Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. Earlier this week, we did an episode
Speaker 1: on Robert Liston, who did groundbreaking work in the field
Speaker 1: of surgery in the nineteenth century but became better known
Speaker 1: for some really gruesome and possibly apocryphal moments in his career.
Speaker 1: In that episode, we very briefly mentioned the lack of
Speaker 1: cadavers available for medical study at that time, and we
Speaker 1: mentioned that there was more on this in our prior
Speaker 1: episode on the Doctor's Riot of seventy eight, which came
Speaker 1: out on July, so we thought this would be the
Speaker 1: perfect time to put that episode back into the feed.
Speaker 1: It's a story that combines medical history, racism, classism, mob violence,
Speaker 1: and changing attitudes about dissection and medical study. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a lot, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
Speaker 1: History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm sure Cvie Wilson and
Speaker 1: I'm Holly fry So. Back when the podcast Sawbones launched,
Speaker 1: we talked about it a couple of times on the
Speaker 1: show and on our Twitter and stuff like that. It's
Speaker 1: been a while since we brought up saw Bones, which
Speaker 1: is a comedy podcast about medical history that's hosted by
Speaker 1: Sydney and Justin McElroy, and I was catching up on
Speaker 1: their show on the plane last week and I listened
Speaker 1: to their episode called Corpse, Theft and the Resurrection Men,
Speaker 1: which included, among other things, a little about the Doctor's
Speaker 1: Riot of seventy eight, which is what we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about today because it's sort of quitted my appetite talk
Speaker 1: more about that and to learn more about that. Um So,
Speaker 1: if you've if you already listen to saw Bones, which
Speaker 1: I know some of our listeners do listen to Sawbones,
Speaker 1: there's some cross over there. We are definitely going to
Speaker 1: talk in more detail about just the Doctor's riot and
Speaker 1: the context that led up to it. And this is
Speaker 1: definitely a different angle than saw Bones, so you you
Speaker 1: know there's gonna be new stuff in here, even if
Speaker 1: you listened to that episode, so for context. In seventeen
Speaker 1: sixty five, North America got its first medical school at
Speaker 1: the College of Philadelphia, and from the beginning, medical students
Speaker 1: at the College of Philadelphia worked with patients at the
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania Hospital, gradually developing the blueprint for today's medical schools
Speaker 1: and teaching hospitals. This program wasn't meant to be a
Speaker 1: person's sole source of medical education, though uh and the
Speaker 1: same was true of other medical schools that opened up
Speaker 1: during the colonial period and after the Revolutionary War. At
Speaker 1: this point, most people became doctors through apprenticeships, and America's
Speaker 1: first medical schools were intended to be this sort of
Speaker 1: period of additional focused study for people who had already
Speaker 1: finished their apprenticeship, so they already effectively were doctors before
Speaker 1: they even went to medical school. There was also a
Speaker 1: lot of anatomical study on cadavers in these programs. On
Speaker 1: the idea that doctors needed to learn anatomy and that
Speaker 1: dissecting cadavers was a good way to do this had
Speaker 1: become really prevalent during the eighteenth century. The thing that
Speaker 1: had not become really prevalent was a big supply of
Speaker 1: cadavers to dissect. The idea of donating your body to
Speaker 1: science really did not exist at this point. Most colonies
Speaker 1: either had no laws governing how bodies might be used
Speaker 1: for medical study, or they specifically prohibited certain uses, for example,
Speaker 1: dissecting unclaimed bodies. There was definitely no regulation of how
Speaker 1: cadavers might be legally obtained and delivered, so schools needed
Speaker 1: these bodies for legitimate study, but they had no legal
Speaker 1: channels to get them. Plus, there were all kinds of
Speaker 1: religious and cultural taboos that made people pretty opposed to
Speaker 1: the idea of having their bodies cut, cut up and
Speaker 1: examined after they were dead. Among Christians and Jews, the
Speaker 1: body was sacred. Various Christian denominations believed that being cut
Speaker 1: up after death was sacrilegious and it would prevent them
Speaker 1: from getting into heaven or from being resurrected on Judgment Day.
Speaker 1: Similar beliefs about the sacredness of the body also ran
Speaker 1: through African traditions that slaves had brought with them, and
Speaker 1: being a doctor at this point in time did not
Speaker 1: have the prestige in the cloud that it does today,
Speaker 1: at least in the Western world, so people were not
Speaker 1: particularly inclined to go against all of these layers of
Speaker 1: taboo to let their bodies be cut up by doctors.
Speaker 1: And it didn't help that British medical schools have been
Speaker 1: using executed criminals for their dissections, so this made American
Speaker 1: communities associate being dissected with being a criminal or with
Speaker 1: being punished. Although it was illegal, there were some schools
Speaker 1: that got their bodies from prisons and almshouses and other institutions.
Speaker 1: They would covertly by the bodies of people who had
Speaker 1: died before they even were buried. But really the primary
Speaker 1: source of cadaver for a really long time was grave robbing,
Speaker 1: and this of course had its own social and religious implications.
Speaker 1: So churchyards were and remained for many people sacred, bodies sacred,
Speaker 1: So digging up bodies out of graveyards and cutting them
Speaker 1: up was a gross offense, and it made doctors who
Speaker 1: already worked particularly well respected, seemed like they had just
Speaker 1: this wanton disregard for human life and just no regard
Speaker 1: for basic decency. There were doctors and students who dug
Speaker 1: up their own cadavers, but they mostly outsourced that work
Speaker 1: to people who were known as resurrectionists, who did the
Speaker 1: actual grave robbing. I feel like this would be a
Speaker 1: great series on one of the secondary um channels, the resurrectionists.
Speaker 1: They had this process, the resurrectionists down to a science.
Speaker 1: So at this point, embalming was not widely used. It
Speaker 1: you know, had culturally in history, it had happened in
Speaker 1: many places, but in terms of like the modern approach
Speaker 1: to it, that was not really common uh, So these
Speaker 1: guys had to work quickly, ideally within hours of burial.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like a heist movie, except it
Speaker 1: involved graves instead of like a bank, uh. And instead
Speaker 1: of digging up the whole length of the casket, they'd
Speaker 1: work just from the head, and they would weaken one
Speaker 1: end of the casket by drilling holes in it before
Speaker 1: bashing it in and just pulling the body out through
Speaker 1: the hole with hooks, getting in and out of the
Speaker 1: place within an hour, and timing the passing of their
Speaker 1: getaway vehicle so they could slip the body into it
Speaker 1: and escape. The graves that were at the biggest risk
Speaker 1: of being robbed were the ones that belonged to poor
Speaker 1: people and slaves, and these were the people who were
Speaker 1: least likely to have someone watching out for the grave
Speaker 1: after the people died. And both of these places, the
Speaker 1: resurrectionists did not have to be quite as on the
Speaker 1: ball with their you know, their their heist shenanigans, because
Speaker 1: most of the people who were being buried in cemeteries
Speaker 1: for the poor and for slaves didn't have the money
Speaker 1: to buy a coffince. They were buried directly in the
Speaker 1: dirt and the words of hair. Yet Martineau, who was
Speaker 1: writing an account of a trip in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: quote in Baltimore, the bodies of colored people exclusively are
Speaker 1: taken for dissection because the whites do not like it,
Speaker 1: and the colored people cannot resist. So although the overwhelming
Speaker 1: majority of stolen bodies were those of black people and
Speaker 1: poor people, having money or status was not necessarily a protection.
Speaker 1: High profile body thefts made headlines, such as the time
Speaker 1: that a search party found the body of John Harrison,
Speaker 1: who was son of President William Henry Harrison and father
Speaker 1: of President Benjamin Harrison, at a medical college in Cincinnati.
Speaker 1: This meant that people who could afford it would bury
Speaker 1: their loved ones in these sealed iron coffins, or they
Speaker 1: would surround the whole grave site in this metal cage
Speaker 1: that covered the whole thing. Some of them who had
Speaker 1: the money to even hired armed guards to watch over
Speaker 1: their newly buried bodies. And regardless of who you were,
Speaker 1: your body lee was not safe from theft until it
Speaker 1: had been in the ground for about two weeks in
Speaker 1: the winter shorter in the summer, at which point it
Speaker 1: would be too decomposed to be dissected, and before we
Speaker 1: move on to exactly what was happening in New York
Speaker 1: at the time of this particular riot. Let's have a
Speaker 1: brief moment for a word from a sponsor. In New
Speaker 1: York where the riot that we're talking about today took place,
Speaker 1: A major source of bodies for cadaver study was the
Speaker 1: Potter's Field, where the poor and the unknown were buried
Speaker 1: in unmarked graves. The other big source was the Negroes
Speaker 1: burial Ground, which was kind of coincidentally quite close to
Speaker 1: New York Hospital. Nearly all of New York City's black
Speaker 1: population was buried in Negro's burial ground. There was only
Speaker 1: one church that buried black people in a segregated churchyard,
Speaker 1: and it charged a fee to do so. As body
Speaker 1: theft from the Grows burial ground became more and more commonplace,
Speaker 1: freed slaves would actually buy land to use as private cemeteries.
Speaker 1: This didn't necessarily help, since these private burial grounds sometimes
Speaker 1: became targets of their own. New York City's demand for
Speaker 1: all these cadavers came from two sources. One was its
Speaker 1: medical school at Columbia College, and the other was Richard Bailey,
Speaker 1: who was a doctor from Connecticut and he was teaching
Speaker 1: not for credit medical classes at New York Hospital, which
Speaker 1: we just mentioned was very close to the Negroes burial ground,
Speaker 1: and that made the Negroes burial ground an easy target
Speaker 1: for gray robbers. So both freed people and slaves in
Speaker 1: New York at this time and become increasingly upset at
Speaker 1: the prevalence of grave grave robbing from the black burial spaces.
Speaker 1: In early February of a group of two thousand slaves
Speaker 1: and one thousand freed people began petitioning the city's common Council,
Speaker 1: including the Mayor and Alderman, not for the gray robbing
Speaker 1: to stop, but for it at least to be carried
Speaker 1: out in a decent and respectful way. This petition read,
Speaker 1: in part, most humbly, Sirs, we declare that it has
Speaker 1: lately been the practice of a number of young gentlemen
Speaker 1: in this city, who call themselves students of the physic,
Speaker 1: to repair to the burying ground assigned for the use
Speaker 1: of your petitioners. Under the cover of night, in the
Speaker 1: most wanton sallies of excess, they dig up bodies of
Speaker 1: our deceased friends and relatives of your petitioners, carrying them
Speaker 1: away without respect for age or sex, mangle their flesh
Speaker 1: out of a wanton curiosity, and then expose it to
Speaker 1: beasts and birds. Your petitioners are well aware of the
Speaker 1: necessity of physicians and surgeons consulting dead subjects for the
Speaker 1: benefit of mankind. Your petitioners do not presuppose it as
Speaker 1: an injury to the deceased, and would not be adverse
Speaker 1: to dissection in particular circumstances, that is, if it is
Speaker 1: conducted with the decency and propriety which the solemnity of
Speaker 1: such occasion requires. Your petitioners do not wish to impede
Speaker 1: the work of these students of the physic, but most
Speaker 1: humbly pray your honors to take our case into consideration
Speaker 1: and adopt such measure as may seem to prevent further
Speaker 1: abuses in the future. Their petition was ignored, but on
Speaker 1: February one, so only a couple of weeks later, the
Speaker 1: Daily Advertiser published an anonymous report about how quote a
Speaker 1: few blacks are buried whose bodies are permitted to remain
Speaker 1: in the grave end quote. Through the rest of February
Speaker 1: and part of March, the Daily Advertiser went on to
Speaker 1: publish really horrifying accounts of grave desecration and body theft,
Speaker 1: and then things came to a head in April. There
Speaker 1: are several conflicting reports of exactly what started the riot,
Speaker 1: so it's not completely clear exactly what happened, but there
Speaker 1: are three pretty common elements of all the various retellings.
Speaker 1: The first is that on April thirteen, some doctors and
Speaker 1: their teacher were dissecting a cadaver in a lab at
Speaker 1: New York Hospital. The second is that, by some means
Speaker 1: or another, a boy got a glimpse of what was
Speaker 1: going on through the window and the doctor saw him.
Speaker 1: And the third is that one of the surgeons, probably
Speaker 1: in an attempt to scare the boy off, waived the
Speaker 1: cadaver's arm at him, and some versions of the story
Speaker 1: one of the doctors shouted that it was the boy's
Speaker 1: mother's arm, and by coincident, this boy's mother had died
Speaker 1: very recently. This version of the story usually goes on
Speaker 1: to say that the boy ran home and told his father,
Speaker 1: who exhumed his mother's grave only to find it empty.
Speaker 1: That seems like a lot of things that had to
Speaker 1: happen just that way. Yeah, it feels like an urban legend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: something definitely happened to spark the whole riot, but this
Speaker 1: particular version of the story is completely retold. But I
Speaker 1: read a couple of things that kind of went back
Speaker 1: through all of the earliest correspondents and news reports, and
Speaker 1: we're like, ah, there's not actual documentation of exactly what
Speaker 1: really tipped the scale. But regardless of how exactly this
Speaker 1: whole thing started, a mob soon descended upon New York Hospital,
Speaker 1: and a letter to Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph, Colonel William
Speaker 1: Heath described it this way. The cry of barbarity and
Speaker 1: etcetera was soon spread. The young sons of Galen fled
Speaker 1: in every direction. One took refuge in a chimney. The
Speaker 1: mob raised, and the hospital apartments were ransacked. In the
Speaker 1: anatomy room were found three fresh bodies, one boiling in
Speaker 1: a kettle, and two others cut up, with certain parts
Speaker 1: of the two sex hanging up in a most brutal position.
Speaker 1: The circumstances, together with the wanton and apparent inhuman complexion
Speaker 1: in the room, exasperated the mob beyond all bounds, to
Speaker 1: the total destruction of every anatomy in the hospital. And
Speaker 1: while many of the doctors and the teachers did indeed flee.
Speaker 1: Some stayed behind to try to protect the cadavers, the
Speaker 1: other specimens, and the teaching materials, but the mob that
Speaker 1: arrived at the hospital dragged all of this out into
Speaker 1: the street and they set it on fire. They also
Speaker 1: reburied the bodies that had not been dissected yet. The mayor,
Speaker 1: James Dwayne, arrived with the sheriff and put the doctors
Speaker 1: and teachers into protective custody at the jail. This calmed
Speaker 1: things down a little bit, but during the night, medical
Speaker 1: students from Columbia, fearing that their school was going to
Speaker 1: be the next target, went into the school to hide
Speaker 1: all of their anatomical materials and cadavers that they would
Speaker 1: not be burned and destroyed as well. And this turned
Speaker 1: out to be a fortunate move since during the night
Speaker 1: to medical students George Swinney and Isaac Ghano broke into
Speaker 1: a churchyard and stole body of a well known white woman,
Speaker 1: which meant that the mob that formed the next morning
Speaker 1: was immense and furious. It swelled to about five thousand people.
Speaker 1: This mob was bound and determined to find and destroy
Speaker 1: anything that was being used for anatomical study at Columbia,
Speaker 1: so they searched the entire college, including the dorms, and
Speaker 1: they went on to search doctor's homes. One person they
Speaker 1: ran across was even beaten solely for wearing black, which
Speaker 1: was the color that the doctors usually wore. And when
Speaker 1: the mob found nothing uh, they all ended up going
Speaker 1: to the jail, where they started an assault on the
Speaker 1: building with rocks and bricks. They tore down the gallows
Speaker 1: to use the wood as a weapon as the rocks
Speaker 1: and the bricks broke windows and made their way into
Speaker 1: the cells where people were being held. The doctors and
Speaker 1: the students started collecting them, along with broken glass to
Speaker 1: defend themselves, and this riot went on for another full
Speaker 1: day until the governor called out the militia. They brought
Speaker 1: in a brigade and artillery, and the ensuing melee. It's
Speaker 1: similarly not clear exactly what happened, but ultimately at least
Speaker 1: three rioters and three militiamen were killed. The final death
Speaker 1: toll is often sided at twenty and afterwards, residents of
Speaker 1: New York doubled down on their efforts to protect the
Speaker 1: bodies of the dead. Armed groups called dead guardmens started
Speaker 1: to keep watch over cemeteries. Bailey and the other doctors
Speaker 1: budged the truth by saying they had never asked anyone
Speaker 1: to steal a body from one of the city's graveyards.
Speaker 1: The reason this was not really on the up and
Speaker 1: up was that the Potter's Field and the Negroes burial
Speaker 1: ground were both outside of the city limits UH, and
Speaker 1: in fact that this point black people could only be
Speaker 1: buried outside the city limits. So what they were saying
Speaker 1: was technically true, but it was really pretty easily. Yes,
Speaker 1: there was a grand jury investigation, but no charges seemed
Speaker 1: to have been filed and no one was convicted, possibly
Speaker 1: because both the rioters and the doctors were breaking the law.
Speaker 1: The riot, apart from destroying anatomical UH equipment and samples
Speaker 1: and causing some deaths, had some ongoing ramifications which we
Speaker 1: want to talk about afterwards from a sponsor. So the
Speaker 1: doctor's riot, which was in seventeen eighty eight, was only
Speaker 1: one of the anatomy riots in the United States between
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty five and eighteen fifty four. There were at
Speaker 1: least seventeen of them. They took place primarily in New England,
Speaker 1: where most of the medical colleges were at the time,
Speaker 1: but they were also riots as far west as Ohio
Speaker 1: and Illinois, and these were not at like fly by
Speaker 1: night shady schools. Uh in an eighteen twenty four riot,
Speaker 1: the target of this mob aggression was actually Yale University.
Speaker 1: In January of seventeen eighty nine, which was the year
Speaker 1: after the Doctor's Ride in New York took place, the
Speaker 1: New York legislature passed laws that made grave robbing illegal,
Speaker 1: and they earmarked certain crimes as being punishable by quote
Speaker 1: dissection after death, so there would be a legal supply
Speaker 1: of bodies. But this didn't provide enough bodies for the
Speaker 1: medical study that was going on, so the grave robbing
Speaker 1: did continue, particularly in Potter's fields and black cemeteries. Massachusetts
Speaker 1: passed a law making it legal to dissect unclaimed bodies
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty one. New York did the same thing
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty four, but other laws were a little
Speaker 1: bit slower in coming. By nineteen thirteen, Louisiana and Alabama
Speaker 1: still had no legal way for medical schools to obtain canavers,
Speaker 1: while most other states had passed laws allowing unclaimed bodies.
Speaker 1: Donated bodies and the bodies of executed criminals to be dissected.
Speaker 1: Even then, the bodies that were being dissected in medical
Speaker 1: schools were disproportionately those of poor people and minorities, so
Speaker 1: they were people who couldn't afford burials or their families
Speaker 1: couldn't afford to claim their bodies, and grave robbing for
Speaker 1: cadaver purposes continued in the United States until the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, the medical establishment
Speaker 1: worked to change people's perceptions of dissection and of donating
Speaker 1: bodies to science. In nineteen sixty eight, the National Conference
Speaker 1: of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws approved the Uniform
Speaker 1: Anatomical Gift Act or u A g a UH. And
Speaker 1: this made donating your body a choice and a gift.
Speaker 1: And it also gave the person who was doing the donating,
Speaker 1: so the person whose body it actually was, the ultimate
Speaker 1: say in what would happen to them. So if you
Speaker 1: wanted to donate your body, it would be donated, even
Speaker 1: if your next of ken objected to the choice that
Speaker 1: you had made. Almost every state had had adopted this
Speaker 1: law or something very similar to it within a few
Speaker 1: year ers and today bequests actually make up the large
Speaker 1: majority of cadavers, which completely changed the demographic of dissected
Speaker 1: bodies and medical schools. Yeah, one of my sources cited
Speaker 1: a personal communication from somebody at Duke University Medical School
Speaker 1: from about ten years ago, and at that point, according
Speaker 1: to this personal correspondence, like the cadavers at Duke were
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly those of Caucasian people. Um I could not find
Speaker 1: statistics for like the broader all of United States medical
Speaker 1: school or in general people who are donating their bodies.
Speaker 1: But this whole shift in it from being a thing
Speaker 1: that happens to you if you can't afford to be
Speaker 1: buried to a thing you choose to do totally changed
Speaker 1: the whole picture of it, which is very fascinating stuff,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of gruesome, it is, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's good that people recognize that science needs their body
Speaker 1: after they have shuffled off this mortal coil. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you
Speaker 1: have heard an email address or a Facebook you are
Speaker 1: l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
Speaker 1: since it is from the archive that might be out
Speaker 1: of date now, you can email us at History Podcast
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works dot com and you can find
Speaker 1: us all over social media at Missed in History and
Speaker 1: you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
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