Gee Whiz! Don’t I wish every day wuz de fourth!

Gee whiz! Don’t I wish every day wuz de fourth! E.W. Kemble, c. 1904 Source: The Library of Congress

Independence Day was, traditionally, one of the bloodiest holidays of the past. See this wonderful post from Strange Company for a round-up of 4th-of-July casualties.

“Blank cartridge wounds,” according to the official report of the American Medical Association, “cause more deaths in the annual celebration of the Fourth of July than all other factors combined. In seven years 794 deaths have been caused by this one factor. Most of the victims were boys from six to eighteen years old, and they were doomed to die the most awful death known to medical science, a death the agony of which is probably not paralleled by the tortures of the Inquisition. If this annual sacrifice were really necessary it would be far more merciful to pick out the hundred or more youths each year and deliberately shoot them.”

JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 55, 1910

Wishing you all a safe Independence Day holiday!

The Day Before the Fourth of July. [Image from The Library of Congress.] c. 1900

Chris Woodyard is the author of The Victorian Book of the Dead, The Ghost Wore Black, The Headless Horror, The Face in the Window, and the 7-volume Haunted Ohio series. She is also the chronicler of the adventures of that amiable murderess Mrs Daffodil in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales. The books are available in paperback and for Kindle. Indexes and fact sheets for all of these books may be found by searching hauntedohiobooks.com. Join her on FB at Haunted Ohio by Chris Woodyard or The Victorian Book of the Dead.