The Tradition of Grave Robbing for Medical Research and Study
Medical research and education in the 1700s relied heavily upon corpse dissection. However, there was a snag: few would donate their loved ones’ corpses. So doctors stole cadavers from fresh graves, or paid grave robbers to do so. In the 1780s, New York’s Columbia University doctors got their corpses from a plot known as the African Burial Ground, where slaves and freedmen were buried. The doctors simply headed there at night, dug up the freshest graves, and stole the corpses. The relatives petitioned the authorities to do something about the grave robbing, but nobody listened. Then one day in April, 1788, some boys peeped through the window of New York Hospital, as a doctor dissected a corpse. To amuse the kids, he waved her severed arm at them. Unfortunately, the woman being dissected happened to be the recently-deceased mother of one of the kids.
He ran home and told his father, who gathered a mob to attack the hospital. When they broke in, the mob encountered corpses strewn all over, one of them boiling in a pot to ease dissection. As the doctor on duty hid, the angry crowd gathered the cadavers and burned them outside. Thousands of New Yorkers attacked doctors’ homes, and even the city’s jail, where the authorities had moved the doctors for their own protection. The mob bayed for blood, and shouted “Bring out the doctors!” The militia was gathered to resist them. In the fighting that ensued, about twenty were killed. John Jay, future president of the Continental Congress and first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, served in the militia at the time. He was struck with a rock that cracked his skull. In the aftermath, laws were finally passed to prohibit and punish grave robbing.