History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part II of a 2-part series. Part I was published on Oct. 18.
LIBERTY TOWNSHIP — The Sells Brothers Circus was in town that Wednesday in early October of 1881, and dozens of wagons and buggies made their way up Columbus Road toward Mount Vernon from the countryside in the southwestern quarter of Knox County.
An inconvenient distraction was the last thing any of them wanted to deal with.
As they drove along, many of these farmers and businessmen and their families caught the same sight on a little hill between Mount Liberty and Bangs: A scruffy, disheveled, dirty man was lying aside the road, beside a fencepost.
He was still lying there when they returned from the circus that evening. The newspaper says that most assumed the man was a drunk sleeping off a bender, and ignored him.
He lay on his back, with his face to the sky, but eyes closed, only occasionally moving, which at least signified that he wasn’t dead. No one stopped, and no one reported him.
That night, the weather turned sharply cold, followed Thursday morning by a dreary, cold rain.
Still the man lay aside the road, exposed to the elements. Several more people passed him during the day, but none stopped to inquire or offer help. Finally on Friday, a farmer reported the presence of the stricken tramp to the township trustees.
They ordered constable Bob McBride to investigate. McBride drove his horse and buggy from his home in Bangs to the spot and checked on the man, who appeared to him to be an elderly homeless tramp.
The man was still alive and opened his eyes and registered McBride’s presence, but he appeared unable to speak.
The hobo’s condition was poor. His body reeked, and he was infested with lice and vermin.
With some difficulty, McBride scooped up the old man and lifted him into his buggy, where he propped him up in the passenger’s seat.
He decided that the man was far too foul to take into his house, but he figured he could leave him in the barn while the trustees figured out what to do with him. He proceeded to his house.
“Well, here we are, old man,” McBride said to the tramp, poking over at him with his elbow. “Rouse up.”
The man didn’t respond. McBride took a closer look. The old man had died. He had lingered just long enough to make one final connection with a fellow human being, then he was gone.
When McBride inspected his pockets, he found a passport that identified the man as Frederick Iunger, from Prussia, in Europe.
One wonders if “Iunger” was a misread of German Gothic script for “Junger,” and the newspaper’s use of “Frederick” might have been the English equivalent of the German name “Friedrich.”
The man had most recently received a letter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but was making his way west, toward what, nobody knows.
Despite his ragged and gaunt appearance, he was actually only 45 years old.
Iunger’s death didn’t solve the problem about what to do with him. Had he survived, he might have been relocated to the county infirmary in Bangs.
As an indigent person, he could theoretically have been buried in the county home cemetery, had he been a patient there. But without being in that system, as an indigent person, he had a definite destination.
Laws had been passed by 1881 that attempted to curb the practice of grave-robbing in Ohio by providing medical colleges with the corpses of unclaimed indigent people. Iunger was going to be a medical cadaver.
What wasn’t settled, was whose.
Constable McBride informed the township trustees about the homeless man’s death, and they ordered him to take the body to Beulah Chapel while they contacted the county coroner.
That church is still in use today as the Beulah United Methodist Church, on the north side of the village of Bangs.
The 1880 census shows McBride living in the hamlet. It makes sense, then, that he picked up Iunger at the hill outside of the town, brought him to his residence, which was a farm, suggesting that he wasn’t right in the middle of Bangs, but on the outskirts.
From McBride’s house to the Chapel would have only been a few hundred yards.
Meanwhile, the trustees had to get hold of the county coroner, but that shouldn’t have been too difficult, as he lived nearby, in Mount Liberty.
In fact, the very hillside where Iunger was found was on property owned by the Carey family.
Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Carey, though only 28 years old, had been elected as Knox County’s coroner.
Not all coroners in those days were actual medical doctors, but Carey was. As recently as 1876, he had been listed as living in Mount Vernon while he was a medical student, but by 1880, he was practicing as a doctor in Mount Liberty, and serving as coroner.
While it seems his career had gotten off to a good start, controversy was soon to mar it.
According to the Democratic Banner, Dr. Carey headed to the chapel to begin his post mortem examination.
Word spread fast even in those days, probably with the help of the telegraph. As telegraph lines ran along railroad tracks, and major tracks passed through Bangs, word was quickly relayed to Mount Vernon.
One person in Mount Vernon who heard about the discovery of the body was John E. Russell, who just happened to be at his home in town, where he returned when he wasn’t lecturing on anatomy at the Starling Medical College in Columbus.
Being aware of the scarcity of cadavers for medical students, and aware of the recent laws, Russell made a beeline for Beulah Chapel, arriving before the coroner had even begun his examination of the body.
Russell requested the body for dissection purposes, citing the new laws, and Dr. Carey said he could certainly arrange that the remains be sent to Starling Medical College after his post mortem examination.
Russell, however, suggested that the remains be sent directly, before any cutting was done.
He offered to pay for Carey to accompany the remains to Columbus, where the
tramp’s body could be examined by students, and Carey could file his report based on this examination.
Carey was reluctant to agree to this until Russell threw in $10 — equivalent to over $300 in today’s money — at which point Carey changed his mind.
This would have been bad enough, the $10 fee amounting to a naked bribe. But we probably never would have heard about that if things hadn’t suddenly been complicated by a counter-maneuver.
A local dentist by the name of Dr. Holbrook had also heard about the body, and had quickly started a petition with the signatures of other local doctors requesting that the body remain in the county for dissection by students of the Knox County Medical Society.
When Holbrook asked a Dr. McMillen to sign, McMillen said that he wouldn’t sign because, A) the Knox County Medical Society didn’t even possess the facilities for an examination to be conducted, and, B) because he’d already heard (!) about Russell’s arrangement, as Russell was a former student of Dr. McMillen.
Russell had promptly informed his mentor about what was going down, and thus battle lines were drawn.
Holbrook was angry to find out about this and alerted Dr. F.C. Larimore. This doctor was the lecturer on minor surgery at Starling Medical College’s chief rival, the Columbus Medical College, which had been started five years previous by a handful of doctors who left Starling to start their own school.
Larimore decided to make a play, sensing that this would be an ideal chance to undermine Starling.
He wired the officials of his college, who sent a telegram to Dr. Carey making a claim on the body and reminding Dr. Carey that he was a former student of that very same Dr. Larimore.
Whether any sort of “counter offer” happened under the table, we’ll never know, but Dr. Carey suddenly went back on his earlier promise to Russell and said that the body was going to Columbus Medical College instead of Starling.
By the next issue of the local newspapers, the story had exploded, with Banner editor Lecky Harper accusing Coroner Carey of corruption.
The Columbus Medical College and Dr. Larimore issued formal statements citing their procurement of the body as being done in coordination with the Knox County Medical Society, and with a flourish of paperwork, they took possession of Frederick Iunger’s body, and sent it on the train to Columbus.
When he heard about the body being stolen right from under his nose, Russell was furious and denounced Coroner Carey “in the most unmeasured terms,” which sounds to me like some of those terms must have been four-letter words.
When the Banner asked Dr. Carey to comment, he denied that he had accepted any money from Russell. When offered space in the paper to describe what had gone down in more detail, though, Carey declined.
As the paper put it, “Dr. Carey was offered every opportunity to present evidence which might exonerate him from the accusation of ‘trafficking with the body,’ but he has declined to do so.”
The young coroner’s support from the local medical establishment seems to have vanished overnight.
That, and the bad publicity from the Banner article prompted Carey to belatedly write out his own account of events, and he marched into the newspaper’s office on the square the following Tuesday, demanding that Lecky Harper publish his side of the story.
Upon reading through the document, Harper declined, and published a statement:
In so far as he gives his denial to the charge that he offered to sell
the body, there was no objection to publishing his statement, but
the larger portion of his effusion was given to violent and abusive
language, coupled with unbecoming epithets, directed against a
young gentleman, whose standing in the community and whose
veracity is in every way equal to that of Dr. Carey. He was
informed that if he modified the language, or confined his card to a
statement of facts, it would be published, otherwise not. He chose
not to curtail his invectives, and pocketing the chapter of
billingsgate, retired.
“Billingsgate” was a new one to me, and I had to look up a definition: billingsgate, noun, coarsely abusive or vulgar language, coming from the notorious swearing of the vendors at the Billingsgate Fish Market in London.
Boy, when Lecky Harper had a chance to skewer someone, you can tell he savored the opportunity.
He positively crowed the following week when he found out his two rival newspapers in Mount Vernon had also refused to print Dr. Carey’s evidently fuming diatribe.
Harper was plainly having fun when he wrote the account of the Mount Vernon Republican News’ rejection:
Coroner Carey carried his card of contumeliousness to the
Republican last week. The Contribution was carefully considered,
and the consummate cussedness curtailed, causing chagrin to the
constructionist. Consequently the cold corpse consigned to the
College without (?) compensation cannot be reclaimed. Catch?
It was clear that by this point, Dr. Carey was being openly mocked. While I could not find any indication that he was ever charged with trafficking a corpse, his days of public office in Knox County were clearly over, and it wasn’t long before gave up his post and decamped westward, settling in Colorado for the remainder of his life, where he died in 1912.
As for Dr. Larimore, we’ll have to come back to him at some point. A room in his Mount Vernon home became the first official hospital space in Knox County, and he went down in local history as being the first physician to use a hypodermic needle, and also the first to deploy anesthetic.
By the height of his career, Larimore became president of the Ohio State Medical Society.
The Columbus Medical College continued along for a few years before it was reabsorbed into the Starling Medical College in 1892.
After absorbing another rival school in 1907, Starling finally was itself absorbed into the Ohio State University, where it became the college’s medical school, which continues to this day.
And what of Frederick Iunger’s remains? Nothing more was said. His bones may have been buried in a Columbus potter’s field. Or, for all we know, his bones could have been strung up as an anatomical display at the college, to be used until they became old and crumbled.
They could even be filed away in some drawer at OSU in Columbus to this day.
It’s a sad end for a man who died alone and ignored alongside the road, far away from home, and oblivious to the scandalous PR circus that was about to explode in his bones’ wake.