forcing a hospital assistant to “tie his good arm down.”13
By 5:30 a.m., the morning after the fire, many of the surviving inmates were herded into the prison chapel, where some turned benches into beds. Other convicts were sent to buildings untouched by the fire. In the meantime the prison yard was cleared of inmates. One local reporter wrote, “More horrible than the dead were some of the injured who had been carried to the prison hospital, stark, or raving mad, a few of them blinded and maimed.”14 By then the prison hospital was, like the prison itself, well over capacity.
On Tuesday, surviving victims spoke “quietly among [them]selves,” trying to find comfort on the “trim, white hospital cots” they were provided. Initial estimates placed 231 injured in hospital. A late check that day found only 5 of them in critical condition. The rough-hewn cons were attended to by prison nurses and inmates trained in the nursing arts. The inmate nurses were well respected by their comrades. Authorities recognized “their cool-headedness” and credited them with saving many lives and avoiding a near panic during the early hours of the catastrophe. They worked “systematically” as they “shunted case after case into the prison yard and administered oxygen under direction of a physician.”15 The hospital patients offered a variety of dispositions. One smoked “stoically and inquired about his pals.” Another asked for permission to go out and get fresh air, and another was more interested in reading the newspaper.16
Among the most prominent caretakers was the Ohio Penitentiary’s only physician, Dr. George Keil. On call twenty-four hours a day, he was at his post by 6 p.m. Easter Monday. As soon as he got to the hospital he called several local doctors, and after speaking with the warden was told to “call up all doctors you can get.” Keil called his wife and told her to do likewise. The response was more than was expected; he remembered that there got to be “more doctors than patients,” necessitating a directive to stop any more doctors from coming into the hospital.17
The hospital had bed capacity for 160, of which 147 were filled at the time of the fire. Anyone who was deemed ambulatory was asked to give up his bed to accommodate the avalanche of burn cases being brought in. By 8:30 p.m. the “National Guard or somebody” brought in a number of temporary cots, adding 150 more injured to the 160 already there.
During his testimony to the Board of Inquiry in the following days, Keil attested that a number of deaths both in the yard and hospital “just breathed and gasped and died…. They seemed to have inhaled either flame or gas and died.” As soon as a victim was pronounced dead, the body was removed. With so little space, as soon as six dead victims were taken out, six live ones were brought in. He admitted there was no way of knowing for sure whether the deceased died from burns, but strongly believed, as did most other authorities, that the vast majority died from suffocation. Asked how many of the 150 in the hospital died there, he responded that “15 or 20 possibly died or were already dead when they were brought in,” but recalled losing only one who had died since 10 p.m. on Monday evening, a victim who succumbed to bronchial pneumonia “from inhalation of smoke and possibly flames.”18
Investigators were interested in whether any of the victims had shared any last words with the doctor before taking their last breaths. Keil responded that even if they did say something, he wouldn’t have had time to listen with the ranks of the injured growing so quickly. Moreover, any who died in the hospital were already unconscious when they were brought in. Pressed further as to whether he heard any inmates speak about how the fire might have started, he told the authorities he was there “to take care of the sick” and was “not interested” in how it started.19
Badly burned convicts were at the mercy of contemporary medicine. Before World War II, surprisingly little was known about treating burn victims. Most advances would come too late for the Ohio Penitentiary fatalities. The go-to drug during the aftermath of the fire was opiates. It wasn’t long after the fire was contained that the prison ran out of its supply. Opiates were noticeably scarce at the prison chapel next to the burnt-out cell house, where “nearly a score of men lay with severe flesh burns … but painless under the influence of opiates administered by scores of Columbus physicians.” Fortunately, appeals to city physicians “brought more than enough” new supplies.20
Most fire victims, as in the case of the Ohio Penitentiary fire, die from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning; indeed, it is rare for fire victims to die from burns. Most thermal damage to the body occurs post mortem. Carbon monoxide poisoning occurs when the deadly gas combines with the hemoglobin in the blood, preventing it from carrying oxygen. Blood cells loaded with CO are unable to transport the life-sustaining oxygen to the body, and consequently the body becomes starved of oxygen. But if the pathologist does not find CO in the blood, the victim was probably dead before the fire. In the case of the Easter Monday blaze, there were so many dead that it was impossible to perform more than cursory checks of the bodies before embalming them. Therefore, autopsies were out of the question. However, if autopsies had been performed, forensic pathologists would probably have found soot in the stomach or, if the victim had been alive during the fire, in the victim’s airway (nose, throat, larynx, trachea, and bronchi).21
The disposal of the more than three hundred bodies “was the most solemn task” confronting officials on Tuesday and Wednesday, as wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, and friends of the deceased continued to mass against “the iron bars of the main prison gate,” hoping and demanding to be admitted into the still-smoldering pen. Although an officer read off the names of survivors and those who had escaped injury, many in the throng refused to believe it until they could see them in person. “They stood in dazed groups after a night of horror splashed with acts of heroism by some of those who had been considered the most desperate inside the walls.”
As soon as the mother and wife of Herbert Ross of Cleveland, serving time for carrying a concealed weapon, heard of the fire, they “departed so quickly” from the dinner table that they were still “attired in house dresses and aprons.” Newspapers lavished ink on them for making the drive to Columbus in two and a half hours, considered a “record” time for the era. Upon arrival they found to their great relief that Ross had been housed in another section, “serving as a waiter in the dining room,” and was unharmed.22
Once family members arrived and a protocol for collecting bodies had been established, they were instructed to pass through the outer gate and were handed pencils to fill out a reference book. Then they were taken in charge by the warden’s daughter, Amanda Thomas, and parole officer Dan Bonzo. Many stood around the main gate for hours until they received a burial permit that allowed them to reclaim the body once it was conveyed to the temporary morgue in the Horticulture Building at the Ohio State Fairgrounds.23 This would serve as the staging area for medical response personnel, including doctors, embalmers, nurses, and other volunteers.
The Horticulture Building, described by one reporter as a cattle barn, would serve as a combination morgue and hospital until the end of the week. Among the first on duty was the Red Cross, which set up a canteen at the fairgrounds. The Red Cross had charge of the fairgrounds and was assisted by members of the Columbus Junior League. As pleas for assistance continued to resonate throughout central Ohio, volunteers began arriving en masse. Among them was a delegation of physicians and students, led by Dr. J. C. McNamara from Marion. The Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, and St. Francis Hospital offered their services as well. The Salvation Army set up a canteen in front of the prison to pass out food, coffee, and succor to exhausted firemen, rescuers, and inmates who aided in the rescue.
Every available physician was called to the disaster
