Book by Andy McPhee

$29.95, 6 x 9 inch hardback, 228 pages, ISBN 978-1-4930-8805-8, Prometheus Books

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists”—body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist, usually for around $100.

In April 1788, word of one particular body snatching quickly spread, and over the course of days, thousands of New Yorkers descended upon a New York City anatomy lab in a growing and dangerous riot. This book reveals the forgotten history of the so-called “Doctor’s Riot of 1788,” along the way explaining the history of body snatching in the United States and England and exploring the moral questions behind an existential medical crisis: Does the need for medical students to learn anatomy on cadavers override society’s demand for maintaining the dignity of its dead?

As the Doctor’s Riot boiled over, founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and Revolutionary War hero Baron von Steuben were called in to quell the rioters, to no avail. Eventually, the state militia was ordered to fire into the crowd, killing several and injuring far more.

In this riveting and revelatory history, author Andy McPhee delves into the post-revolutionary period of America to trace the foundational changes spurred by the riot, the influence of the riot on framers of the Constitution, the formation of Black-only graveyards, how the radical advent of embalming improved embalming practices, what body snatching looks like today, and how the teaching of anatomy continues to change and adapt to new technologies.

About the Author:

Andy McPhee has worked in the publishing field for more than 30 years, starting as a writer and editor at Weekly Reader’s mid-level science magazine and finishing as a healthcare textbook publisher for F. A. Davis, a major publishing house in Philadelphia. His narrative nonfiction book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, published in 2023 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. McPhee is a consultant and Fellow of the National Writing Project and has earned two Feature Writing awards from the Association of Educational Publishers, now a division of the American Association of Publishers. McPhee is also a former registered nurse in critical and acute care who practiced nursing for 25 years and taught nursing for ten. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Author’s Note

New York historian Robert Swan once described the warring historical accounts of The Doctors’ Riot of 1788 as “incomprehensible.” Said Swan, “The first full reports, which left many details wanting, surfaced in out-of-town newspapers two weeks later. Almost certainly newspaper editors witnessed this tragedy. Yet on
Tuesday of the riot, Thomas Greenleaf, of the Independent Journal and Patriotic Advertiser, apologized to the public for being unable to give ‘a concise statement of the sad confusion of the city since last Sunday for this day’s paper.’ Locally, any inkling of trouble could only be inferred two days later when physicians published notarized disclaimers of involvement with grave robbing of any church.”

Swan was correct. Precious little contemporaneous information exists about the riot, making detailed examination of the event and its immediate aftermath difficult. However, four later accounts of the event offer enough citations and are written by such respected historians that they can provide a reliable and detailed history. One was written by James Joseph Walsh in his multi-volume work, History of Medicine in New York: Three Centuries of Medical Progress, published in 1919. Walsh was a devoted Catholic who earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1892 and was named dean of the medical school at Fordham University in 1906. Walsh also founded Fordham University Press, the oldest Catholic university press in the nation. His meticulous research of the riot, as well as the religious underpinnings of body snatching as a whole, provide a solid, scholarly base of information.

Another article on the event, by physician, author, and historian Jules Calvin Ladenheim, appeared in the Winter 1950 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. It, too, provides detailed and well-cited descriptions of the riot. 

The third key account is Swan’s own chronicle, “Prelude and Aftermath of the Doctors’ Riot of 1788,” which appeared in the October 2000 issue of New York History. Swan’s piece offers a scholarly and dispassionate explanation of the riot, complete with references. Swan also refers to the fourth important resource, an article by Whitfield J. Bell Jr., a highly regarded authority in early American science and medicine. In the article Bell included a letter written April 16, 1788, from William Heth, a Virginia planter who served as a colonel in the Continental Army. He was writing to Edmund Randolph, a Virginia politician who succeeded Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State. The letter, published in 1971, was discovered in storage at the Virginia State Library and contained previously
unknown material about the riot.

I also examined and sometimes used information from Joel Headley’s The Great Riots of New York, 1712–1873, Ralph G. Victor’s “An Indictment for Grave Robbing at the Time of the ‘Doctors’ Riot’ 1788,” and from a marvelous speech given by William Alexander Duer to the St. Nicholas Society of New York in 1848. Those sources proffered great detail but few to no references. Thomas Gallagher’s The Doctor’s Story proved valuable in understanding the tenor of the times and the way doctors tended to work in the eighteenth century. How I wish Mr. Gallagher had provided at least a few citations for his detailed, highly embellished tales of the days and nights of the riot, but alas, he did not. 

Using those sources and a few others, I tried to re-create a detailed account of the buildup to the riot, the riot itself, and the immediate aftermath. I admit to taking certain liberties in my account, however. For instance, I made several assumptions about the boys outside New York Hospital and their actions. Key sources indicate that “a boy” found a ladder and raised it to the anatomy lab window. If it was a single boy, he had to have been tall enough and strong enough to lift a wooden ladder, carry it to the window, and raise it up. A 13- or 14-year-old would fit that scenario, but it seems unlikely that a group of older boys would have been playing in the hospital yard even on a Sunday. They would have been working at home, perhaps, or already apprenticed. I decided, then, that the boys playing on the lawn were most likely 8 to 12 years old and that at least two and probably three of them actually put the ladder up to the window. I could be wrong, but if I am, I don’t think it’s by much. In the interest of clarity, the reader should know, then, that those are the kinds of decisions I made in the chapters dealing specifically with the riot. Details in those chapters taken from historical accounts have been cited.

I decided to use terms we employ today that describe people of the time. For instance, rather than using “slaves,” I used “enslaved Africans,” the preferred use by officials of the African Burial Ground National Monument and Howard University researchers. I likewise used “American Indian,” rather than older, more contentious terms, and I am aware that the great nations of the northeast ranged well into Canada, borders being nonexistent to indigenous peoples at that time. 

The term “body snatching” occurs throughout, not “grave robbing.” Grave robbing was reserved for people who stole personal items from a grave, items the theft of which could be prosecuted in court. Stealing a body, though, could not, seeing as how a body was not considered property. I also used “body parts” rather than “tissues” to make clear that although the term “tissue banks” sounds clean and rather clinical, it isn’t. Although many tissue banks may be legitimate and operate ethically, many do not. So I wrote as if the body is made up of tissues, which it is, and that I should be clear about what those tissues actually are: body parts.

In most cases I have adjusted spellings and capitalization to more modern formats for easier reading. I did, however, maintain original spellings and capitalization where important for historical purposes.

It seems important at this point to let the reader know my own feelings about donating one’s body for anatomical study, feelings that may or may not have played a role in writing this book, though I hope they haven’t. I have had “Organ Donor” marked on my driver’s license since my early twenties, and now that I am retired and moving (or perhaps creaking) through the last part of my life, I believe I will be donating my body to a university-based anatomy program when I’m finished with it. I know what can happen to my body after death. I know it could be handled harshly, disrespectfully, and, I suppose, amorally as well, and I accept that. I would be delighted even so to be used well after death, whether students studied my whole body or an orthopedic surgeon learned a new technique from my right shoulder, a military researcher discovered how to better protect soldiers from my torso, and a device manufacturer found a better way to reduce traumatic blood loss from my legs.

I accept those risks, but I also fervently wish that the federal government will finally push forward meaningful legislation to regulate body donations and thus prevent harsh, disrespectful, and amoral use of anyone’s body. It’s time, let’s do it.

Preface

The phone in my bedroom rang late one night. It was the night shift supervisor at my hospital telling me that I needed to get to the operating room stat. I was an operating room technician then, what they call now a surgical technologist, and lived just a few minutes from the hospital, so I threw on my clothes and ran out the door. When I reached the operating room, I immediately began setting up for an exploratory operation, having been told that someone in the emergency room was being brought to the operating room with severe chest and abdominal injuries. A young man on a motorcycle had gone off the road and crashed in a ditch. He hadn’t been found for a few hours, and his injuries were life-threatening. The next thing I knew, two surgeons were bursting through the doors with a patient on a stretcher. The surgeons, gloveless and still in their street clothes, slashed open the man’s abdomen, top to bottom. They thrust their bare hands into the man’s belly, filled with blood at that point, and began searching. There was at least one artery bleeding profusely, and if they could find it and close it, maybe they could save the man’s life.

I had helped with dozens of operations by then, Caesarean sections and gallbladder operations and hernia repairs, but I had never before been confronted by anything like that, and I will never forget it. The surgeons, two of the best I had ever worked with, rummaged around feverishly, desperate to find the bleeder, but it was no use. The patient died on the table from profound blood loss.

The surgeons, whom I respectfully and with profound gratitude call Roger and Jack here, were despondent but needed to know where the bleeding came from, so they kept looking. With blood no longer pouring into the abdomen, they soon found the culprit. “There it is,” said Roger, the always calm voice in the room. The left iliac artery, an artery in the groin that feeds the leg, was splayed open about two inches, as if someone had pulled down its zipper. There was no way to recover from such an injury; it’s a wonder the man had survived as long as he had. The two surgeons—one a grizzled veteran and the other fresh from his residency—began closing the cyclist’s abdomen.

I’ve thought a great deal about that patient and that surgery while writing this book, about how absolutely critical anatomy knowledge is to physicians and about how, without it, they would be lost, as lost as that young man with a lacerated artery in a belly filled with blood. I’ve thought about the other organs I’ve had the opportunity to see and feel firsthand: the firmness of the edge of the liver, the white sheen of the diaphragm, the ruddy red of the non-pregnant uterus, and the stretched pink of a fully pregnant one. I’ve thought about some of the technological advances in anatomy education I’ve seen—video podcasts, virtual reality headsets, and anatomy tables that allow medical students to explore the body digitally in three dimensions. As brilliant, fascinating, and effective as those technologies might be, I’m not sure they can replace the kind of actual, hands-on-organs learning that working with cadavers can.

One of my challenges for this book, then, was to find a way to present the necessity of cadaver dissection hand in hand with the necessity of a rather despicable trade, that of the body snatcher, the resurrectionist, the dreaded sack-’em-up men. Those men were performing a vital service for medical education. They might have performed the service illegally, immorally, and purely for the money, but it was a service nonetheless. I can understand as well the fury that can come from someone desecrating the body of a loved one and particularly doing so without approval, without ever being notified of the act. But that looks at the issue through today’s lens. At the time of the Doctors’ Riot, society needed the resurrectionist’s services just as it needs the services of morticians and pathologists today. We still need people who purposely choose to deal with the dead and who treat our dead with kindness and respect. We need the dead, still, to help us learn. Even with the latest technologies, some of which are truly astonishing, we still need people who donate their bodies for study and practice.

The Doctors’ Riot of 1788 sparked a movement that led to today’s system of body donation and the laws and morality that support it. We have reached a place where whole-body donation has become not only accepted but is also seen as distinctly noble. We have reached a place where a wide variety of organs can be donated, removed from the body, and transplanted into someone else just prior to death. Yet while organ donation is closely regulated, the body donation business—and it is a business, to be sure—is almost completely unregulated.

The learning that occurs from practicing on real cadavers is just too damn important for our health. We need to protect that learning. I hope this book, in some small way, contributes to the creation of laws that provide a measure of assurance to families of people who have donated their bodies. We need to make sure that those bodies have not been used in vain and that they have not been manhandled, mistreated, neglected, or disrespected. We need, quite simply, to ensure dignity after death.