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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 legally, 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 Doctors’ Riot of 1788 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Bodysnatching is an uncomfortable topic. Many people do not 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 trace back to Great Britain. Many Britons 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. If their bodies were disfigured, many feared they would not rise properly on judgment day. This was the origin of the many taboos around autopsies and dissection.
This led to the general perception that dissection of human bodies was shameful and disrespectful. As a result, government officials banned human dissection and offered medical schools only a limited number of criminals’ corpses each year.
Even so, there were not enough bodies for anatomy students to dissect. This led to grave robbing in Great Britain by people known as resurrectionists. I previously did an episode on Resurrectionists if you are interested in learning more about the topic.
But for the purposes of this episode, it is important to know that the United States inherited the prejudice against dissection, and that medical practitioners shared the same need for more bodies to study.
Grave robbing was considered a necessary evil by anatomists and other medical practitioners, as it was the most surefire way of studying the body or practicing medical treatment without harming a real patient. It provided real-world practice.
Corpses procured through bodysnatching in the 18th century were the cheapest source of bodies for anatomy lessons. They were cheaper for institutions and ensured the remains were newly deceased and of good quality.
In the United States, people in poverty were the biggest victims of bodysnatching. 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 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 snatchers.
Compounding this lack of public concern, institutional marginalization restricted enslaved people to interments beyond the 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 paupers’ graveyards, was an easy target for body snatchers to collect cadavers.
Most of the body snatching occurred in the winter. This was because the cold slowed the rate of decomposition in the body. In the winter before the riot, the number of corpses being taken by body snatchers had increased significantly.
A group of freedmen visiting the cemetery noticed the uptick in grave robbing and raised the issue. On February 3, 1788, the group petitioned New York’s common council to take action against bodysnatching. The petition was ignored, and no effort was made to stop the activity.
Despite the petition going nowhere, bodysnatching persisted. However, it didn’t come to the attention other communities until a newspaper called the Advertiser published an article later in February.
In the article, they printed that the body of a white woman was stolen from the Trinity Churchyard. While many were willing to ignore the desecration of the graves of marginalized people, the stealing of the white woman’s body led to a public outcry.
The article showed that bodysnatching could happen to anyone, and that no one was safe.
What turned public concern over bodysnatching into a riot began with a poorly made joke. In April 1788, several children were playing outside New York hospital, where a physician named Richard Bayley worked.
Bayley had completed his medical training in England, where bodysnatching practices were extremely common. Bayley himself had taken up the practice and was known to take corpses from two different cemeteries. This led to whispers about him performing cruel experiments and cutting up his patients.
One of Bayley’s medical students, John Hicks, was working in a room that faced the street. Inside, he 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.
John Hicks was annoyed that his dissection had drawn a crowd, so he decided to scare the children away. To do this, he turned toward the boys while holding the cadaver’s arm. He then waved the arm at them and said, “This is your mother’s arm. I just dug it up!”
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 lying to rest. He began to dig into the ground until he reached his wife’s coffin. 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. 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 toward the 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 others tried to save the medical equipment.
Those who attempted to protect the equiopment failed, as the crowd got hold of everything, bringing it onto the street where they would smash or burn them.
While inside the hospital, the rioters 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 equipment, the mob was still incredibly angry. 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 at the time, James Duane, had several doctors jailed for their own safety. While this might seem odd, the prison was the most secure building in town.
Yet even the jail’s sturdy walls could not 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, appealed to local leaders to come to the jailhouse and help restore order.
One of the leaders who arrived was John Jay, who was later named a Supreme Court Justice and was a future governor of the state. He begged the mob to leave. However, his pleas were brushed aside as the mob did not think that someone with status as high as Jay would know anything about having his loved ones’ graves robbed.
The pleas of John Jay failed so much that the mob began to throw things at him. One of these objects was a rock which cracked Jay’s skull open.
Another leader brought into the riot was Revolutionary War hero and army general Baron von Steuben. Instead of heroically ending the riot, he got hit in the head with a 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 soldiers’ guns were enough to overwhelm the crowd. Members of the mob began to flee, leaving behind an estimated 20 dead in the street.
The 1788 Doctors’ 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 toward doctors in New York City persisted for years after the riot. Although a few anatomy students did face trial, the vast majority escaped punishment for bodysnatching.
By the following year, New York City began to put measures in 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 o with public morality.
What happened in New York in 1788 was not an isolated incident. Within the United States, at least 17 instances of anatomy riots occurred between 1765 and 1854. These riots occurred in major cities like Boston and Philadelphia, as well as in smaller places like Vermont.
The issue of bodysnatching didn’t end in the United States until laws were passed in the 19th and early 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 changed, which led to the passage of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act in 1968.
This act enabled whole-body donation programs. This meant people could voluntarily give up their bodies to medical schools, meaning they no longer needed to collect corpses from crime scenes or from unclaimed bodies.
The Doctors’ 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 the problem of grave robbing and helped spur efforts to regulate the legal supply of cadavers for medical study. In that sense, the events of 1788 became an important moment in the long process of balancing scientific advancement with public trust and ethical limits.