Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Doctor's Riot of 1788

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the years after the American Revolution, New York City was growing rapidly, and so was the demand for trained physicians. But medical education required something that was difficult to obtain, and rumors soon spread that the dead were not being allowed to rest in peace. Anger grew, suspicions hardened, and in the spring of 1788, outrage exploded into violence in the streets of Manhattan. Learn more about the doctor's riot of 1788. On this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Great news. EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027-volt and

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Starting point is 00:01:12 to you. Peace contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Body snatching is a rather uncomfortable topic, as many people don't like to think of themselves or their loved ones, as being the subject of scientific experiments after they pass away. The roots of this discomfort in the United States actually traced back to Great Britain. Many British people were terrified that being dissected after they had passed away would mean that their bodies would be disfigured on Judgment Day. The Christian idea of Judgment Day holds that God will raise people from the dead and judge them as being good or bad. But if their bodies were disfigured, many people feared that they would not rise properly on Judgment Day.

Starting point is 00:02:04 And this was the origin of many of the taboos surrounding autopsies and dissection. This led to the general belief that dissection of human bodies was shameful and disrespect. And as a result, governments banned human dissection and offered medical schools only a limited number of criminal corpses every year. Even so, there were not enough bodies for anatomy students to dissect, and this led to grave robbing in Great Britain by people known as Resurrectionists. I previously did an episode on Resurrectionists if you're interested in learning more about the topic. But for the purposes of this episode, it's important to know that the United States inherited the prejudice against dissection and medical practitioners shared the same need to have more bodies to study.

Starting point is 00:02:49 Grave robbing was considered a necessary evil by American anatomists and other medical practitioners as it was the most surefire way of studying the body and preparing medical treatments without harming a real patient. It provided real-world practice. Corpses procured through body snatching in the 18th century were the cheapest source of bodies for anatomy lessons. They were cheaper for institutions and they ensured that the remains were newly deceased and of good quality. In the United States, people in poverty were the biggest victims of body snatching. Groups that were hit the hardest were usually the poorest, including enslaved and free black people, Irish and German immigrants, and Native Americans. Because enslaved individuals

Starting point is 00:03:33 were legally categorized as property, there was a widespread disregard for the sanctity of their remains. This societal indifference turned their burial sites into prime targets for body snatching. Compounding this lack of public concern, institutional marginalization restricted enslaved people to internments beyond city limits. These burial grounds frequently utilized mass graves, which increased the efficiency and profitability of body harvesting while keeping the practice out of the broader public's view. Conveniently for body snatchers, one of the grave sites where slaves were buried was located right by Columbia College, which was the location of New York City's only School of Medicine. This location is now known as the African burial ground. It, along with

Starting point is 00:04:21 Popper's Graveyards, was an easy target for body snatchers to collect cadavers. Most of the body snatching occurred in the winter. This is because the cold slowed the rate of decomposition. In the winter before the riot, the number of corpses being taken by body snatchers had reached an all all-time high. A group of freedmen visiting the cemetery noticed the uptick in grave robbing and raised the issue. On February 3rd, 1788, the group petitioned New York's Common Council to take action against body snatching. The petition, however, was ignored and no effort was made to stop the activity. Despite the petition going nowhere, body snatching persisted. However, it didn't come to the attention of other communities in New York until a newspaper called the advertiser published an article

Starting point is 00:05:06 later that February. In the article, they printed that the body of a white woman was stolen from the Trinity Churchyard. While many people were willing to ignore the desecration of graves from marginalized people, the stealing of a white woman's body led to a public outcry. The article showed that body snatching could happen to anyone and that no one was safe. What turned public concern over body snatching into a riot began with a poorly made joke. In April 1788, several children were playing outside of New York Hospital where a physician named Richard Bailey worked. Bailey had completed his medical training in England, where body snatching practices were extremely common. Bailey himself had taken up the practice and was

Starting point is 00:05:51 known to take corpses from two different cemeteries. This led to whispers about him performing cruel experiments and cutting up his patients. One of Bailey's medical students, John Hicks, was working in a room that faced the street. Inside, he was, was completing a dissection on a woman's body. While performing the dissection, Hicks realized that street urchins had gathered outside the window and were watching him. Hicks was annoyed that his dissection had drawn a crowd, so he decided to scare the children away. And to do this, he turned towards the boys while holding the cadaver's arm. He then waved the arm at them and said, quote, this is your mother's arm, I just dug it up.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Although the comment was meant as an admittedly dark joke, one of the boys took it seriously. This boy had just lost his mother and ran home to his father sobbing. Once home, he reported to his father what the medical student had said. The father grabbed his shovel and went to the graveyard where his wife was laid to rest. He began to dig around the ground until he reached his wife's coffin, and when he opened the coffin up, there was nothing inside. and he was, justifiably, furious. As you would expect, this family was not the only one angry at medical practitioners.

Starting point is 00:07:12 The father began to campaign, finding allies and men who wanted to join him and seek revenge. These men had bodies of their wives or other close family members go missing. Moved by the father's call to storm the hospital and demand justice, hundreds of sympathetic New Yorkers joined his cause. energized and united in their anger, the growing mob began its march towards the hospital building. Inside the hospital, the doctors and anatomy students saw the giant angry mob approaching and were terrified. Many tried to flee on foot, some escaped through more dramatic means like climbing the chimney, while some tried to save the medical equipment. And those who attempted to protect the medical equipment failed, as the crowd got a hold of everything,

Starting point is 00:07:55 bringing it into the street where they would smash or burn it. While they were inside the hospital, the riders discovered multiple bodies inside, all of which were in different states of decay. They took the corpses and reburied them. Despite reclaiming the bodies and smashing all the equipment, the mob was still not done. Instead of backing down, more people joined them. By the following day, several thousand people marched to the medical building at Columbia College. While the mob was marching towards the school, the New York mayor,

Starting point is 00:08:29 at that time, James Duane had several doctors jailed for their own safety, and while it might seem odd, the prison was the most secure building in the city. Yet even the jail's sturdy walls couldn't hold off the gathering mob. Outside, a furious crowd of 5,000 rioters attacked the structure, breaking windows and destroying the surrounding fences. As the chaos escalated, New York Governor George Clinton intervened and summoned the militia to restore control. In addition, he appealed to local leaders to come to the jailhouse to help restore order. One of the leaders who showed up was John Jay, who was later a Supreme Court Justice and a future governor of the state of New York.

Starting point is 00:09:10 He begged the mob to leave, however, as pleas were brushed aside, as the mob did not think that someone with a status as high as John Jay would know anything about having their loved ones graves robbed. The pleas of John Jay failed so badly that the mob began throwing things at him, and one of the things was a rock which, crack chase skull wide open. Another leader brought into the riot was Revolutionary War Hero and Army General Baron von Steuben.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Instead of heroically ending the riot, he too got hit in the head with the brick. Von Steuben, now bloodied from his brick-related injury, called upon the mayor to have the militia fire upon the crowd. Despite not technically ordering the soldiers to fire, the soldiers were already scared, and hearing the word fire was enough to make them act. They leveled their rifles towards the crowd and shot. The rioters attempted to hold their ground at the jail, but the soldier's guns were enough to overwhelm the crowd.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Members of the mob began to flee, leaving behind an estimated 20 dead in the street. The 1788 doctor's riot lasted for four days. At least three militia and three writers died in the confrontation. Many of the cadavers recovered from the hospital that were not reburied were destroyed in the riot. Even though the mob failed to break into the jail cell to reach the physicians, hostility towards doctors in New York City persisted for years after the riot. Although a few anatomy students did end up facing trial,

Starting point is 00:10:46 the vast majority escaped punishment for body snatching. By the following year, New York began to put measures into place to ensure corpses were treated properly. In January 1789, the city enacted a law that anyone who mistreated a corpse would stand in a pillory or be publicly whipped, imprisoned, or fined. They also decided to create a legal source of cadavers for doctors. This source came from the bodies of executed criminals. These criminals could be used legally for anatomical studies, which helped balance the scientific needs with public morality. What happened in New York City in 1788 was not an isolated industry. incident. Within the United States, at least 17 instances of anatomy riots occurred between

Starting point is 00:11:31 1765 and 1854. These riots occurred in major cities like Boston and Philadelphia, as well as in more remote places like in Vermont. The issue of body snatching didn't end in the United States until laws were passed in the 19th and 20th centuries, known as the Anatomy Acts. The Anatomy Acts legalized the use of unclaimed bodies from poorhouses and prisons for medical training. By supplying more corpses, the market for stolen corpses became unnecessary. The demand for cadavers for medical training was further addressed in the mid-20th century. During this time, public perception of scientific research on cadavers had changed, which led to the passage of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 1968.

Starting point is 00:12:18 This act enabled whole-body donation programs. This meant that people could voluntarily give up their bodies after death to medical schools, meaning they no longer needed to collect corpses from crime scenes or from unclaimed bodies. The doctor's riot of 1788 was more than an outbreak of mob violence. It exposed the collision between the needs of a developing medical profession and the public's deeply held beliefs about death, burial, and human dignity. The riot forced New York authorities to confront this problem of grave robbing and help spur efforts to regulate the legal supply of cadavers for medical study.

Starting point is 00:12:54 In that sense, the events of 1788 became an important movement in the long process of balancing scientific advancement with public trust and ethical limits. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Olivia Ash. My big thanks go to everyone who supports a show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord.

Starting point is 00:13:28 This is where everything happens that's outside of the show. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Doctor's Riot of 1788

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