A Supreme Court Chief Justice in a Riot
Eighteenth century medical research and education relied heavily upon corpse dissection. However, few would donate their loved ones’ corpses. So doctors stole them from fresh graves, or paid grave robbers to do so. It was as justifiable a cause for moral panic as any. In the 1780s, New York’s Columbia University doctors got their corpses from 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. Relatives of the deceased petitioned the authorities to do something, 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 was the recently-deceased mother of one of the boys.
The kid ran home and told his father, who gathered a mob to attack the hospital. When they broke in, they encountered a scene of horrors. Numerous corpses were strewn all over the place, one of them boiling in a pot to ease dissection. As the doctor on duty hid in a chimney, the mob gathered the cadavers and burned them outside. Over the next few days, 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 gathered to resist them. In the resultant fighting, about twenty were killed. John Jay, who served in the militia, was struck with a rock that cracked his skull. Afterwards, laws were finally passed to prohibit and punish grave robbing.
