“Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois) – 14 Jul 1936, Tue – Page 1
SIX TORRID DAYS TAKE HEAVY TOLL OF DETROIT LIVES
Detroit, Mich., July 13.—[Special.]
—City hospitals and the Wayne county morgue today presented a picture seen only during a major catastrophe as Detroit endured its sixth consecutive day of 100 degree weather—the worst heat wave in the history of Michigan.Nurses and physicians worked overtime in hospitals crowded beyond capacity with hundreds of heat prostration patients. At the county morgue, where 100 bodies were received during the day, women and children wept as they moved among the crypts seeking to identify loved ones.
Hospital Facilities Overtaxed.
Deaths occurred at the rate of one every ten minutes, a city official estimated. Facilities in many of the hospitals were so overtaxed that cribs for transporting bodies to the morgue had to be brought in from the outside.“I have never seen anything like it in my 16 years of experience here,” said Dr. W. T. Ryan, chief medical examiner at the morgue. In 36 hours he supervised 150 autopsies. “The heat has caused the greatest wave of death I have ever witnessed,” declared Dr. T. K. Gruber, superintendent of Eloise hospital, county institution for mental cases. In six days 81 deaths have occurred there.”
