Woodstock Music & Art Fair15–18 August 1969
A source-led incident report covering the major medical demand, conflicting casualty figures, site conditions and verified limits of the available record.
Incident Overview
Mass medical demand, not a single crowd-crush event
Date: 15–18 August 1969. The supplied row uses 18/08/1969, matching the final day of the event.
Location: Woodstock Music Festival Site, Bethel vicinity, Sullivan County, New York, United States. Venue context places the event on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm, with the visitor-site address given as 200 Hurd Road, Bethel, New York 12754.
Incident name: Woodstock Music & Art Fair / Woodstock Festival Mass Medical Emergency.
Summary
What the sources support
Woodstock drew approximately 450,000 people to a rural farm site. Medical planning had been based on a far smaller expected crowd.
Sources describe large-scale improvised medical response, drug-related cases, foot lacerations, evacuations and deaths. They do not support a single crowd-crush incident as the primary cause of fatalities.
Review Conflicts →Key Figures
Reported medical and casualty data
Chronology
Event and response timeline
Main Details
Reported outcomes
Disputed Details
Conflicting Information
The source set agrees that medical demand was substantial, but key casualty figures are not consistent.
Medical-focused sources support two deaths, while some secondary fact-list sources report three.
Report two deaths, including Raymond Mizsak and Richard Bieler.
Report three deaths, usually summarised as two drug overdoses and one tractor-related death.
Safest wording: “2 fatalities verified in stronger medical-focused sources; 3 fatalities reported by some secondary sources.”
The sources use different definitions: medical cases, medical incidents, patients, first-aid visits, overdoses, bad trips and lacerations.
Report 5,162 medical cases or more than 5,000 medical incidents, with around 800 drug-related cases.
Report 742 overdoses, 836–938 foot lacerations and at least 3,000 patients / first-aid visits.
The figures show heavy medical demand, but do not form one clean final injury total. Annoying, but honest.
Some summaries describe the death as overdose, while TIME presents a more cautious medical explanation.
Reports that the death is often attributed to overdose but may have involved hyperthermia and myocarditis-related complications after Thorazine.
Use the simpler “drug overdose” wording.
“Overdose” should be treated as reported, not medically settled.
Not Verified
Unverified Details
These points should not be presented as final facts without stronger records.
Source Material
References
Sources used for the incident summary, medical figures, fatality conflict, site location and historical context.
All Document URLs
Source Links
Direct links to each referenced source.
