Moral Panic Caused by Medical Dissection
John Jay (1745 – 1829) was a patriot, diplomat, and jurist who served the nascent United States in various roles. A New Yorker, he was elected to both the First and Second Continental Congresses, and served as president of the latter. As ambassador to Spain from 1779 to 1782, he persuaded it to help the American colonists in their war against Britain. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris that secured US independence, and later served as America’s first Secretary of State. Jay was also appointed the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1789. When it came to case law, his years on the bench were mostly uneventful: in six years, his court decided only four cases.
The tranquility of Jay’s service on the bench contrasted sharply with the tumult he experienced a year earlier in 1788. A doctor nowadays is a respected professional, but it was not always so. Indeed, one of America’s biggest riots after the country gained its independence was against doctors. The so-called “Doctors Riot” was sparked by popular abhorrence of a ghoulish, but common medical practice at the time. Back then, doctors routinely robbed graves of corpses for dissection. The riot erupted in New York City on April 16th, 1788, and killed over twenty people. As seen below, the future US Supreme Court chief justice almost got killed in the tumult.
