Donora: A Look Back at the Worst Air Pollution Disaster in US History

Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Sylvan Stool Lecture ~

Andy McPhee, RN (Independent Scholar)

Mortician Rudolph Schwerha had already picked up two bodies in the dense fog. When he finally returned to the funeral home he found his wife, Helen, waiting at the door. “Before she spoke,” recalled Schwerha, “I knew what she would say. I thought, Oh, my God—another! I knew it by her face. And after that came another. Then another. There seemed to be no end. By ten o’clock in the morning, I had nine bodies waiting here.”

What was happening? “We didn’t know. I thought probably the fog was the reason; it had the smell of poison. But we didn’t know.”

Schwerha’s gut sense proved sadly accurate. A heavy fog had descended over Donora, a small steel and zinc mill town along the Monongahela River about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. It was Halloween weekend in 1948, and before the weekend had ended 21 people would perish from the toxins concentrated in the fog, toxins that came mostly from the zinc mill at the north end of town. It was the worst air pollution disaster in US history, and it would prompt the legislation we know today as the Clean Air Act.

Join author Andy McPhee for a presentation about the town, its mills, and the smog that literally changed the quality of our air. Andy McPhee is a retired registered nurse and educational healthcare publisher, as well as the author of six books, most recently Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2023. The book provides the most complete and comprehensive accounting of the smog ever written. He is working on a book tentatively titled Bloodletting, Body Snatching, and the Doctors' Riot of 1788. McPhee lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida, with his wife and two dogs.

This lecture was recorded. You can find the recording at this link; the lecture proper starts at 15:45 (15 minutes and 45 seconds).

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

"Could a situation be more ghastly?": Doctors, Disinfectants, and the Dead After the Johnstown Flood of 1889

Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 6-7:15pm Eastern

~ University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture ~

Vicki Daniel, PhD (Case Western)

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam located in Western Pennsylvania’s Conemaugh Valley failed catastrophically, sending a torrent of water toward the city of Johnstown and killing approximately 2,200 people. In the wake of the flood, officials from the Pennsylvania Board of Health immediately labeled the decomposing human bodies scattered throughout the valley as a massive health threat and established new protocols for protecting the public’s health. At the same time, survivors grieved the dead as beloved friends and neighbors who deserved proper burial and commemoration. For this reason, the Johnstown Flood represents a moment of conflict between the social and medical conceptualizations of the dead in the era of emerging public health paradigms. In this talk, I will examine the roots of this conflict and analyze how local leaders and state health officials in Johnstown tried to balance between the biological and social imperatives of mass fatality events. I will show how officials deployed public health measures that reflected a compromise between viewing the dead as dangerous material and seeing them as human remains.

Click here to watch the recording of the lecture. A brief business meeting took place before the lecture with reports from the Secretary and Treasurer as well as an election; see the Contact Us page for the current officers.

Image: Anonymous depiction of the flood water surging over the stone railway bridge, which is in the center. Behind it is a pile of burning buildings and trees with orange-yellow flames and gray smoke. There are people rushing about and bodies in the water and on the ground.

Donora: Clean air started here

When you drive across the Donora-Monessen Bridge, you're greeted by a sign that reads, "Next to yours, the best town in the USA." Although the area has suffered both during the 5 decades there was a U.S. Steel plant along the horseshoe bend in the Monongahela River, and in the 7 decades since then, Donorans are incredibly proud of their hometown, which birthed not only Stan "The Man" Musial but both Ken Griffey, Sr., and Jr. The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society was there to mark the 75th anniversary of a freak weather event that smothered the valley with the smoke from domestic fires, motor vehicles, trains, as well as industrial toxins from the wire factory and especially the zinc smelter. It became a rallying cry for the environmental movement in the middle of the 20th century.

We were treated to a private lecture by the Donora Historical Society's historian, Brian Charlton, who can talk extensively and extemporaneously about the area.

Above left: "Donora smog" painted into Halloween decorations on an empty storefront window.

Above right: The high school teams are the Donora Dragons.

Below: "After many silent springs, a fatal fall--the Donora Smog" and its victims.

I highly recommend this 4-minute video, "A Town Called Donora: A Digital Story." It includes a dramatic introduction as well as a reading of Guenter Kunert's poem "Song of a Small Town" ("Lied von einer kleinen Stadt (Fuer eine Orgel)") published in East Berlin in 1950 after reading this Life magazine article with several black and white photographs.

The green oxygen canister below was used to deliver oxygen to some of the hundreds of residents who sickened on the carbon monoxide, ozone, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and trioxide, volatile organic compounds, and the components of acid rain (nitric acid and sulfuric acid) over the 5 days.

If you would like to learn more about the smog event, you can purchase Andy McPhee's book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town (2022), the first book-length treatment of the event. McPhee is a nurse and an accomplished writer and will be speaking to the Society during the 2024-2025 lecture season.

We admired the many exhibits of the museum before enjoying lunch at a local diner. We hope you'll join us on our next day trip!

Rachel Carson: A Pioneer for Science-based Policy Connecting Environment and Health

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

6-7:15pm Eastern Time (US and Canada)

~ University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture ~

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECORDING

Patricia DeMarco, PhD

Senior Scholar and Adjunct Faculty, Chatham University

AND Vice President of the Forest Hills Borough Council

In one of the last public speeches of her life, Rachel Carson addressed the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Permanente Medical Group in San Francisco. Her thoughts on that occasion resonate today with even more clarity, as much that she feared in 1963 has become our reality. In that speech “On the Pollution of Our Environment” she said, “In spite of the truly marvelous inventiveness of the human brain, we are beginning to wonder whether our power to change the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom, for our own good, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the welfare of generations to come.” Carson used her knowledge of science and her early understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things to advocate for policy based on science. The challenges we are facing today can be addressed by recognizing that the laws of Nature are not negotiable. We must adjust our laws and our ways of interacting with the living earth and each other to align more closely to accommodate the laws of chemistry, physics, physiology, and ecology. 

Dr. Demarco is the author of Pathways to Our Sustainable Future – A Global Perspective from Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). See her website for a Curriculum Vitae and current work.

Donations toward the speaker's honorarium are gratefully appreciated.

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its generous support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.