1788 New York City Doctor's Riot: Grave Robbing, Dissection and Racial Unity

        Lanterns flicker in the chill March breeze.  An icy drizzle begins to fall.  The worn winter clothes of the three medical students shimmer as they’re covered by a dusting of ice crystals.

“Come on, hurry,” one of the young men wearing a tri-corner hat says as the breath rises like steam from between his lips.

“I am hurrying.  You want to dig?”  The one who is standing over the headstone says between clenched teeth as he shovels another spadeful of mud over the edge of the hole.

The lanterns flash again casting shadows over the three men.  

What was that sound?

The lookout, who is standing with eyes darting left to right a few feet away, puts a finger to his lips, “Shhh,” he whispers.

More muffled sounds of digging.  The night turns silent and even colder.  Frozen drizzle.  The men breathe into the palms of their hands to keep the bitter March chill from biting into their fingertips.  Tense moments pass by.

Finally, the sound that the three students have been waiting anxiously to hear--THUD.

The spade has hit wood.  It has hit the top of a freshly buried coffin.

The year is 1788 and these three medical students are grave robbers--practitioners of the innovative yet taboo technique of dissection--referred to as “resurrectionists” in the parlance of the times for their propensity to dig up dead bodies in the middle of the night for their experiments.

They are digging in a place called the Pauper’s Cemetery on Chambers Street in Manhattan only mere blocks from where they attend school at Columbia College, New York City’s first school of medicine.

Most of the bodies interred in the pauper’s cemetery are the bodies of black men and women, some who were freed before their deaths and some who died while still in bondage.  In 1788 nearly one fifth of the city’s population is black and that population is disproportionately represented in the pauper’s cemetery.

These three students, and many others like them, have been busy this past winter digging up bodies young and old, men and women, even children at a prodigious pace in the middle of the night to feed their studies and the need for more specimens to dissect.

The digging has to be done at night, and done quietly, because both body-snatching and dissection are considered heinous crimes at the time.  And it has to be done in the middle of winter because there is simply no other way to preserve a body and keep it worthy of dissection and study in an era before refrigeration.

        

In 1788, not just in New York City but all across the newly founded 13 states as well, dissection was not only illegal but also taboo to the Puritanical Christian consciences of Americans.  Most Americans at the time felt that even dissection for the advancement of medical science somehow violated the sanctity of the human body which only God Himself could create, and for that reason, dissecting a corpse to learn about the inner workings of the body was an unforgivable sacrilege.

However, in Great Britain, and in other parts of western Europe, dissection of dead bodies for medical study while still frowned upon by most people, was permitted under law for the advancement of medical knowledge.  In Europe dissections could be performed in classroom settings as long as strict procedures and policies were adhered to.  Medical schools could only obtain the bodies of executed criminals for dissection and hundreds of students packed shoulder to shoulder in a lecture hall would have to watch and take notes on one single dissection performed in front of everyone by a fully qualified medical doctor, but even with these strictures medical advances among Europeans were miles ahead of those being made by their American counterparts.  

Thanks to the permitted dissections and to the pioneering work of European doctor’s medical science saw great advances in the later 18th century.  Still, American medical students felt the need to observe and study these advances first hand, hence given the rise in popularity of grave robbing especially of the newly dead in pauper’s cemeteries just like the one on Chambers Street in Manhattan.

Most of the bodies both buried in, and dug up from pauper’s cemeteries, were the bodies of African-Americans who were either freed slaves or slaves themselves.  One reason that the so-called “resurrectionists’ chose to target the newly deceased in the black community so regularly is because most blacks at the time had no easily identifiable next of kin who would be able to bring their nefarious deeds to light on account of the fact that the true family members of most blacks in the 18th century were either still in Africa or completely unknown for certain.

With one of the nation’s first and most predominant medical colleges being located at Columbia College in Manhattan, the problem of digging up dead bodies for dissection became especially bad in New York City.  With such a cold winter in Manhattan and such a large and growing black population that could easily be exploited under the eyes of the law, grave robbing the dead from African-American cemeteries became an acute problem in the Winter and Spring of 1788.

The problem became so bad that in February of that year a group of freed blackmen had petitioned the City Council to take action to stop grave robbing in the pauper’s cemetery.  The petttitioners wrote that, “Young gentlemen in this city who call themselves students of the physic and who under cover of night dig up the bodies of our dearest deceased friends,..carry them away without respect to age or sex.” (Smithsonian Magazine 2014)

Interestingly, the freedmen’s petition only asked that the body snatching from the graves of their deceased friends and relatives be done with decency and respect and not that it be stopped altogether.  Despite the freedmen’s willingness to compromise, and despite the fact that they asked only that the problem be merely acknowledged by city authorities, their appeal fell on deaf ears and nothing was done to stop the “resurrectionists” as the cold winter of 1788 turned to Spring.

Nothing was done that is until a very curious event occurred sometime in April and caused what would forever be known as the New York City Doctor’s Riot.  

Today there is some debate about whether the single event which precipitated the riot ever actually occurred or if it is simply a lie that was spread by some school children which has now lasted for nearly 250 years and become a sort of macabre urban legend.  But because it is the type of event that could engender such rage in the citizens of New York and cause a riot by blacks and working class whites and because it may actually have happened it is worth retelling as the precipitate cause of the 1788 New York City Doctor’s riot.

Sometime in April of 1788, quite possibly April 5th though like many things about the Doctor’s riot, the exact date of the incident is unknown, a group of children were playing just outside New York Hospital near Columbia College.  

History reports that a medical student inside the building named John Hicks was performing a dissection at the exact time that the children happened to be playing outside his window.   Lost in study, and in the minutiae of human anatomy, Hicks became enraged by the noise that the children were making and cut an arm off the corpse that he was dissecting.  To make the children go away Hicks then took the severed arm, opened the window wide and waved the  bloody appendage back and forth in the directions of the children who were probably aged somewhere between eight and ten.

It is said that Hicks told one boy that the arm belonged to his dead mother.  

This boy then ran home where he immediately told his father what had happened.  Upon hearing this a large crowd, a posse of sorts, was gathered together by the boy’s father, and several dozen men then marched to the cemetery where they proceeded to exhume the grave of the man’s dead wife.  When they opened her coffin it was empty which seemed to confirm that Hicks had indeed stolen the corpse for the purposes of dissection.

This story is reported in most sources on the 1788 Doctor’s Riot so it appears quite probable that some variation of these events did occur and did in fact precipitate the riot.  However, it must be kept in mind that the villain, John Hicks, was a student of one Dr.  Richard Bayley.  Dr. Bayley was an American who had earned his medical degree in England and was a well known, and open, proponent of dissection and even of grave robbing whenever necessary to procure specimens.  

On the night of the incident a crowd of over 2,000 freed blacks and working class whites gathered near the pauper’s cemetery and marched on the hospital and Columbia College.  The interracial crowd, filled with rage, broke into the medical buildings in an effort to find both Hicks and Bayley and bring them to justice.

Once inside the buildings the angry mob found several dozen bodies in various stages of decomposition and piles of severed limbs and disemboweled organs littering the floor.  Many screamed in horror as they recognized the faces of loved ones on the dissection tables who had only recently been buried in the pauper’s cemetery.

This only incensed the crowd more.  Soon the mob swelled to nearly 5,000 New York City citizens of all races who quickly descended on the city’s main thoroughfare, Broadway, in a vigilante manhunt for Hicks, Bayley and all physicians.

Doctors were forced into hiding and most had to flee the city entirely.  For years after the riot all types of medical professionals were held in very low esteem in New York City.

Eventually the crowd would assemble in front of the courthouse to demand justice for the crimes of the “resurrectionists”.  The unrest would go on for a total of two days and nights.  Once crowds began to hurl rocks at government buildings and attempt to set fire to the courthouse, New York Governor Henry Clinton was forced to call in the militia.

After the second day of rioting, and after a brief clash between rioters and the militia, order was restored.  We know today that at least 3 rioters and 3 militiamen were killed in the course of the two day riot but some historians estimate that the death toll from the Doctor’s Riot could have been as high as 20-30 individuals.

Neither John Hicks nor Richard Bayley were ever apprehended and it appears as if no physicians were actually harmed in the riot.

In a peaceful society, rioting, violence and civil unrest are never good things and neither is desecrating the final resting places of society’s most vulnerable individuals.  Though mob violence definitely has no place in a civil and democratic society, nonetheless, not everything that came out of the 1788 Doctor’s Riots was bad.

For one thing, as a result of public pressure over grave robbing, dissecting the bodies of executed criminals was actually legalized in the United States not long after the riot.  Also, it became legal for medical students to dissect the bodies of individuals killed in duels which did a lot to discourage the hyper-violent practice of dueling with pistols for honor then prevalent in American society.  Medical students would no longer have to go prowling through the cemeteries of the poor and destitute in the middle of the night to procure their specimens, but rather a whole class of paid workmen called “Resurrection Men” would bring the bodies of dead criminals and dead duelists directly to the students.

As a result of all of these changes American doctor’s were better able to keep pace with their European counterparts and soon medical colleges flourished throughout the entire fledgling United States of America.

But all of the changes to the law and advancements in medical science aside, the 1788 Doctor’s Riot of New York City represents one of the first times in the history of the United States that people of different races, united by a common cause, actually came together to make a positive change.  A movement that began in the black community at the time spread throughout the entire city and soon became a lynchpin for change and improvement across the entire nation.

Although we all disagree with the methods of expression employed by those who participated in the Doctor’s Riot of 1788, we today, can definitely understand and relate to their anger and frustration, and we as American’s, particularly New Yorker’s, should be proud of the unity, diversity and resolve that all these men and women exhibited nearly two-hundred and fifty years ago.