For a while we just knew it was hot. Too hot to cook in the kitchen. Too hot to open the shades. Too hot to sleep. Too hot to sit outside. Too hot to move except in slow motion. Too hot to do anything but talk about the heat. And so hot we knew we would never forget the summer of ’95.
But that’s all we knew. We didn’t know what was happening out there in stifling apartments and in stagnant rented rooms where the air stood thick and still, trapping the heat like a lit oven. We didn’t know that the heat was picking off the fragile people who live among us.
One of the first to know was Dr. Edmund Donoghue, Cook County’s medical examiner. It was Friday night–the day after the temperature had hit 104 in Chicago, a record–and it was still sweltering in the 90s at twilight. The city and the suburbs were perspiring and exhausted. Sidewalks felt like baked clay and lawns were turning the color of hay. We didn’t yet know the heat had become a killer.
Donoghue’s phone rang. That day, his office had received 23 death cases and four of them were heat-related. It had been fairly busy and he’d just gotten home from work.
“I got a call, it was my office and they warned me there would be 40 cases the next day, which was Saturday,” says Donoghue. “The highest number of cases examined in one day by our office had been 37 so I knew we were going to have a problem. I called two other pathologists and my chief investigator, Pat Angelo, and asked them to come in on their day off.
“But when I got in Saturday morning, we didn’t have 40. We had 87 cases. I called in all the other pathologists. The phones were ringing off the hook. Every time I looked out the window I saw more squadrols coming in. At one point they were lined up outside in the lot and then trailed out and down Leavitt Street. We had to have traffic cops direct the congestion, the bodies were coming in so fast. I realized then we would have to get refrigerated trucks to handle the bodies. Without those trucks we would have hit gridlock. We were full.
“On Sunday we had 83. On Monday we had 110. Tuesday we had 92. Wednesday, 49. Thursday, 45, and Friday, 22.
“This was a disaster in Chicago akin to the earthquake in Los Angeles, the floods along the Mississippi and Hurricane Hugo in Miami. We’d been struck with the overwhelming forces of nature that we were not equipped to handle. We were not overdramatizing the number of the heat-related deaths. We were being perfectly honest about what was happening. People were dying from the heat.”
So says Dr. Donoghue. Not a man to make rash statements and not a man to back down. A professional who calls it as he sees it. And what he was seeing two weeks ago was the deadliest heat wave to ever hit Cook County. And he said so.
He did the same thing more than a decade ago when his office saw something unusual. It’s now known as the infamous Tylenol case. He was not the medical examiner yet, but he was on duty.
“I came back to the office one night around 7 p.m. One of the investigators said, `Doctor, we’ve got something unusual. We have a male postal worker from Arlington Heights who died and then two of his relatives got sick, one has died and one is not expected to live.’ I said we should call the doctor of the day, Dr. Barry Lifschultz, and get an investigator out there. We figured there were only two likely elements that would kill so quickly: cyanide or nicotine. Nicotine is used as an agricultural herbicide in the South and is not found here, so that was ruled out. So we suspected cyanide but we had no idea where it came from.
“Then two different teams of paramedics told the investigator that they’d seen a bottle of Tylenol at the scene and although it seemed like a preposterous idea, we had the bottles brought in and we called our toxicologist in the middle of the night and, yes, the investigator had smelled the cyanide and the toxicology report came back with cyanide poisoning.
” Dr. Stein was out of town and I had an announcement of worldwide significance. So the next morning I called George Dunne, who headed the county board. I was going to say, `What should I do?’ but instead I said, `Here’s what I want to do. I want to hold a press conference.’ I’d never held a press conference in my life. But we had to get the information out–that there might be poison in Tylenol tablets.
“We called the company and told them what we were going to do and they asked if we had to release this information. I said, `What alternatives do I have?’ The answer was none.”
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“Since medical school, I always wanted to be the chief medical examiner of Cook County,” says Donoghue, 50. “But I knew it was not a very realistic expectation since Cook County didn’t even have a medical examiner yet. They had a coroner.”
“Ed always knew what he wanted, he was a very strong-minded child,” says his mother, Mary Helen Donoghue. “He was the oldest of six, you know, and he came from a long line of strong personalities.”
One of the strong personalities in his life was his grandfather, George Donoghue, who became Chicago’s first park superintendent.
“I learned about compassion from him,” says Donoghue. “I remember there was a park policeman who got into trouble drinking on the job. He was going to get fired for it but my grandfather knew he was just six months away from retiring and getting his pension. So instead of having the man lose the pension he’d worked for all his life, he had him assigned to an island in the Jackson Park lagoon without his gun for the last six months until his retirement. So he could get his pension.”
Another indelible persona was his father, Dr. Edmund Donoghue also, who was a general surgeon in Chicago. On Sundays, Donoghue would go with his father on his hospital rounds, either standing quietly beside him as he examined his patients or waiting for him in the hospital’s library.
It was while he was attending Notre Dame that Donoghue made a foray out of the world of medicine. His junior year, he left the school and went into the seminary, thinking perhaps that he might become a priest.
“I realized quickly it was not for me,” he says.
And so, from studying the mysteries of the human spirit, he returned to pre-med at Notre Dame, medical school at Marquette University and the mysteries of human death.
“Dr. Stein used to say that we are here for the living and he meant it and I believe it,” says Donoghue. “Death is only a small part of what we deal with here. What we really do is answer questions for the living. Was it a homicide? Was it an accidental death at the workplace and will the family be compensated?
“Autopsies would be gruesome if it weren’t for the fact that we are developing information useful for the living,” says Donoghue. He gives a good example.
“I was awakened one Sunday morning after a Franciscan brother had died and was found in his room at the friary. I did the autopsy the following morning and I looked at the arteries and there was a 40 percent occlusion but nothing that would make him die. Then I remembered a case that Dr. Lifschultz told me about. It had been a nun who died mysteriously and he discovered it was from carbon monoxide poisoning.
“So I immediately ordered a carbon monoxide test on his blood and that’s what it was. I called the friary and told them to open their windows immediately. If I had missed that, I might have ended my career, but more importantly we might have lost a lot more Franciscan brothers. We saved lives. My friends have asked me why didn’t I go into the kind of medicine that saves lives and I say, `I have–even as the medical examiner.’ “
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The difference between a coroner and a medical examiner is basically this, says Donoghue.
“The coroner is an elected official who is not necessarily qualified. A medical examiner is appointed in Cook County by the president of the county board, approved by the board and must be a licensed physician and certified by the American Board of Pathology in anatomic and forensic pathology.”
Donoghue, who has been with the medical examiner’s office since 1977, likes what he does. He has been the chief medical examiner for the last two years.
“When I get up in the morning, I get the papers and I read about what I am going to look into that day. This is intensely interesting.”
The medical examiner’s office, still commonly called the morgue, at 2121 W. Harrison, is a place few of us have ever visited. It is new and modern, and the lobby is in good taste–subtle in desert colors but crypt-like, similar to the inner sanctum of an Egyptian tomb.
It is here Donoghue and his staff of 114 work. It’s the third largest medical examiner’s office in the country, serving a population of 5.8 million. When it comes to death, says Donoghue, they have seen just about everything.
Right now the medical examiner’s office is still cordoned off from the public and the press. There is a yellow police ribbon that circles the place and squad cars that block the streets. The heat has not left the city for good and predictions are that it will hit again, like an anvil, like a steam iron, this weekend.
Whatever criticism has arisen from Donoghue’s blank honesty about who died and why does not perturb him. He is not a politician. He is a scientist.
“I stand by my figures. By this Tuesday it was 471 people who died of heat-related causes and I would be less than honest not to report what I saw.”
Mayor Richard Daley was out of town when the death toll from the heat began to mount two weeks ago. So was the fire commissioner. And quite a few other officials of the city.
But Donoghue was at work. Where he plans to be.
“I can guarantee you that every city official is going to be watching the thermometer,” he says. “I was supposed to go down to St. Louis this weekend, but I noticed the temperature was going to be 98 degrees. I just think it’s a good idea this weekend to stay in town.”
