July 16, 2014 • 23 mins
In the late 1700s, medical colleges needed cadavers for educational dissection, but there were no legal means for obtaining them. This led to some unorthodox dealings in the acquiring of bodies, and brought New York to a fever pitch in 1788. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back when
the podcast Sawbones launched, we talked about it a couple
(00:21):
of times on the show and on our Twitter and
stuff like that. It's been a while since we brought
up saw Bones, which is a comedy podcast about medical
history that's hosted by Sydney and Justin McElroy. And I
was catching up on their show on the plane last
week and I listened to their episode called Corpse Theft
and the Resurrection Men, which included, among other things, a
(00:43):
little about the Doctor's Riot of seventy eight, which is well,
we're gonna talk about today because it's sort of wedded
my appetite talk more about that and to worry more
about that. Um So, if you've if you already listen
to saw Bones, which I know some of our listeners
do listen to saw Bones, there's cross over there. We
are definitely going to talk in more detail about just
(01:04):
the Doctor's riot and the context that led up to it.
And this is definitely a different angle than sabb Owes.
So you you know there's gonna be new stuff in
here even if you listened to that episode, so for context.
In seventeen sixty five, North America got its first medical
school at the College of Philadelphia, and from the beginning,
(01:26):
medical students at the College of Philadelphia worked with patients
at the Pennsylvania Hospital, gradually developing the blueprint for today's
medical schools and teaching hospitals. This program wasn't meant to
be a person's sole source of medical education, though, uh
and the same was true of other medical schools that
opened up during the colonial period and after the Revolutionary War.
(01:49):
At this point, most people became doctors through apprenticeships, and
America's first medical schools were intended to be this sort
of period of additional focused study for people who had
already finished their apprenticeship, so they already effectively were doctors
before they even went to medical school. There was also
a lot of anatomical study on cadavers in these programs,
(02:11):
on the idea that doctors needed to learn anatomy and
that dissecting cadavers was a good way to do this
had become really prevalent during the eighteenth century. The thing
that had not become really prevalent was a big supply
of cadavers to dissect. The idea of donating your body
to science really did not exist at this point. Most
(02:33):
colonies either had no laws governing how bodies might be
used for medical study, or they specifically prohibited certain uses,
for example dissecting unclaimed bodies. There was definitely no regulation
of how cadavers might be legally obtained and delivered, so
schools needed these bodies for legitimate study, but they had
no legal channels to get them. Plus, there were all
(02:56):
kinds of religious and cultural taboos that made people pretty
opposed to the idea of having their bodies cut, cut up,
and examined after they were dead. Among Christians and Jews,
the body was sacred. Various Christian denominations believed that being
cut up after death was sacrilegious and it would prevent
them from getting into heaven or from being resurrected on
(03:17):
Judgment Day. Similar beliefs about the sacredness of the body
also ran through African traditions that slaves had brought with them,
and being a doctor at this point in time did
not have the prestige in the cloud that it does today.
At least in the Western world, so people were not
particularly inclined to go against all of these layers of
(03:38):
taboo to let their bodies be cut up by doctors.
And it didn't help that British medical schools had been
using executed criminals for their dissections, so this made American
communities associate being dissected with being a criminal or with
being punished, although it was illegal. There were some schools
that got their bodies from ins and alms houses and
(04:01):
other institutions. They would covertly by the bodies of people
who had died before they even were buried, But really
the primary source of cadavers for a really long time
was grave robbing, and this of course had its own
social and religious implications. So churchyards were and remained for
(04:22):
many people sacred, bodies sacred, so digging up bodies out
of graveyards and cutting them up was a gross offense,
and it made doctors who already worked particularly well respected
seemed like they had just this wanton disregard for human
life and just no regard for basic decency. There were
doctors and students who dug up their own cadavers, but
(04:44):
they mostly outsourced that work to people who were known
as resurrectionists, who did the actual grave robbing. I feel
like this would be a great series on one of
the secondary um channels, the resurrectionists. And they had this process,
the resurrectionists, down to a science. So at this point,
embalming was not widely used. It you know, had culturally
(05:06):
in history, it had happened in many places, but in
terms of like the modern approach to it, that was
not really common. Uh. So these guys had to work quickly,
ideally within hours of burial. It was kind of like
a heist movie, except it involved graves instead of like
a bank. Uh And instead of digging up the whole
length of the casket, they'd work just from the head
and they would weaken one end of the casket by
(05:27):
drilling holes in it before bashing it in and just
pulling the body out through the hole with hooks, getting
in and out of the place within an hour, and
timing the passing of their getaway vehicle so they could
slip the body into it and escape. The graves that
were at the biggest risk of being robbed were the
ones that belonged to poor people and slaves, and these
were the people who were least likely to have someone
(05:50):
watching out for the grave after the people died. And
both of these places, the resurrectionists did not have to
be quite as on the ball with their you know,
their their heists shenanigans, because most of the people who
were being buried in cemeteries for the poor and for
slaves didn't have the money to buy a coffin, so
they were buried directly in the dirt. And the words
(06:11):
of Harriet Martineau, who was writing an account of a
trip in the eighteen hundreds quote in Baltimore, the bodies
of colored people exclusively are taken for dissection because the
whites do not like it, and the colored people cannot resist. So,
although the overwhelming majority of stolen bodies were those of
(06:31):
black people, in poor people having money or status was
not necessarily a protection. High profile body thefts made headlines,
such as the time that a search party found the
body of John Harrison, who was son of President William
Henry Harrison and father of President Benjamin Harrison, at a
medical college in Cincinnati. This meant the people who could
(06:53):
afford it would bury their loved ones in these sealed
iron coffins, or they would surround the whole grave site
in this old cage that covered the whole thing. Some
of them who had the money to even hired armed
guards to watch over their newly buried bodies. And regardless
of who you were, your body really was not safe
from theft until it had been in the ground for
(07:14):
about two weeks in the winter shorter in the summer,
at which point it would be too decomposed to be dissected.
And before we move on to exactly what was happening
in New York at the time of this particular riot,
let's have a brief moment for a word from a sponsor.
In New York where the riot that we're talking about
today took place, A major source of bodies for cadaver
(07:37):
study was the Potter's Field, where the poor and the
unknown were buried in unmarked graves. The other big source
was the Negroes burial Ground, which was kind of coincidentally
quite close to New York Hospital. Nearly all of New
York City's black population was buried in Negro's burial ground.
There was only one church that buried black people in
(07:58):
a segregated churchyard. It charged a fee to do so.
As body theft from the Negro's burial ground became more
and more commonplace. Freed slaves would actually buy land to
use as private cemeteries. This didn't necessarily help, since these
private burial grounds sometimes became targets of their own. New
York City's demand for all these cadavers came from two sources.
(08:22):
One was its medical school at Columbia College, and the
other was Richard Bailey, who was a doctor from Connecticut,
and he was teaching not for credit medical classes at
New York Hospital, which we just mentioned was very close
to the Negroes burial ground, and that made the Negroes
burial ground an easy target for gray robbers. So both
(08:43):
freed people and slaves in New York at this time
and become increasingly upset at the prevalence of grave grave
robbing from the black burial spaces. In early February of
a group of two thousand slaves and one thousand freed
people began petitioning the City East Common Council, including the
mayor and aldermen, not for the grave robbing to stop,
(09:05):
but for it at least to be carried out in
a decent and respectful way. This petition read in part
most humbly, sirs, we declare that it has lately been
the practice of a number of young gentlemen in this city,
who call themselves students of the physic, to repair to
the burying ground assigned for the use of your petitioners.
Under the cover of night, in the most wanton sallies
(09:28):
of excess, they dig up bodies of our deceased friends
and relatives of your petitioners, carrying them away without respect
for age or sex, mangle their flesh out of a
wanton curiosity, and then expose it to beasts and birds.
Your petitioners are well aware of the necessity of physicians
and surgeons consulting dead subjects for the benefit of mankind.
(09:51):
Your petitioners do not presuppose it as an injury to
the deceased, and would not be adverse to dissection in
particular circumstances, that is, if it is conducted with the
decency and propriety which the solemnity of such occasion requires.
Your petitioners do not wish to impede the work of
these students of the physic, but most humbly pray your
(10:12):
honors to take our case into consideration and adopt such
measure as may seem to prevent further abuses in the future.
Their petition was ignored, but on February one, so only
a couple of weeks later, the Daily Advertiser published an
anonymous report about how quote few blacks are buried whose
(10:36):
bodies are permitted to remain in the grave end quote.
Through the rest of February and part of March, the
Daily Advertiser went on to publish really horrifying accounts of
grave desecration and body theft, and then things came to
a head in April. There are several conflicting reports of
exactly what started the riot, so it's not completely clear
(11:00):
exactly what happened, but there are three pretty common elements
among all the various retellings. The first is that on
April thirteen, some doctors and their teacher were dissecting a
cadaver in a lab at New York Hospital. The second
is that by some means or another, a boy got
a glimpse of what was going on through the window
(11:20):
and the doctor saw him. And the third is that
one of the surgeons, probably in an attempt to scare
the boy off, waived the cadaver's arm at him. And
some versions of the story, one of the doctors shouted
that it was the boy's mother's arm, and by coincident,
this boy's mother had died very recently. This version of
(11:42):
the story usually goes on to say that the boy
ran home and told his father, who exhumed his mother's
grave only to find it empty. That seems like a
lot of things that had to happen just that way. Yeah,
it feels like an urban legend. Yeah, something definitely happened
(12:05):
to spark the whole riot. But this particular version of
the story is completely retold. But I read a couple
of things that kind of went back through all of
the earliest correspondents and news reports, and we're like, ah,
there's not actual documentation of exactly what really tipped the scale.
But regardless of how exactly this whole thing started, a
(12:27):
mob soon descended upon New York Hospital, and a letter
to Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph Colonel William Heath described it
this way. The cry of barbarity and etcetera was soon spread.
The young sons of Galen fled in every direction. One
took refuge in a chimney. The mob raised, and the
(12:47):
hospital apartments were ransacked. In the anatomy room were found
three fresh bodies, one boiling in a kettle, and two
others cut up, with certain parts of the two sex
hanging up in a most brutal position. The circumstances, together
with the wanton and apparent inhuman complexion in the room,
exasperated the mob beyond all bounds, to the total destruction
(13:09):
of every anatomy in the hospital. And while many of
the doctors and the teachers did indeed flee, some stayed
behind to try to protect the cadavers, the other specimens,
and the teaching materials. But the mob that arrived at
the hospital dragged all of this out into the street
and they set it on fire. They also reburied the
bodies that had not been dissected yet. The mayor, James Dwayne,
(13:33):
arrived with the sheriff and put the doctors and teachers
into protective custody at the jail. Those calm things down
a little bit, but during the night, medical students from Columbia,
fearing that their school was going to be the next target,
went into the school to hide all of their anatomical
materials and cadavers that they would not be burned and
(13:54):
destroyed as well, and this turned out to be a
fortunate move since during the night to medical students George
Swinney and Isaac Gano broke into a churchyard and stole
the body of a well known white woman, which meant
that the mob that formed the next morning was immense
and furious. It swelled to about five thousand people. This
(14:14):
mob was bound and determined to find and destroy anything
that was being used for anatomical study at Columbia, so
they searched the entire college, including the dorms, and they
went on to search doctors homes. One person they ran
across was even beaten solely for wearing black, which was
the color that the doctors usually wore. And when the
mob found nothing uh, they all ended up going to
(14:37):
the jail, where they started an assault on the building
with rocks and bricks. They tore down the gallows to
use the wood as a weapon as the rocks and
the bricks broke windows and made their way into the
cells where people were being held the doctors and the
students started collecting them along with broken glass to defend themselves,
(14:59):
and this it went on for another full day until
the governor called out the militia. They brought in a
brigade and artillery, and the ensuing melee. It's similarly not
clear exactly what happened, but ultimately at least three rioters
and three militiamen were killed. The final death toll is
often sided at twenty and afterwards, residents of New York
(15:23):
doubled down on their efforts to protect the bodies of
the dead. Armed groups called dead Guardmen's started to keep
watch over cemeteries. Bailey and the other doctors budged the
truth by saying they had never asked anyone to steal
a body from one of the city's graveyards. The reason
this was not really on the up and up was
that the Potter's Field and the Negroes burial ground were
(15:45):
both outside of the city limits uh and in fact,
that this point black people could only be buried outside
the city limits. So what they were saying was technically true,
but it was really pretty easily. Yes, there was a
grand jury investigation, but no charges seemed to have been
filed and no one was convicted, possibly because both the
(16:06):
rioters and the doctors were breaking the law. The riot,
apart from destroying anatomical UH equipment and samples and causing
some deaths had some ongoing ramifications which we want to
talk about afterwards from a sponsor. So the Doctor's Riot,
which was in seventeen eighty eight, was only one of
(16:27):
the anatomy riots in the United States between seventeen sixty
five and eighteen fifty four. There were at least seventeen
of them. They took place primarily in New England, where
most of the medical colleges were at the time, but
they were also riots as far west as Ohio and Illinois,
and these were not at like fly by night shady
(16:48):
schools UH in an eighteen twenty four riot. The target
of this mob aggression was actually Yale University. In January
of seventeen eighty nine, which was the year after the
Doctor's Ride in New York took place, the New York
legislature passed laws that made grave robbing illegal, and they
earmarked certain crimes as being punishable by quote dissection after death,
(17:12):
so there would be a legal supply of bodies. But
this didn't provide enough bodies for the medical study that
was going on, so the grave robbing did continue, particularly
in Potter's Fields. And black cemeteries. Massachusetts passed a law
making it legal to dissect unclaimed bodies in eighteen thirty one.
New York did the same thing in eighteen fifty four,
(17:34):
but other laws were a little bit slower in coming.
By nine thirteen, Louisiana and Alabama still had no legal
way for medical schools to obtain canavers, while most other
states had passed laws allowing unclaimed bodies, donated bodies, and
the bodies of executed criminals to be dissected. Even then,
the bodies that were being dissected in medical schools were
(17:57):
disproportionately those of poor people in my parties, so they
were people who couldn't afford burials or their families couldn't
afford to claim their bodies, and grave robbing for cadaver
purposes continued in the United States until the nineteen twenties.
In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, the medical establishment
worked to change people's perceptions of dissection and of donating
(18:19):
bodies to science. In nineteen sixty eight, the National Conference
of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws approved the Uniform
Anatomical Gift Act or u a g a UH and
this made donating your body a choice and a gift,
and it also gave the person who was doing the donating,
so the person whose body it actually was, the ultimate
(18:42):
say in what would happen to them. So if you
wanted to donate your body, it would be donated, even
if your next of ken objected to the choice that
you had made. Almost every state had had adopted this
law or something very similar to it within a few years,
and today bequests actually make the large majority of cadavers,
which completely changed the demographic of dissected bodies in medical schools. Yeah.
(19:07):
One of my sources cited a personal communication from somebody
at Duke University Medical School from about ten years ago,
and at that point, according to this personal correspondence, uh,
like the cadavers at Duke were overwhelmingly those of Caucasian people.
UM I could not find statistics for like the broader
(19:28):
all of United States medical school or in general people
who are donating their bodies. Uh. But this whole shift
in it from being a thing that happens to you
if you can't afford to be buried to a thing
you choose to do totally changed the whole picture of it.
Which is very fascinating stuff. Kind of kind of gruesome,
(19:51):
it is, but you know, it's good that people recognize
that science needs their body after they have shuffled off
this mortal coil. Uh. Do you have listener mail which
may or may not be about dead people. I do
have listener mail that is about someone who is dead,
but it is not about their bodies. This is from Heather,
and it's about our Edna St. Vincent Malay episode. And
(20:14):
Heather says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I just listened to
your two part episode on Edna St. Vincent Malay and
had to write in to share my own experiences with
the poet. While she did not live most of her
adult life in Maine, we Mainners claim her as one
of our own, despite our people's taciturn disapproval of her
quote firecracker lifestyle. I first fell in love with Renaissance
when I read in eighth grade as part of a
(20:34):
required unit on our home state of Maine. For extra credit,
I went to Camden and hiked Mount Batty part of
the Camden Hills, and climbed up Mount Batty Tower and
photographed the scene that inspired the opening lines of the poem,
as well as a plaque placed into the tower commemorating
quote Maine's finest lyric poet. She's described in the plaque
as a frail girl with flaming red hair, and the
(20:56):
general description of her told in public schools is one
of a brilliant mind, mind with a love of nature.
It wasn't until I was in college that I learned
of Vincent's love affairs with men and women, and that
she reportedly wore pants and smoked marijuana long before those
were acceptable. I have no proof of these claims other
than what my professor told me, but I love thinking
of her as such a unique spirit. Needless to say,
(21:18):
it was a far cry from the stagy old coddters
we've been reading about. When I became a high school
English teacher, I always lead with Vincent Shenanigan's, turning my
students into fans before they'd read a single line of
her poetry. To me, she is the painter in saying
of awesome, and largely my kids agreed. Maine can be
a heart climate, and too often those who lived here
are broken by the demands of survival. Even today, I've
(21:40):
always loved that Edna st. Vincent Malay gave that way
of life too, firm middle fingers and lived her own
way so fully. I think she and Thorow would have
been great friends if they could have been here in
Maine together. Thank you so much for the podcast, Heather,
and she included some photos. Now I think about the
time traveling possibilities of like and the St. Vincent wlian
(22:01):
Brook Farm community. Yeah, I kind of want I kind
of want Edna St Vincent Malay to have had a
big conversation with Walt Whitman. Yeah. I could see that
being a pretty fun show to watch. I would pay
tickets for that. I think I'm i too. So if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other subject, you can where a history of podcasts
(22:21):
at how stuffworks dot com. We've been saying that address
for a while, but to make it super clear, if
you send it to Discovery dot com, we will not
get it. Uh. We're on Facebook at Facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History.
Are tumbler is miss in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we're also on pinterest. Uh. If you'd like to
learn more about what we talked about today, You can
(22:41):
come to how stuff works dot com with the word
doctor in the search bar, and you will find how
becoming a doctor works. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you will
find all kinds of show notes, links to all the episodes.
I will also put into today's show notes links to
two different websites that listeners have made for us telling
you whether England was at war with France. You can
(23:04):
do all of that, and a whole lot more at
our website how stuff works dot com or missing history
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because at how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back when
the podcast Sawbones launched, we talked about it a couple
(00:21):
of times on the show and on our Twitter and
stuff like that. It's been a while since we brought
up saw Bones, which is a comedy podcast about medical
history that's hosted by Sydney and Justin McElroy. And I
was catching up on their show on the plane last
week and I listened to their episode called Corpse Theft
and the Resurrection Men, which included, among other things, a
(00:43):
little about the Doctor's Riot of seventy eight, which is well,
we're gonna talk about today because it's sort of wedded
my appetite talk more about that and to worry more
about that. Um So, if you've if you already listen
to saw Bones, which I know some of our listeners
do listen to saw Bones, there's cross over there. We
are definitely going to talk in more detail about just
(01:04):
the Doctor's riot and the context that led up to it.
And this is definitely a different angle than sabb Owes.
So you you know there's gonna be new stuff in
here even if you listened to that episode, so for context.
In seventeen sixty five, North America got its first medical
school at the College of Philadelphia, and from the beginning,
(01:26):
medical students at the College of Philadelphia worked with patients
at the Pennsylvania Hospital, gradually developing the blueprint for today's
medical schools and teaching hospitals. This program wasn't meant to
be a person's sole source of medical education, though, uh
and the same was true of other medical schools that
opened up during the colonial period and after the Revolutionary War.
(01:49):
At this point, most people became doctors through apprenticeships, and
America's first medical schools were intended to be this sort
of period of additional focused study for people who had
already finished their apprenticeship, so they already effectively were doctors
before they even went to medical school. There was also
a lot of anatomical study on cadavers in these programs,
(02:11):
on the idea that doctors needed to learn anatomy and
that dissecting cadavers was a good way to do this
had become really prevalent during the eighteenth century. The thing
that had not become really prevalent was a big supply
of cadavers to dissect. The idea of donating your body
to science really did not exist at this point. Most
(02:33):
colonies either had no laws governing how bodies might be
used for medical study, or they specifically prohibited certain uses,
for example dissecting unclaimed bodies. There was definitely no regulation
of how cadavers might be legally obtained and delivered, so
schools needed these bodies for legitimate study, but they had
no legal channels to get them. Plus, there were all
(02:56):
kinds of religious and cultural taboos that made people pretty
opposed to the idea of having their bodies cut, cut up,
and examined after they were dead. Among Christians and Jews,
the body was sacred. Various Christian denominations believed that being
cut up after death was sacrilegious and it would prevent
them from getting into heaven or from being resurrected on
(03:17):
Judgment Day. Similar beliefs about the sacredness of the body
also ran through African traditions that slaves had brought with them,
and being a doctor at this point in time did
not have the prestige in the cloud that it does today.
At least in the Western world, so people were not
particularly inclined to go against all of these layers of
(03:38):
taboo to let their bodies be cut up by doctors.
And it didn't help that British medical schools had been
using executed criminals for their dissections, so this made American
communities associate being dissected with being a criminal or with
being punished, although it was illegal. There were some schools
that got their bodies from ins and alms houses and
(04:01):
other institutions. They would covertly by the bodies of people
who had died before they even were buried, But really
the primary source of cadavers for a really long time
was grave robbing, and this of course had its own
social and religious implications. So churchyards were and remained for
(04:22):
many people sacred, bodies sacred, so digging up bodies out
of graveyards and cutting them up was a gross offense,
and it made doctors who already worked particularly well respected
seemed like they had just this wanton disregard for human
life and just no regard for basic decency. There were
doctors and students who dug up their own cadavers, but
(04:44):
they mostly outsourced that work to people who were known
as resurrectionists, who did the actual grave robbing. I feel
like this would be a great series on one of
the secondary um channels, the resurrectionists. And they had this process,
the resurrectionists, down to a science. So at this point,
embalming was not widely used. It you know, had culturally
(05:06):
in history, it had happened in many places, but in
terms of like the modern approach to it, that was
not really common. Uh. So these guys had to work quickly,
ideally within hours of burial. It was kind of like
a heist movie, except it involved graves instead of like
a bank. Uh And instead of digging up the whole
length of the casket, they'd work just from the head
and they would weaken one end of the casket by
(05:27):
drilling holes in it before bashing it in and just
pulling the body out through the hole with hooks, getting
in and out of the place within an hour, and
timing the passing of their getaway vehicle so they could
slip the body into it and escape. The graves that
were at the biggest risk of being robbed were the
ones that belonged to poor people and slaves, and these
were the people who were least likely to have someone
(05:50):
watching out for the grave after the people died. And
both of these places, the resurrectionists did not have to
be quite as on the ball with their you know,
their their heists shenanigans, because most of the people who
were being buried in cemeteries for the poor and for
slaves didn't have the money to buy a coffin, so
they were buried directly in the dirt. And the words
(06:11):
of Harriet Martineau, who was writing an account of a
trip in the eighteen hundreds quote in Baltimore, the bodies
of colored people exclusively are taken for dissection because the
whites do not like it, and the colored people cannot resist. So,
although the overwhelming majority of stolen bodies were those of
(06:31):
black people, in poor people having money or status was
not necessarily a protection. High profile body thefts made headlines,
such as the time that a search party found the
body of John Harrison, who was son of President William
Henry Harrison and father of President Benjamin Harrison, at a
medical college in Cincinnati. This meant the people who could
(06:53):
afford it would bury their loved ones in these sealed
iron coffins, or they would surround the whole grave site
in this old cage that covered the whole thing. Some
of them who had the money to even hired armed
guards to watch over their newly buried bodies. And regardless
of who you were, your body really was not safe
from theft until it had been in the ground for
(07:14):
about two weeks in the winter shorter in the summer,
at which point it would be too decomposed to be dissected.
And before we move on to exactly what was happening
in New York at the time of this particular riot,
let's have a brief moment for a word from a sponsor.
In New York where the riot that we're talking about
today took place, A major source of bodies for cadaver
(07:37):
study was the Potter's Field, where the poor and the
unknown were buried in unmarked graves. The other big source
was the Negroes burial Ground, which was kind of coincidentally
quite close to New York Hospital. Nearly all of New
York City's black population was buried in Negro's burial ground.
There was only one church that buried black people in
(07:58):
a segregated churchyard. It charged a fee to do so.
As body theft from the Negro's burial ground became more
and more commonplace. Freed slaves would actually buy land to
use as private cemeteries. This didn't necessarily help, since these
private burial grounds sometimes became targets of their own. New
York City's demand for all these cadavers came from two sources.
(08:22):
One was its medical school at Columbia College, and the
other was Richard Bailey, who was a doctor from Connecticut,
and he was teaching not for credit medical classes at
New York Hospital, which we just mentioned was very close
to the Negroes burial ground, and that made the Negroes
burial ground an easy target for gray robbers. So both
(08:43):
freed people and slaves in New York at this time
and become increasingly upset at the prevalence of grave grave
robbing from the black burial spaces. In early February of
a group of two thousand slaves and one thousand freed
people began petitioning the City East Common Council, including the
mayor and aldermen, not for the grave robbing to stop,
(09:05):
but for it at least to be carried out in
a decent and respectful way. This petition read in part
most humbly, sirs, we declare that it has lately been
the practice of a number of young gentlemen in this city,
who call themselves students of the physic, to repair to
the burying ground assigned for the use of your petitioners.
Under the cover of night, in the most wanton sallies
(09:28):
of excess, they dig up bodies of our deceased friends
and relatives of your petitioners, carrying them away without respect
for age or sex, mangle their flesh out of a
wanton curiosity, and then expose it to beasts and birds.
Your petitioners are well aware of the necessity of physicians
and surgeons consulting dead subjects for the benefit of mankind.
(09:51):
Your petitioners do not presuppose it as an injury to
the deceased, and would not be adverse to dissection in
particular circumstances, that is, if it is conducted with the
decency and propriety which the solemnity of such occasion requires.
Your petitioners do not wish to impede the work of
these students of the physic, but most humbly pray your
(10:12):
honors to take our case into consideration and adopt such
measure as may seem to prevent further abuses in the future.
Their petition was ignored, but on February one, so only
a couple of weeks later, the Daily Advertiser published an
anonymous report about how quote few blacks are buried whose
(10:36):
bodies are permitted to remain in the grave end quote.
Through the rest of February and part of March, the
Daily Advertiser went on to publish really horrifying accounts of
grave desecration and body theft, and then things came to
a head in April. There are several conflicting reports of
exactly what started the riot, so it's not completely clear
(11:00):
exactly what happened, but there are three pretty common elements
among all the various retellings. The first is that on
April thirteen, some doctors and their teacher were dissecting a
cadaver in a lab at New York Hospital. The second
is that by some means or another, a boy got
a glimpse of what was going on through the window
(11:20):
and the doctor saw him. And the third is that
one of the surgeons, probably in an attempt to scare
the boy off, waived the cadaver's arm at him. And
some versions of the story, one of the doctors shouted
that it was the boy's mother's arm, and by coincident,
this boy's mother had died very recently. This version of
(11:42):
the story usually goes on to say that the boy
ran home and told his father, who exhumed his mother's
grave only to find it empty. That seems like a
lot of things that had to happen just that way. Yeah,
it feels like an urban legend. Yeah, something definitely happened
(12:05):
to spark the whole riot. But this particular version of
the story is completely retold. But I read a couple
of things that kind of went back through all of
the earliest correspondents and news reports, and we're like, ah,
there's not actual documentation of exactly what really tipped the scale.
But regardless of how exactly this whole thing started, a
(12:27):
mob soon descended upon New York Hospital, and a letter
to Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph Colonel William Heath described it
this way. The cry of barbarity and etcetera was soon spread.
The young sons of Galen fled in every direction. One
took refuge in a chimney. The mob raised, and the
(12:47):
hospital apartments were ransacked. In the anatomy room were found
three fresh bodies, one boiling in a kettle, and two
others cut up, with certain parts of the two sex
hanging up in a most brutal position. The circumstances, together
with the wanton and apparent inhuman complexion in the room,
exasperated the mob beyond all bounds, to the total destruction
(13:09):
of every anatomy in the hospital. And while many of
the doctors and the teachers did indeed flee, some stayed
behind to try to protect the cadavers, the other specimens,
and the teaching materials. But the mob that arrived at
the hospital dragged all of this out into the street
and they set it on fire. They also reburied the
bodies that had not been dissected yet. The mayor, James Dwayne,
(13:33):
arrived with the sheriff and put the doctors and teachers
into protective custody at the jail. Those calm things down
a little bit, but during the night, medical students from Columbia,
fearing that their school was going to be the next target,
went into the school to hide all of their anatomical
materials and cadavers that they would not be burned and
(13:54):
destroyed as well, and this turned out to be a
fortunate move since during the night to medical students George
Swinney and Isaac Gano broke into a churchyard and stole
the body of a well known white woman, which meant
that the mob that formed the next morning was immense
and furious. It swelled to about five thousand people. This
(14:14):
mob was bound and determined to find and destroy anything
that was being used for anatomical study at Columbia, so
they searched the entire college, including the dorms, and they
went on to search doctors homes. One person they ran
across was even beaten solely for wearing black, which was
the color that the doctors usually wore. And when the
mob found nothing uh, they all ended up going to
(14:37):
the jail, where they started an assault on the building
with rocks and bricks. They tore down the gallows to
use the wood as a weapon as the rocks and
the bricks broke windows and made their way into the
cells where people were being held the doctors and the
students started collecting them along with broken glass to defend themselves,
(14:59):
and this it went on for another full day until
the governor called out the militia. They brought in a
brigade and artillery, and the ensuing melee. It's similarly not
clear exactly what happened, but ultimately at least three rioters
and three militiamen were killed. The final death toll is
often sided at twenty and afterwards, residents of New York
(15:23):
doubled down on their efforts to protect the bodies of
the dead. Armed groups called dead Guardmen's started to keep
watch over cemeteries. Bailey and the other doctors budged the
truth by saying they had never asked anyone to steal
a body from one of the city's graveyards. The reason
this was not really on the up and up was
that the Potter's Field and the Negroes burial ground were
(15:45):
both outside of the city limits uh and in fact,
that this point black people could only be buried outside
the city limits. So what they were saying was technically true,
but it was really pretty easily. Yes, there was a
grand jury investigation, but no charges seemed to have been
filed and no one was convicted, possibly because both the
(16:06):
rioters and the doctors were breaking the law. The riot,
apart from destroying anatomical UH equipment and samples and causing
some deaths had some ongoing ramifications which we want to
talk about afterwards from a sponsor. So the Doctor's Riot,
which was in seventeen eighty eight, was only one of
(16:27):
the anatomy riots in the United States between seventeen sixty
five and eighteen fifty four. There were at least seventeen
of them. They took place primarily in New England, where
most of the medical colleges were at the time, but
they were also riots as far west as Ohio and Illinois,
and these were not at like fly by night shady
(16:48):
schools UH in an eighteen twenty four riot. The target
of this mob aggression was actually Yale University. In January
of seventeen eighty nine, which was the year after the
Doctor's Ride in New York took place, the New York
legislature passed laws that made grave robbing illegal, and they
earmarked certain crimes as being punishable by quote dissection after death,
(17:12):
so there would be a legal supply of bodies. But
this didn't provide enough bodies for the medical study that
was going on, so the grave robbing did continue, particularly
in Potter's Fields. And black cemeteries. Massachusetts passed a law
making it legal to dissect unclaimed bodies in eighteen thirty one.
New York did the same thing in eighteen fifty four,
(17:34):
but other laws were a little bit slower in coming.
By nine thirteen, Louisiana and Alabama still had no legal
way for medical schools to obtain canavers, while most other
states had passed laws allowing unclaimed bodies, donated bodies, and
the bodies of executed criminals to be dissected. Even then,
the bodies that were being dissected in medical schools were
(17:57):
disproportionately those of poor people in my parties, so they
were people who couldn't afford burials or their families couldn't
afford to claim their bodies, and grave robbing for cadaver
purposes continued in the United States until the nineteen twenties.
In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, the medical establishment
worked to change people's perceptions of dissection and of donating
(18:19):
bodies to science. In nineteen sixty eight, the National Conference
of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws approved the Uniform
Anatomical Gift Act or u a g a UH and
this made donating your body a choice and a gift,
and it also gave the person who was doing the donating,
so the person whose body it actually was, the ultimate
(18:42):
say in what would happen to them. So if you
wanted to donate your body, it would be donated, even
if your next of ken objected to the choice that
you had made. Almost every state had had adopted this
law or something very similar to it within a few years,
and today bequests actually make the large majority of cadavers,
which completely changed the demographic of dissected bodies in medical schools. Yeah.
(19:07):
One of my sources cited a personal communication from somebody
at Duke University Medical School from about ten years ago,
and at that point, according to this personal correspondence, uh,
like the cadavers at Duke were overwhelmingly those of Caucasian people.
UM I could not find statistics for like the broader
(19:28):
all of United States medical school or in general people
who are donating their bodies. Uh. But this whole shift
in it from being a thing that happens to you
if you can't afford to be buried to a thing
you choose to do totally changed the whole picture of it.
Which is very fascinating stuff. Kind of kind of gruesome,
(19:51):
it is, but you know, it's good that people recognize
that science needs their body after they have shuffled off
this mortal coil. Uh. Do you have listener mail which
may or may not be about dead people. I do
have listener mail that is about someone who is dead,
but it is not about their bodies. This is from Heather,
and it's about our Edna St. Vincent Malay episode. And
(20:14):
Heather says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I just listened to
your two part episode on Edna St. Vincent Malay and
had to write in to share my own experiences with
the poet. While she did not live most of her
adult life in Maine, we Mainners claim her as one
of our own, despite our people's taciturn disapproval of her
quote firecracker lifestyle. I first fell in love with Renaissance
when I read in eighth grade as part of a
(20:34):
required unit on our home state of Maine. For extra credit,
I went to Camden and hiked Mount Batty part of
the Camden Hills, and climbed up Mount Batty Tower and
photographed the scene that inspired the opening lines of the poem,
as well as a plaque placed into the tower commemorating
quote Maine's finest lyric poet. She's described in the plaque
as a frail girl with flaming red hair, and the
(20:56):
general description of her told in public schools is one
of a brilliant mind, mind with a love of nature.
It wasn't until I was in college that I learned
of Vincent's love affairs with men and women, and that
she reportedly wore pants and smoked marijuana long before those
were acceptable. I have no proof of these claims other
than what my professor told me, but I love thinking
of her as such a unique spirit. Needless to say,
(21:18):
it was a far cry from the stagy old coddters
we've been reading about. When I became a high school
English teacher, I always lead with Vincent Shenanigan's, turning my
students into fans before they'd read a single line of
her poetry. To me, she is the painter in saying
of awesome, and largely my kids agreed. Maine can be
a heart climate, and too often those who lived here
are broken by the demands of survival. Even today, I've
(21:40):
always loved that Edna st. Vincent Malay gave that way
of life too, firm middle fingers and lived her own
way so fully. I think she and Thorow would have
been great friends if they could have been here in
Maine together. Thank you so much for the podcast, Heather,
and she included some photos. Now I think about the
time traveling possibilities of like and the St. Vincent wlian
(22:01):
Brook Farm community. Yeah, I kind of want I kind
of want Edna St Vincent Malay to have had a
big conversation with Walt Whitman. Yeah. I could see that
being a pretty fun show to watch. I would pay
tickets for that. I think I'm i too. So if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other subject, you can where a history of podcasts
(22:21):
at how stuffworks dot com. We've been saying that address
for a while, but to make it super clear, if
you send it to Discovery dot com, we will not
get it. Uh. We're on Facebook at Facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History.
Are tumbler is miss in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we're also on pinterest. Uh. If you'd like to
learn more about what we talked about today, You can
(22:41):
come to how stuff works dot com with the word
doctor in the search bar, and you will find how
becoming a doctor works. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you will
find all kinds of show notes, links to all the episodes.
I will also put into today's show notes links to
two different websites that listeners have made for us telling
you whether England was at war with France. You can
(23:04):
do all of that, and a whole lot more at
our website how stuff works dot com or missing history
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because at how stuff works dot com. M
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