IT WOULD be imprecise to say that Dr. Charles Norris loved the job of chief medical examiner. He lived it and breathed it. He spent his own money on it. He gave it power and prominence and wore himself into exhaustion and illness over it. Under his direction, the New York City medical examiner’s office would become a department that set forensic standards for the rest of the country. And Norris himself would become something of a celebrity, described by
Time
magazine as the “famed, sardonic, goat-bearded, public spirited” medical examiner who “battled for pure food laws, fought against quack doctors, Prohibition, unsanitary restaurants, pronounced on many a suicide and murder that perplexed police, made his name and detective work known in medico-legal circles the world over.”
The key term in that exuberant, lengthy description, the reason Norris accepted one of the most spectacularly reluctant job offers in the city’s history, could be found in those two words “public spirited.” Journalists tended to emphasize the public side of Norris’s personality—the outsize former-college-football-player build, the buoyant laugh and quick wit, the dramatic face with its intense dark eyes and lowering eyebrows—and gloss over the intense sense of purpose that really defined the man.
Everyone knew that Norris didn’t have to work for the money. His father, Joseph Parker Norris, was a descendant of the merchant banker family that had founded Norristown, Pennsylvania; his mother, Frances Stevens Norris, was a daughter of the first president of the Bank of Commerce in New York City. Born on December 4, 1867, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Norris began his schooling at Cutler’s Private School, a tony little Manhattan institution founded by the Harvard-educated tutor of Theodore Roosevelt. He then went to Yale University, where he earned a bachelor of philosophy with an emphasis on science; from there he went to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his doctorate in medicine in 1892. He then studied abroad, first at a series of medical schools in Germany, then in Vienna, where he decided to specialize in pathology and bacteriology. He returned to New York in 1896 and took a job as a pathology lecturer at Columbia. In 1904 he left to become director of the main laboratory at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals.
People would forget, as Norris assumed the mantle of public crime fighter, how much he enjoyed basic medical research. While at Columbia and Bellevue, he published paper after paper on infectious disease: “The Bactericidal Action of Lymph Taken from the Thoracic Duct of the Dog,” “Spirochetal Infection of White Rats,” “Influence of Fasting on the Bactericidal Action of the Blood,” “Anterior Poliomyelitis,” “Detection of Typhoid Carriers,” and even “Red Leg in Frogs,” an analysis of an extremely nasty bacterial infection that broke blood vessels apart, staining once-green limbs red.
As fascinating as the research could be, it barely tapped Norris’s reservoir of energy or his capacity for public service. He’d been brought up in the tradition: his childhood had steeped him in stories of his ancestors’ contributions to their country. Eighteenth-century Norris family members fought in the Revolutionary War, even stripped the lead gutters and rain spouts from their Philadelphia home to make bullets for the Continental Army. His banker grandfather, John Austin Stevens, had negotiated the first loan of $100 million to allow the federal government to finance the Civil War.
In an essay on forensic medicine, Norris would muse on the need for doctors and scientists to lend their talents to criminal investigation, even if it meant less lucrative employment: “A much neglected field of medical endeavor is open to those of us who pursue this widely important branch.” What would happen if researchers didn’t contribute to the field? he asked, and answered: “Grave injustice to the relatives of the deceased . . . justice [would be] flaunted and innocent people bear the brunt due to a system which fosters ignorance, prejudice and graft.”
IT HELPED that Charles Norris, however high-minded he could sound, also possessed a lively sense of the ridiculous. “We call this the Country Club,” he would tell visitors gravely, gesturing them into his departmental offices, furnished with items from the motley collection left him by Patrick Riordan.
Norris had saved, with some enjoyment, the old coroner’s original inventory, which had listed, in bitterly meticulous detail: three (dented, according to Riordan’s notes) brass cuspidors, one curio closet (glass front intact), one safe (large), two telephone booths, four rugs, thirty-one chairs (two broken, one destroyed), eleven rolltop desks (one in bad shape), three wooden file cabinets, two clocks, one fan, one costumer (or coat rack), and four wooden wardrobes (one in several pieces). The rugs (filthy), they’d thrown away. One slightly blood-spattered carpet from a murder investigation was eventually salvaged to cover the floor of the Country Club lounge.
Norris at least had a new home for his department’s offices and laboratories: in Bellevue’s recently completed pathology building. Standing a stately six stories, solid with granite, dressed up by long arched windows, the building had been designed with the intention of coordinating the city’s forensic services. Here the city morgue was located, as well as the laboratories and autopsy rooms used by pathologists to study the dead. There was plenty of room for the medical examiner’s offices and, to Norris’s delight, some spare space on the third floor for a forensic chemistry laboratory, something which he was determined to establish.
As he wrote to Mayor Hylan, the location benefited them all. Riordan may have handed over all his battered furnishings, but he had left behind not a scrap of laboratory equipment. It made sense that “the place for the laboratory force of the medical examiner’s office should be where its seat of greatest activity resided.” Further, as Norris reminded the mayor, Bellevue offered the doctors working for him free access to the glassware, instruments, and chemicals of the pathology department.
The resentful mayor had cut the medical examiner’s budget by some $65,000 from what he had offered Riordan. Norris responded by constantly needling the mayor for more money—and by paying for needed supplies himself. He’d inherited a comfortable income, and throughout his tenure he used it to make sure his department was adequately equipped. His first purchase, out of personal funds, was laboratory equipment needed to test for bacterial infections.
He’d assembled a capable staff in his Manhattan office, which would handle major lab work for all the boroughs. He kept a couple of physicians on and brought in some new pathologists, notably a fiercely intelligent Harlem doctor named Thomas Gonzales. He worried, though, about the staff he’d inherited in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The doctors there seemed lazy to him. Norris warned the mayor that he might have to replace a certain amount of “useless timber.” But first he’d see how they responded to new standards. It surprised no one who knew Charles Norris that he had plans, lots of them. He would develop new rules for handling bodies. He would hire someone to run the chemistry lab, clerks to answer the phones, and stenographers to take and type notes on all bodies processed by the laboratory. He would create files on each case and insist that medical examiner employees, when testifying in court, refer to the recorded information rather than “memory,” as in the past.
“This work, which I may term ‘organization,’ ” has apparently not been tried before, Norris wrote to Hylan, displaying his contempt for the previous system. The relaxed environment of the old coroner’s office, he promised the mayor, was now a thing of the past.
BY APRIL, Norris was happily harassing other city departments. He complained to the district attorney’s office that his men were kept standing about in the courtroom halls for hours, waiting to be called for testimony. He complained to the police department that the stations weren’t stocked with soap and towels for the medical examiners to use before and after handling bodies.
“I wish to call to your attention the delay of the police precincts in their notification of homicides to the office of the Chief Medical Examiner,” he wrote to the police commissioner. For example, he’d been notified of a shooting on the Upper West Side some two hours after the police had reached the crime scene. It was the second time this had happened since Norris had taken office. In this case no real harm had been done, but “in many cases, I can conceive very well that non-attendance on the part of the Chief Medical Examiner or his assistants might be detrimental to the criminal investigation of a case.” He asked that desk lieutenants in police precincts be instructed to automatically call his office whenever a homicide or suspicious death occurred.
He wrote to the Bronx district attorney, reporting that certain police officers seemed to be taking bribes to conceal murders. In one case, they’d asked him to declare a suicide; when he’d refused, they’d tried to get an independent doctor to issue the death certificate. “It is entirely out of the question, in my opinion, to even consider the possibility of a suicide on account of the number and situation of the bullet wounds. There were four bullet wounds sprayed across the corpse.” How, Norris asked, could the man have accomplished shooting himself in the heart, the shoulder, the leg, and the arm? That might have been the old way of issuing death certificates, but those times were over, and he wanted everyone to know it.
He wrote to hospitals asking them to be quicker in getting bodies to the morgue for examination—one woman’s body arrived eight hours after she died. Norris called that completely unacceptable. He insisted that hospitals fill out forms issued by his office for every suspicious death, every detail according to his careful direction. “Your peremptory order,” began one response from a ruffled hospital director.
He was even tougher, though, on assistant medical examiners who failed to follow his instructions. He wanted key organs removed at autopsy for chemical analysis—the stomach, for instance, in a suspected poison case—had to be put in a sterile glass jar, labeled, dated, and placed in a sanitary fiber bag. All such evidence would go directly to the chemistry laboratory at Bellevue’s pathology building.
Norris wrote to the Brooklyn office demanding meticulous and thorough work in every detail. An assistant medical examiner there had declared a man dead of kidney damage due to use of a salve containing mercury. He’d done so based on a discussion with the man’s doctors, but without removing the kidneys for analysis or gathering any other evidence. “Did you make any efforts to procure the salve in order to determine that there
was
mercury?” Norris wrote angrily. When the doctor in question didn’t improve fast enough to suit him, Norris fired him.
He chastised personnel in the Bronx office with equal vigor. Norris was particularly exasperated by a report that loosely blamed a man’s death on wood alcohol. The document stated that the victim had been drinking heavily in the hours before his collapse. He’d also been stricken with sudden blindness (a classic symptom of wood alcohol poisoning) several hours before lapsing into a coma. The death certificate listed wood alcohol poisoning as a “more than probable” cause.
But “more than probable” was hardly a professional opinion, Norris said. The doctors should have removed liver and brain and preserved them for testing so that the diagnosis could be confirmed. Other evidence—such as the bottle containing the allegedly poisonous whiskey—should have been also saved and analyzed. Witnesses should have been questioned and statements taken down. Without such work, he emphasized, the district attorney had no way to prosecute vendors of liquors containing wood alcohol.
And that mattered, because getting it right had to be the everyday standard of the medical examiner’s office. It also mattered because Norris had a worrying idea based on rising numbers of wood alcohol deaths. He thought the city was looking at the start of a serious health problem. The latest research findings of his newly hired forensic chemist, Alexander Gettler, reinforced his concern. Gettler, a cigar-smoking gambling enthusiast from Brooklyn, possessed none of Norris’s aristocratic background but shared his perfectionistic ideals, and, in the case of wood alcohol, his sense of alarm.
BORN IN 1883, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who had left the country for better opportunities, Gettler learned early to love the magic of chemistry. By the time he graduated from high school, he was hooked by the puzzle of fitting one molecule to another, by the kaleidoscope of colors that glowed in a test tube. His family had no money to send him to college, so he paid for it himself. While working as a ticket agent on the 39th Street Brooklyn-to-Battery ferry, he earned a science degree from the College of the City of New York. To earn his master’s at Columbia University, he arranged to work the midnight-to-eight ferry shift. That way he could do homework during the ferry’s quiet night hours and attend classes during the day.
Awarded his master’s in 1910, Gettler took a job as a chemistry instructor at Bellevue Medical School, then went to work on his doctorate. Two years later Gettler received his Ph.D. from Columbia and was promoted to assistant professor in the medical school. He married a young schoolteacher, Alice Gorman, despite the loud opposition of her Irish Catholic family. Gettler, the Jewish immigrant, simply charmed away their objections, agreeing to move in with his in-laws, taking the top floor of their Brooklyn home. He even attended Sunday services with his wife. “He refused to do confession though,” his daughter-in-law would recall years later.
Gettler was not an imposing figure in the style of Charles Norris. A slight man, he had a thin, intense face, serious dark eyes, and carefully smooth dark hair. He was shy with strangers, indifferent to politics, and impatient with the constant journalistic interest in his work. With nosy reporters, he usually retreated behind an annoyingly pedantic facade: “A personality as colorless as the sodium chloride [table salt, NaCl] that he works with,” wrote one frustrated reporter, after a series of dust-dry responses to questions.