A social history of death investigations in the urban Midwest

The scene of myriad grisly deaths, late nineteenth-century St. Louis was a hotbed for homicide, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and workplace accidents. The role of the city’s Gilded Age coroners has not been fully examined, contextualized, or interrogated until now. Sarah E. Lirley investigates the process in which these outcomes were determined, finding coroners’ rulings were not uniform, but rather varied by who was conducting the inquest. These fascinating case studies explore the lives of the deceased, as well as their families, communities, press coverage of the events, and the coroners themselves.

Sudden Deaths in St. Louis is a study of 120 coroners’ inquests conducted between 1875 and 1885. Each chapter analyzes the typical versus the atypical in verdicts of death. At the time, inaccurate findings and cursory investigations fueled criticisms of coroner’s offices for employing poorly trained laymen. The coroners featured in this book had the power to shape public perception of the deceased, and they often relied on preexisting reputations to determine cause of death. For instance, women who worked as prostitutes were likely to be ruled as suicides, whether or not that was actually the case, and women who were respected members of their communities, particularly mothers, frequently received rulings of suicide caused by insanity. Verdicts also depended in part on availability of witnesses, including family members, to determine whether another person could be held liable for the death. Lirley’s book highlights the stories of ordinary men and women whose lives were tragically cut short, and the injustice they received even after death.

Sarah E. Lirley is a historian who specializes in the history of women and gender, nineteenth century history, and the history of death and death investigations. Lirley is an assistant professor of history at Columbia College (Columbia, Missouri). She has published articles in the Missouri Historical Review and has written peer-reviewed blog articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews in a variety of historical journals. She has presented her research at more than twenty professional conferences.

“This study of the history of coroners’ inquests in St. Louis during the late nineteenth century makes a valuable contribution to death studies. Providing a look into the lives of ordinary people and the factors that shaped investigations, Sudden Deaths illuminates the social meanings and implications of class and urban economy in the Gilded Age.”—
Keona K. Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis

“The ordinary men and women who people this book meet tragic ends—driven to death by grief at the loss of a child, killed at work in a boiler explosion, fatally beaten by a spouse, or dying from a botched abortion. Lirley brings a strong sense of justice to a fascinating source base and reveals the drama of social history.”—Alison Clark Efford, author of German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship, in the Civil War Era

“In this fascinating, new exploration of coroners’ inquests and violent deaths in Gilded Age St. Louis, Lirley uncovers how one’s social standing—whether they were ‘respectable’ or ‘rough,’—shaped interpretations of their death. Connecting race, class, and gender with questions of insanity, homicide, suicide, abortion, alcoholism, and medicine in death testimonies and verdicts, Lirley extends a history more relevant today than ever.”—Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, author of Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign against Convents in Antebellum America 

“This meticulously researched book uses nineteenth-century investigations of suspicious deaths as a window into the private circumstances and public meanings of the lives and deaths of St. Louisians. Lirley’s exhaustive research into coroner’s records is a treasure trove of information about the daily worlds of women, African Americans, and immigrants navigating work, domestic conflict, pregnancy, alcoholism, and depression.”—Catherine E. Rymph, author of Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right 

“Lirley provides a provocative look at the Gilded Age from a unique perspective that explores not just race and gender but also the seamy undersides of both cities in the period and the ways deaths were reported and treated.”—Jeffrey Smith, author of The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America

“In the early Gilded Age, elected St. Louis coroners investigated unexpected death, such as those resulting from domestic violence, suicide, abortion, or traumatic accident. These coroners brought not only science and law to their work but social judgment. Similar deaths were often judged differently. They could spare a respected family embarrassment on the one hand, or effectively condemn those judged guilty of moral turpitude—prostitutes, the dissolute, the perpetrators of domestic violence, or the sin of poverty, on the other. Lirley’s revealing study is the first to make systematic use of these now readily accessible records, reconstructing both the harshness and occasional charity that still resonate in our world of opioid and COVID-19 deaths.”—Kenneth H. Winn, editor of Missouri Law and the American Conscience: Historical Rights and Wrongs

“In this captivating study of death, we learn a great deal about life, especially the lives of the marginalized in Gilded Age urban America. Lirley mines overlooked coroners’ inquests in turn-of-the-century St. Louis, rich sources for historians of violence, medicine, family and labor, for the social meaning of death. In her gleaning of witness testimony, Lirley unearths obscured or hidden topics, affording historians a rare glimpse into the daily lives, and deaths, of poor and working-class Americans, including immigrants, prostitutes, the addicted and African Americans. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the study of death.”—Diane Miller Sommerville, author of Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South 

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