Report on Special Examination of the Accounts and Methods of the Office of Coroner in the City of New York...Office of the Commissioner of Accounts, City of New York; Leonard M. Wallstein, Commissioner of Accounts. 1915, 10" x 7", 82pp. Original wrappers, bound in a workaday black cloth-like cardboard. Bookplate of the library of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., and also the NY Public Library, which sent the book to the Library of Congress in 1933. With a pasted-in "voucher for medical examiner's reports" on the front pastedown. The book is staple bound, and the paper in some areas is becoming brittle. Overall, only a fair copy, but intact. $150
- WorldCat locates 10 copies, including: Columbia, Cornell, Yale, University of Illinois Urbana, Harvard, U Missouri, U Chicago. It seems as though there is only one copy in NYC.
If you ever had any interest—known and unknown—in reading about very impressive amounts of corruption and its constituents in the coroner’s office for NYC 104 years ago, here’s your chance to satisfy it. I’ve found a scarce report documenting the extraordinary conditions of that agency.
You don’t want to be on the other end of this paper—it is scathing, and angry, and well-written and documented. From a quick read of it the office of the coroner of NYC was simply a fantastic mess of incompetent work and very highly competent corruption.
The report starts at the end, with a summary of findings, and then goes downhill from there:
- “The elective coroner in New York City represents a combination of power, obscurity and irresponsibility which has resulted in inefficiency and malfeasance in the administration of the office. With constant temptation and easy opportunity for favoritism and even extortion, with utter lack of supervision and control, and without the slightest preparation and training to create in the coroner's mind a scientific and professional interest in the performance of his duties, the present system could not have been better devised intentionally to render improbable, if not impossible, the honest and efficient performance of the important public function entrusted to his office.
Of the 65 men who have held the office of coroner since consolidation, not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties….”
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