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Four days after the Iroquois
Theater fire, some victims' families failed to find
their loved ones, despite multiple searches of
morgues and hospitals. In their frustration, they
turned to alternate location possibilities. One
theory was that fire victims had been taken to the
private homes of strangers for care. The idea was
posted in the newspaper, but no one reported such an
occurrence.
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In time, all the families
found their victims, with one remaining who was
never identified. In the early days, the confusion
resulted from bodies being so badly injured that
even husbands, parents, and children of the victims
misidentified the remains. One of the misidentified,
the
Greenwald boy, was entombed before the mix-up
was discovered.
The notion that Northwestern medical students had
hidden away bodies were born of grief and
desperation, fueled by recollections of body
snatching for anatomy study in the early 1800s. In
1903, that gruesome stage in medical education
history wasn't the ancient history that it is today.
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The irony of the accusation against Northwestern students
was that several had performed heroically to help 35-50 people escape from the
Iroquois. With help from painting contractors
Charles Cubbon and
Joe Leibert, they stretched a ladder, then a scaffolding plank, across Couch
Place, for victims to crawl to safety. The students laid the victims in the
recitation room, smothering their smoldering clothing and covering them with
blankets to conceal immodest exposure.
A few victims were taken to hospitals and survived, but most of those who
crossed the plank had been badly burned by the fireball and smoke inhalation.
They died and were transported to morgues, but a few family members viewed
bodies at Northwestern before beginning the circuit of hospitals and morgues.
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Built by the
Ira Couch family as the third Tremont House Hotel, the
Dearborn Street building became Northwestern's
new home in 1902. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
spoke at the building dedication.
The third floor was used for the law, dental and
pharmacy departments.
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