Monday, October 31, 2005
Doctors, Cadavers, and America's First Riot
Filed under: the good old days...
Note: The Good Old Days is our regular Friday column. It is presented today as a special for Halloween.
On this Halloween, we present a story that starts as a tale of the macabre, and evolves into star-studded massacre.
It's the tale of the first riot in the young United States, a riot not about taxes or whiskey but cadavers, and the inappropriate procurement of them. We turn to the writings of Dr. John Wilson:
The Doctors Mob, one of the most violent outbreaks of civil unrest in early American history, was a furious response to the common practice of obtaining cadavers for anatomical dissection by robbing graves. This hazardous and loathesome business, made necessary by the gross inadequacy of legal provisions for obtaining cadavers for medical instruction, was carried out by a disparate group, generally referred to as "resurrectionists." Medical students and teachers of anatomy were frequently involved in grave robbing, and there was a more or less disreputable assortment of entrepreneurs who sold cadavers to medical schools or private teachers of anatomy.Resurrectionists preferred to rob the graves of the poor, the unknown, and enslaved Blacks as least likely to be noticed and cause public outcry; but no graves were exempt unless there was some protection such as an iron coffin, a vault, or a watchman standing guard with a shotgun from dusk to dawn for two weeks, after which the corpse was so decomposed as to be of little use for dissection.
Grave robbing at its best was a complicated and dangerous undertaking that required careful planning to avoid detection, and considerable skill to complete the task with dispatch. Two strong men, two large canvas tarpaulins, digging tools, and a dark lantern to light the scene but invisible from a distance, were the essentials. Dirt was removed from only the head end of the coffin and placed on one of the tarpaulins. After silently breaking through the lid of the coffin, weakened by a row of holes bored across it, the corpse was hauled up by a hook inserted under the chin or, alternatively, by a rope attached to a ring on the back of a harness strapped under the arms. The body was then stripped of all clothing and wrapped in the other tarpaulin. The clothes were thrown back into the coffin, the excavated dirt returned to the grave, and its surface restored exactly to its prior appearance to disarm suspicion of tampering.
In the hands of experts, the over-all job required about an hour. The deceased, wrapped in the tarpaulin, was placed in a wagon, whose inconspicuous drive past the graveyard was carefully timed to coincide with the completion of the disinterment, and thence the cadaver was delivered to the medical school through a clandestine entrance. Bodies were usually procured during the cool season from November to February when anatomy courses were given, and were dissected immediately because embalming was not in use, putrefaction progressed rapidly, and discovery was always to be feared.
How did this particular uprising occur? Legend suggests its genesis was a series of unfortunate events starting on April 13, 1788, at the old New York Hospital in lower Manhattan:
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