. | |
| 1571-d. | Oaths and affidavits. |
ORGANIZATION OF OFFICE; OFFICERS AND EMPLOYEES
§ 1570. There is hereby established the office of chief medical examiner of the city of New York. The head of the office shall be called the “chief medical examiner.” He shall be appointed by the mayor from the classified service and be a doctor of medicine, and a skilled pathologist and microscopist.
The mayor may remove such officer upon stating in writing his reasons therefor, to be filed in the office of the municipal civil service commission and served upon such officer, and allowing him an opportunity of making a public explanation. The chief medical examiner may appoint and remove such deputies, assistant medical examiners, scientific experts, officers and employees as may be provided for pursuant to law. Such deputy medical examiners, and assistant medical examiners, as may be appointed, shall possess qualifications similar to those required in the appointment of the chief medical examiner. The office shall be kept open every day in the year, including Sundays and legal holidays, with a clerk in constant attendance at all times during the day and night.
VIOLENT AND SUSPICIOUS DEATHS; PROCEDURE
§ 1571. When, in the city of New York, any person shall die from criminal violence, or by a casualty, or by suicide, or suddenly when in apparent health, or when unattended by a physician, or in prison, or in any suspicious or unusual manner, the officer in charge of the station house in the police precinct in which such person died shall immediately notify the office of the chief medical examiner of the known facts concerning the time, place, manner and circumstances of such death. Immediately upon receipt of such notification the chief medical examiner, or a deputy or assistant medical examiner, shall go to the dead body, and take charge of the same. Such examiner shall fully investigate the essential facts concerning the circumstances of the death, taking the names and addresses of as many witnesses thereto as it may be practical to obtain, and, before leaving the premises, shall reduce all such facts to writing and file the same in his office. The police officer so detailed shall, in the absence of the next of kin of deceased person, take possession of all property of value found on such person, make an exact inventory thereof on his report, and deliver such property to the police department, which shall surrender the same to the person entitled to its custody or possession. Such examiner shall take possession of any portable objects which, in his opinion, may be useful in establishing the cause of death, and deliver them to the police department.
Nothing in this section contained shall affect the powers and duties of a public administrator as now provided by law.
AUTOPSIES; FINDINGS
§ 1571-a. If the cause of such death shall be established beyond a reasonable doubt, the medical examiner in charge shall so report to his office. If, however, in the opinion of such medical examiner, an autopsy is necessary, the same shall be performed by a medical examiner. A detailed description of the findings written during the progress of such autopsy and the conclusions drawn therefrom shall thereupon be filed in his office.
REPORT OF DEATHS; REMOVAL OF BODY
§ 1571-b. It shall be the duty of any citizen who may become aware of the death of any such person to report such death forthwith to the office of the chief medical examiner, and to a police officer who shall forthwith notify the officer in charge of the station-house in the police precinct in which such person died. Any person who shall willfully neglect or refuse to report such death or who without written order from a medical examiner shall willfully touch, remove or disturb the body of any such person, or willfully touch, remove, or disturb the clothing, or any article upon or near such body, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
RECORDS
§ 1571-c. It shall be the duty of the office of medical examiner to keep full and complete records. Such records shall be kept in the office, properly indexed, stating the name, if known, of every such person, the place where the body was found and the date of death. To the record of each case shall be attached the original report of the medical examiner and the detailed findings of the autopsy, if any. The office shall promptly deliver to the appropriate district attorney copies of all records relating to every death as to which there is, in the judgment of the medical examiner in charge, any indication of criminality. All other records shall be open to public inspection as provided in section fifteen hundred and forty-five. The appropriate district attorney and the police commissioner of the city may require from such officer such further records, and such daily information, as they may deem necessary.
OATHS AND AFFIDAVITS
§ 1571-d. The chief medical examiner, and all deputy or assistant medical examiners, may administer oaths, and take affidavits, proofs and examinations as to any matter within the jurisdiction of the office.
§ 3. Section eleven hundred and seventy-nine of such charter is hereby amended to read as follows:
BUREAUS
§ 1179. There shall be two bureaus in the department of health. The chief officer of one bureau shall be called the “sanitary superintendent,” who, at the time of his appointment, shall have been, for at least ten years, a practicing physician, and for three years a resident of the city of New York, and he shall be the chief executive officer of said department. The chief officer of the second bureau shall be called the “registrar of records,” and in said bureau shall be recorded, without fees, every birth, marriage, and death, which shall occur within the city of New York.
§ 4. Section twelve hundred and three of such charter is hereby amended to read as follows:
MEDICAL EXAMINERS’ RETURNS
§ 1203. The department of health may, from time to time make rules and regulations fixing the time of rendering, and defining the form of returns and reports to be made to said department by the office of chief medical examiner of the city of New York, in all cases of death which shall be investigated by it; and the office of the chief medical examiner is hereby required to conform to such rules and regulations.
§ 5. Section twelve hundred and thirty-eight of such charter is hereby amended to read as follows:
DEATHS TO BE REPORTED
§ 1238. It shall be the duty of the next of kin of any person deceased, and of each person being with such deceased person at his or her death, to file report in writing, with the department of health within five days after such death, stating the age, color, nativity, last occupation and cause of death of such deceased person, and the borough and street, the place of such person’s death and last residence. Physicians who have attended deceased persons in their last illness shall, in the certificate of the decease of such persons, specify, as near as the same can be ascertained, the name and surname, age, occupation, term of residence in said city, place of nativity, condition of life; whether single or married, widow or widower; color, last place of residence and the cause of death of such deceased persons, and the medical examiners of the city, shall, in their certificates conform to the requirements of this section.
§ 6. Such charter is hereby amended by inserting therein a new section, to be numbered section fifteen hundred and eighty-five-a, and to read as follows:
COUNTY CLERKS TO EXERCISE CERTAIN STATUTORY POWERS AND DUTIES OF CORONERS
§ 1585-a. In the city of New York the powers imposed and the duties conferred upon coroners by the provisions of title three of chapter two of the code of civil procedure shall be exercised and performed by the county clerk of the appropriate county, and said county clerk shall, in the exercise and performance thereof, be subject to the same liabilities and responsibilities as are prescribed in such title in the case of coroners.
§ 7. Sections seventeen hundred and sixty-six to seventeen hundred and seventy-nine, both inclusive, of chapter four hundred and ten of the laws of eighteen hundred and eighty-two, entitled “An act to consolidate into one act and to declare the special and local laws affecting public interests in the city of New York,” and all acts amending such sections, are hereby repealed.
§ 8. The officers and employees now exercising the powers and duties which by this act are abolished, or are conferred or imposed upon the office of chief medical examiner, including coroner’s physicians, shall be transferred to the office of chief medical examiner. Service in the office, board or body from which transferred shall count for all purposes as service in the office of the chief medical examiner.
§ 9. All funds, property, records, books, papers and documents within the jurisdiction or control of any such coroner, or such board of coroners, shall, on demand, be transferred and delivered to the office of the chief medical examiner. The board of estimate and apportionment shall transfer to the office of the chief medical examiner all unexpended appropriations made by the city to enable any coroner, or board of coroners, to exercise any of the powers and duties which by this act are abolished or are conferred or imposed upon such office of chief medical examiner.
APPENDIX F
A COUNTY ALMSHOUSE IN TEXAS
By Dr. Thomas W. Salmon
[Portion of an address delivered at the meeting of the Association of County Judges and Commissioners at Waxahachie, Texas, on February 11, 1916.]
This particular Poor Farm is in one of the richest counties of the state. The taxable property of that county is assessed at more than $45,000,000. It contains no large cities (the largest has a population of 15,000), all but two per cent. of the people are native-born and the proportion of negroes is much less than in the state as a whole. It would be difficult indeed to find in this wide land a county more prosperous, more pleasant to live in or more truly American than this one.
Four miles west of the county-seat is the Poor Farm. There is a substantial brick building for the poor and infirm which is heated by steam and lighted by acetylene gas. Scattered around the main building are some small wooden cabins, cheap in construction and not in very good repair, but, on the whole, comfortable for the old people, the paralytics and the epileptics who live in them. If we could leave this Poor Farm, having seen so much and no more, we could think of it again only with feelings of pleasure that the county’s unfortunates were provided for so comfortably; but standing alone is an old brick building in which the insane are kept and this must be visited too. It is a gloomy place, coming out of the bright October sun, but when your eyes become accustomed to the shadows, you see what this county has provided for the insane who are neglected by the great mother state. You see that there is a clear space running around three sides of the one large room which forms the entire interior of the building. In the center and across the rear end of this room are fourteen iron cages—four extending across the rear and ten back to back, down the center. They are made of iron bars, the tops, backs and adjoining sides being sheet metal. Near the top of each solid side, are seven rows of holes about an inch in diameter. Their purpose is ventilation but they serve also to destroy what poor privacy these cages might otherwise possess. Each cage contains a prison cot or two swinging from the wall while a few have cots upon the floor.
In these cages, which are too far from the windows in the brick walls for the sunlight to enter except during the short period each day when it shines directly opposite them, abandoned to filth and unbelievable misery lie the insane poor of this pleasant, fertile, prosperous American county. Color, age and sex have no significance in this place. All of those distinctions which govern the lives of human beings elsewhere are merged in common degradation here.
Men and women, black and white, old and young, share its horrors just alike. They are insane and that fact alone wipes out every other consideration and every obligation except that of keeping, with food and shelter, the spark of life alight. When, at dusk, the shadows deepen, the creatures in this place of wretchedness cower closer in the corners of their cages for there are no cheerful lights here as in the other buildings and when the darkness blots out everything there are only the moans of distressed human beings to tell you it is not a tomb. Through the night, when persons with bodily illnesses are attended by quietly treading nurses in the two fine hospitals which the nearby town supports, these unfortunate men and women, who are sick in mind as well as in body, drag through terrors which no human community would wish to have its worst criminals experience.
Each day brings to the poor creatures here light and food—as it does to the cattle in the sheds—but it does not bring to them the slightest hope of intelligent care, nor, to most of them, even the narrow liberty of the iron-fenced yard. One attendant, a cheerful young man, is employed by the county to look after the forty-odd inmates who at the least compose the Poor Farm population. He used to be a trolley car conductor but now he receives forty dollars a month for attending to the inmates, male and female, who cannot care for themselves. He brings back the feeble-minded when they wander off, he finds epileptics when they fall in their attacks and he sees that all are fed. He is called the “yard-man”; his duties are those of a herdsman for human beings. His predecessor, a man of about sixty years of age, is serving a term in the state penitentiary for an attack upon a little girl who was an inmate of this Poor Farm. At his trial it was brought out that he had served a previous term in another state for a similar offense.
The present “yard-man” has not the slightest knowledge of any other kind of treatment for the insane, nor has he had the slightest experience in practical nursing or in caring for the mentally or physically helpless. He has been employed here about a year. He found the insane in these cages and he knows of no other way of keeping them. All but three or four of them remain in their cages all day, crouching on the stone floors instead of on the green grass outside. A feeble white woman in bed, wasted and pale, who apparently has but a few months to live, was pointed out in one of the cages and the “yard-man” was asked if she would run away if she were permitted to have her bed outside. He admitted that it was not likely but said that she was weak and would fall out of bed. He was asked if it would be worse to fall out of bed on the grass or on the wooden floor of the main building than on the stone floor of her cage, but these matters were far outside his experience and he had no reply to make.
How much more knowledge and experience would have been required of this young man if the county had seen fit to maintain a menagerie! No one would think of entrusting the animals to one so wholly inexperienced in their care. This young man might be employed as an assistant, but he would never be placed in charge of an animal house full of valuable specimens.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the wretched people who are confined in these cages were selected from a larger number of insane inmates of the Poor Farm on account of exceptional intractability or because their brains have been so dulled by the final stages of dementia that they are no longer conscious of their surroundings. These people are not a few selected for such reasons; they constitute all but one of the avowedly insane who are housed in this Poor Farm. They include persons as appreciative as you or I would be of the loathesomeness of their surroundings and of the personal humiliation of being confined in such a place. In one cage is a man who has delusions which doubtless make it unsafe for him to have his liberty in the community. He has not been allowed outside his cage for a single hour in three years.
This place was built twenty years ago. Perhaps the brain which planned it is now dust, nevertheless its ignorant conception of the nature of mental disease still determines the kind of care this county affords the most unfortunate of all its helpless sick. Perhaps, too, the hands which laid these bricks and forged these iron bars are now dead, nevertheless they still stretch out of the past and crush the living in their cruel grasp. The conception of mental diseases which gave to this county this dreadful place did not even reflect the enlightenment of its own period. Eighty years earlier Esquirol had stirred the pity of France by a recital of miseries no worse than those which you can see in this county to-day. Many years before this place was built, Conolly had aroused public opinion in England to such an extent that it was possible for cages such as these to exist in only the darkest corners of the land. Thirty years before this grim structure arose from the fair soil of Texas, Dorothea Dix was showing the inhumanity of almshouse care of the insane in this country and members of our legislatures were profoundly stirred by her descriptions of conditions less abhorrent than those which exist to-day in the Poor Farm which I have just described. Great reforms in the care of the insane have extended over the entire country ever since these walls were built but they have left this place untouched and it stands to-day, not a pathetic but disused reminder of the ignorance and inhumanity of another age and of another kind of civilization, but an actual, living reality reproducing, with scarcely a detail lacking, conditions which were described in pitying terms by the writers of four centuries ago.
Standing in the doorway of this building you can see evidences of the material greatness of the twentieth century; taking a single step inside you can see exactly what the superstition, fear and ignorance of the sixteenth century imposed upon the insane.