SYMHC Classics: The Doctors' Riot of 1788

We're revising a 2014 episode today. 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. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Earlier this week, we did an episode
on Robert Liston, who did groundbreaking work in the field
of surgery in the nineteenth century but became better known
for some really gruesome and possibly apocryphal moments in his career.
In that episode, we very briefly mentioned the lack of
cadavers available for medical study at that time, and we

(00:23):
mentioned that there was more on this in our prior
episode on the Doctor's Riot of seventy eight, which came
out on July, so we thought this would be the
perfect time to put that episode back into the feed.
It's a story that combines medical history, racism, classism, mob violence,
and changing attitudes about dissection and medical study. Yeah, that's

(00:45):
a lot, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm sure Cvie Wilson and
I'm Holly fry So. Back when the podcast Sawbones launched,

(01:08):
we talked about it a couple 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 little about the Doctor's

(01:32):
Riot of seventy eight, which is what we're gonna talk
about today because it's sort of quitted my appetite talk
more about that and to learn 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 Sawbones,
there's some cross over there. We are definitely going to
talk in more detail about just the Doctor's riot and

(01:53):
the context that led up to it. And this is
definitely a different angle than saw Bones, 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, medical students

(02:15):
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. At

(02:38):
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. On

(02:59):
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 colonies

(03:21):
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 kinds of

(03:45):
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 Judgment Day.

(04:07):
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

(04:27):
taboo to let their bodies be cut up by doctors.
And it didn't help that British medical schools have 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 prisons and almshouses and other institutions.

(04:51):
They would covertly by the bodies of people who had
died before they even were buried. But really the primary
source of cadaver 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 many people sacred, bodies sacred,

(05:14):
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 they mostly outsourced that work

(05:34):
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.
They had this process, the resurrectionists down to a science.
So at this point, embalming was not widely used. It
you know, had culturally in history, it had happened in

(05:56):
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 drilling holes in it before

(06:17):
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 watching out for the grave

(06:39):
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 heist 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 coffince. They were buried directly in the
dirt and the words of hair. Yet Martineau, who was

(07:01):
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 black people and
poor people, having money or status was not necessarily a protection.

(07:25):
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 that people who could afford it would bury
their loved ones in these sealed iron coffins, or they
would surround the whole grave site in this metal cage

(07:49):
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 lee was not safe from theft until it
had been in the ground for about two weeks in
the winter shorter in the summer, at which point it
would be too decomposed to be dissected, and before we

(08:11):
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 study was the

(08:34):
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 a segregated churchyard,

(08:55):
and it charged a fee to do so. As body
theft from the Grows 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. One was its

(09:19):
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 freed people and slaves in

(09:41):
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's common Council,
including the Mayor and Alderman, not for the gray robbing
to stop, but for it at least to be carried

(10:02):
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 of excess, they dig up bodies of

(10:26):
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. Your petitioners do not presuppose it as

(10:49):
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 honors to take our case into consideration

(11:12):
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 a
few blacks are buried whose bodies are permitted to remain

(11:34):
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 exactly what happened, but there

(11:58):
are three pretty common elements of 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 and the doctor saw him.

(12:18):
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 the story usually goes on

(12:39):
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 to spark the whole riot, but this

(13:03):
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 mob soon descended upon New York Hospital,

(13:26):
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 hospital apartments were ransacked. In the
anatomy room were found three fresh bodies, one boiling in

(13:49):
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 of every anatomy in the hospital. And
while many of the doctors and the teachers did indeed flee.

(14:11):
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, arrived with the sheriff and put the doctors
and teachers into protective custody at the jail. This calmed

(14:35):
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 destroyed as well. And this turned
out to be a fortunate move since during the night
to medical students George Swinney and Isaac Ghano broke into

(14:58):
a churchyard and stole 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 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

(15:20):
they went on to search doctor's 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 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

(15:43):
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, and this riot 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

(16:05):
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 doubled down on their efforts to protect the
bodies of the dead. Armed groups called dead guardmens started
to keep watch over cemeteries. Bailey and the other doctors

(16:29):
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 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

(16:50):
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 rioters and the doctors were breaking the law.
The riot, apart from destroying anatomical UH equipment and samples

(17:12):
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 the anatomy riots in the United States between

(17:34):
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 schools. Uh in an eighteen twenty four riot,

(17:55):
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, so there would be a legal supply

(18:17):
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, but other laws were a little

(18:39):
bit slower in coming. By nineteen 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

(18:59):
schools were disproportionately those of poor people and minorities, 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

(19:19):
worked to change people's perceptions of dissection and of donating
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,

(19:42):
so the person whose body it actually was, the ultimate
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
year ers and today bequests actually make up the large

(20:04):
majority of cadavers, which completely changed the demographic of dissected
bodies and medical schools. Yeah, 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, like the cadavers at Duke were
overwhelmingly those of Caucasian people. Um I could not find

(20:28):
statistics for like the broader all of United States medical
school or in general people who are donating their bodies.
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,

(20:53):
kind of kind of gruesome, it is, but you know,
it's good that people recognize that science needs their body
after they have shuffled off this mortal coil. Thank you
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you
have heard an email address or a Facebook you are

(21:14):
l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History Podcast
at how Stuff Works dot com and you can find
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(21:34):
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