Today is the opening day of the 2012 Olympics in London. Plenty of coverage of that will follow. But the lead story in today's SportsFriday section was about something that happened in 1904, and what followed.
1904 was the year my father's oldest brother was born. It was the year the cornerstone was laid for the high school I went to on 15th Street, near First Avenue. The building remains, and is used for Continuing Education classes. It was also the year Christian Koehler, 14, was killed when he accidentally ran into the path of a descending 16 pound iron ball thrown by a future Olympic hammer thrower, who was practicing in an empty lot in upper Manhattan.
It was the early 20th century's version of chasing after a ball and running into traffic: Christian was chasing an errant throw of a ball from his friends when he was hit in the head and instantly killed. Today's Times does a terrific piece, by Samantha Storey, on the accident, as much as it is a backdrop for the future Olympian, Simon P. Gillis, as well as what his life amounted to afterward.
In a prior employment I used to work with a reference book known as ICD-9 and then ICD-10. These were versions of the International Classification of Diseases. Aside from numerical codes for virtually any known ailment, there were cause of death codes toward the back. These started with E for some reason and really got specific. There were codes for death by trolley, horse drawn or motorized. I guess because these codes were used internationally, there were no further specifics if the trolley was going uptown, downtown, or crosstown. The person was no less dead, regardless of the trolley's direction. I don't have access to the latest version of these codes, but no doubt they have been broadened to include skate boards, snowmobiles, jet skis, etc. Very specific.
Cause of death codes were introduced in the late 1800s, and are revised approximately once every 10 years to stay abreast with what can do you in and to ensure there can be international comparability of health statistics.
The tenth and most recent revision, known as the ICD-10, was first used to classify deaths that occurred on January 1, 1999 and after. The previous version, the ICD-9, was used from 1979 through 1998. The ICD-10 is much more detailed with about 8,000 possible categories for cause of death compared with 4,000 categories in the previous version. The International Statistical Institute, the successor to the International Statistical Congress, at its meeting in Vienna in 1891, charged a committee, chaired by Jacques Bertillon (1851-1922), Chief of Statistical Services of the City of Paris, with the preparation of a classification of causes of death.
Poor Christian was no less dead no matter how the accident was coded. Unfortunately, as the NYT points out, there is little that can be reconstructed of the accident other than relying on newspaper accounts. Anyone who could give a firsthand account is no longer alive.
We don't know anything about Christian. Where he went to school, and what he might have liked to become. If I'm right that he had a German surname, then as the columnist Jimmy Breslin once pointed out, he was sure to get steered to a vocational school to learn the skill of operating a wood lathe. Jimmy pointed this out in his biography on Damon Runyon, that any German boy who fell into New York City's Board of Education's gravitational pull, was going to learn how to operate a lathe.
A reprint of how the Evening World covered the story shows a drawing of how the accident took place, referring to Christian as a "lad," and depicting a youngster taking one on the coconut as if Mr. Gillis aimed directly at him. The headline and sub-headings are direct in language, but not overly sensational. One wonders how the New York Post might have reported the accident. Even acknowledging the paper had a different owner then it does today, it's not hard to think they might have sprayed: "Hammer Hits Frail on the Head" across some column inches.
The upshot is, cities have always been somewhat dangerous places to live in. People engaged in myriad activities, vying for overlapping space creates cultures of bad events waiting to happen.
Due to the popularity of living in Manhattan, and the near complete disappearance of empty lots, it is not likely that someone is going to get thunked on the head from a hammer thrower in training for anything, let alone the Olympics.
But just think, ICD-10 comes up with two times the number of codes for cause of death that ICD-9 had: 4,000, to 8,000.
The world is a dangerous place, and the iPhone has got to figure into it somehow.
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