-
Why It Wasn’t Just Gray’s Anatomy
No, not the TV show, the anatomy textbook. Known far and wide as Gray’s Anatomy, and still published today by Elsevier, Henry Gray could not have found success without his artistic partner, Henry Carter. Here’s their story. Henry Carter self-portrait Henry Vandyke Carter had been keeping a diary since he was fourteen. He was now…
-
What Happened to Residents’ Health Long After the Donora Death Fog?
“Our scientists tell us that the Donora episode was a rare phenomenon. We hope and pray it will never recur. This study by the Public Health Service into the Donora episode, the most exhaustive ever made on a problem in air pollution, is a step toward positive assurance that such a thing will not happen…
-
From Boom to Bust: What Happened to Little Webster?
Cuddled along a bend in the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania, across from the industrial town of Donora, Webster once boasted a population of about two thousand. Anyone traveling up the Mon around the turn of the twentieth century would have seen a charming village at the base of
-
What Happens to Residents’ Health When a Coke Plant Closes?
Just south of Careopolis, Pennsylvania, the Ohio River splits at the northernmost tip of a long skinny island and joins together again about five miles later. The island, Neville Island, contained at its southernmost tip the Shenango Coke Works, a sprawling industrial complex built around 1930. Shenango processed coal for steel mills and had been…
-
The Most Important Half-Finished Painting in American History
Hanging in a prominent position in the Winterthur Museum in Pennsbury Township, Delaware, is a painting one might think shouldn’t be there at all. It might, to the casual visitor, look like it belongs back in the artist’s studio to be completed. Half of it is blank, after all. The painting is, however, as complete…
-
How a 16th Century King’s Decision Sort of Led to the Doctor’s Riot of 1788
You can kind of — kind of — blame the craft of body snatching on King James IV of Scotland. King James IV James was the son of King James III and Margaret of Denmark, and assumed the Scottish crown at the ripe age of 15. He had famously been forced to attend a border…
-
When the Publick Rose Up Against Its Doctors, Part 1
Donora’s heroic physicians during the smog of 1948 learned their trade long after medical education had recovered from the destructive effects of the so-called “Doctor’s Riot of 1788.” The event was a bloody post-revolutionary protest against medical students in New York City stealing corpses to study anatomy. The incident ravaged
