Case File | The Doctors Who Stole Bodies

From Airship and Evergreen Podcasts, I'm Jeremy Schwartz and this is American Criminal. The Crimes and Corruption of William Tweed occurred as America's political system was still taking shape.

As you heard, he took advantage of his position to enrich himself and his friends. And it was so easy for him, mostly because people didn't know what they didn't know.

They didn't realize how simple it was for politicians to steal in the ways that Bill did. Didn't understand the cycle of more power leading to more money, leading to more power, leading to, you get it.

But of course, Bill Tweed wasn't the first man to exploit people's ignorance, nor was he the first person whose actions can be looked at as morally gray.

Because sure, he swindled his constituents and stole from the public purse, but he also used his power to affect positive changes in the city. Does one outweigh the other? Now that's not for me to say.

I'm just pointing it out so that you can make up your mind. And while we're on the subject of ethically dubious actions, let's talk about New York City's doctors' riot.

This happened right on the heels of the Revolutionary War, long before Bill was even born. But, like the cautionary tale of Boss Tweed, this deadly riot came about because of a lack of regulations over an aspect of society that needed them.

In this case, it was the study of medicine. See, doctors needed human bodies so they could learn. And the fresher they were, the better the specimen, obviously.

It was an open secret that new corpses would often be taken from graves and used as teaching aids. Not the most pleasant thing to think about, but much of society was pretty happy to ignore the elephant in the room.

This was especially true in 18th century New York City, when nearly all of the bodies being stolen were black. But in April of 1788, something changed, and it suddenly brought a lot more attention to the cottage industry, a body-snatching.

Eric Rivenes, the host of Most Notorious, sat down with author Andy McPhee to speak about exactly what happened to set off the Doctors' Riot, the history of resurrectionists, and the complex morality of the lines we cross in service of a greater

good. good.

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Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast.

I'm Eric Rivenes. Great to have you here with me. And I am so pleased to introduce Andy McPhee to the podcast today.

He is a former critical care nurse, nurse educator, and an award-winning writer. He has authored four books and hundreds of news articles for young adults. He has also overseen the publication of dozens of educational health care textbooks.

His brand new book, out on January 6th, is called The Doctors' Riot of 1788, Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

My pleasure.

Thank you very much for having me, Eric.

Sure. So, you start your book with an experience you had in an operating room, with a man who had suffered from a motorcycle accident. Can you tell us that story?

Yeah, I'd be happy to tell that story.

I was working my way through nursing school as what they call nowadays a surgical technologist, but back then, what was an operating room technician. And I was on call every third weekday and every third weekend. And you get called in.

I only lived a few minutes from the hospital, so it was one of those nights. Woke up in the middle of the night. They had a case coming in.

Hurry up and get here. And it happened to be a fairly young guy in his early 20s, I believe, who had gone off, was riding a motorcycle, went off into a ditch, and he wasn't found for a few hours.

By the time they got him into the emergency room, he was in really bad shape. And so they really just brought him straight up to the emergency room, to the operating room. And I had already set up by them.

And there was another nurse there as well. And people nowadays in health care, they're going to go nuts. But we didn't have the problems that we have today.

They cracked his belly, that is, they operated on his abdomen, slicing it open. They didn't have gloves on. They were in the street clothes.

I was dressed, and I was in gloves and a gown, but they were not. It was such a hurry to get to this, to find out where this guy was bleeding from. And they didn't find it in time.

And so the surgeons, after we called it off, the surgeons kept looking. They wanted to find out what happened.

And they found that the iliac artery, which is an artery that feeds a leg on this man's left side, looked like someone had taken a zipper pull and pulled it down, and it was open about an inch and a half, two inches.

It was just wide open, and that's where the bleeding was coming from.

And I remember that kind of got me thinking and remembering all the other things that I had been fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending on how you take it, to have seen and done in those days when I was in the operating room. I felt livers.

I've helped with cesarean sections. I don't know how many of those. So I know what the uterus looks like, and I know what the abdominal anatomy looks like and muscles look like.

We were just getting into total hips at that time. This is a while ago. So I tried to use that background and that knowledge and bring it into the book.

And so that guy made an enormous impression on me. And I remember it to this day. I feel bad for him and his family, obviously.

But yeah, that's the story I tell. I try to kind of get people into it so that they understand my point of view as they're reading the book.

What is the connection in your mind between the story and the phenomenon of body snatching and the riot in your book? How does it tie together?

Do you have to know, these surgeons and physicians, anybody working in health care, now physical therapists especially, not just surgeons but any kind of physician, you have to know what you're looking at all the way in.

And I said, how else are you going to know that? How else can any physician understand what a bruit is, for example? A bruit is a sound that constriction of an artery plays.

So when you get a pulse going through an artery, if it vibrates, that's called a bruit, and that means something. And you have to understand what's happening inside the body to be able to help the body and to help the body heal.

And I tried to think back, well, how else could they have done that? From hundreds and thousand years ago, how could they? There wasn't a way, other than to examine dead bodies and to cut them open, which really didn't happen to like the 16th, 1700s.

There wasn't a way. Da Vinci and Vesalius and those guys studied mostly muscles, and they didn't do a whole lot with the interior body.

And even then, the muscle, the pictures that they drew, the illustrations we know now are sometimes terribly wrong, but they didn't know that then.

So how else can you learn where the liver is, what the stomach is like, what the liver is like when someone has cirrhosis, and how that might affect the rest of their organs, unless you've had the opportunity to view the body.

And you can't do that really on living people. You have to do it on dead people.

So it's in the natural outcrop of that need, resurrectionists, these sacrament men, who would sneak into the cemeteries at night and take bodies and then transport them to an anatomist, where they would get dissected by students.

There wasn't a very big leap. Da Vinci used resurrectionists back when he was painting and sculpting, and he dissected, I mentioned in the book, he dissected a 100-year-old man, who he sat on the bed as he died. He used to hang out at hospitals.

And if someone died, he would just take the body to the crypt where he was working, and he would anatomize it or dissect it and learn from it.

So it's not a very big jump from the need to have insight and in-depth understanding of internal organs to body-snatching. It was a natural evolution. And so that's, I think, where that link comes, because I was like, oh, yeah, I understand now.

I can sense this now. Once you see what an artery is and what a vein looks like and how thick an artery is, but a vein is not, you get it. Oh, I get it.

Because the artery is carrying the blood and the vein under pressure. And the vein is carrying blood, but it's not very much under pressure. And you really understand that.

So there was a very natural link between my experiences in the operating room and then understanding why we needed to have resurrectionists for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Right. So in your author's note, you do make a distinction between body snatching and grave robbing, right?

Right. It's really a legal separation first. Body snatching is taking the body from a grave illegally.

Grave robbing is taking items that were inside the grave, on the body, clothing, jewelry, whatever, stones that might have been placed with the body, and stealing those. The thing is, that was illegal, and that's always been illegal.

Well, not always, but for a long, long, long time, it was illegal to take any kind of item from a grave site. It was property, and the property belonged to the family who buried the victim. The body, however, has always been kind of up for grabs.

The body was never property that the law defined, and it made business of resurrection and body snatching legally very difficult.

Because if their laws didn't protect the body as property, and that's been the case for hundreds of years, if they could only protect, the laws could only protect the property within the grave, that's a tough place to be.

And so resurrectionists didn't really face a lot of consequences. And people sort of understood it. Yes, we need to have that industry for our doctors, but at least they didn't take my mother's diamond ring, as the case may be.

So it was two very different things. And any of the resurrections who were arrested and convicted were arrested and convicted mostly because of the property that they took, rather than stealing the body itself.

So after these resurrectionists dug up a body, they would remove the clothes and then just take the naked body? Yeah.

Yeah. So they tried as hard as they could. It was fascinating.

They tried to make it seem like the grave had never been disturbed.

So they would put somebody out as a watchman at cemeteries, and they'd keep their ears to the ground, listening for when people were going to be buried, and they would go to the cemeteries, and they would wait until after dark.

Now, this is mostly, by the way, in the cooler months, wherever this was occurring, in the cooler months, because if it was in the summer and the hot months, you didn't get very far. The body decomposed too rapidly.

So they mostly occurred in the winter months.

So they'd go under cover of night, and the really good resurrectionists, and even the mediocre ones, would carefully place items that they were going to have to move off to the side, and sometimes even draw a map of where those items were, because

people used to put stones on top of the grave to deter body snatchers. And so the body snatchers come in, and I'm going to move this rock that way. I'm going to keep it exactly like that, and I'm going to move this rock that way.

And then at the end, they'd take all the jewelry off, whatever, they would leave it in there, put the stones back, try to make it seem as if the grave site has not been disturbed at all, and then leave.

It was an art, basically, or at least a craft, to this act of stealing a body. They didn't dig up the whole body. They tuck it out through the head of the casket.

So they dig down to the head, break open the casket.

These were just wooden, usually pine boxes, and they would just dig up the, break the heading of the lid where the head was, drag the body above ground through that opening, and then replace everything as best they could.

And it was quite, it's clever. You know, what are you going to do? It's this, and then, and so bodies that have been taken from graves, there has got to be more than people know.

Because not all of them were caught. The families didn't always, like what happened in the Doctors' Riot, a family just found out that the mother who just died was taken from her grave, and they went to the grave.

Let's think of how many families left their loved ones there, and then they're not there anymore, but they don't know it, and they never go, they don't, you can't see it when you go back. You know, three months later, it looks like a grave site.

So it's fascinating. So I think there are a lot of empty graves out there, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, I'll bet. So these resurrectionists were medical students?

In the US., yeah. Not so much in Europe and England, but in the US., absolutely. They were predominantly medical students.

England, the old time resurrectionists in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s in England, it was a job for them. They had a good, strong stomach. They could make money.

It was a job for them. And they were medical students, absolutely, in Edinburgh and London, who went body snatching because they needed bodies. Not as, in the US., it was far more common.

We had four medical schools by the 1800s in the US., that's it. Then, by 1860, there were 60 of them. There were way more medical schools.

So it was absolutely imperative in America because of that growth, that you had bodies to feed that growth. So the students became the main resurrectionists, unless you could hire somebody to do it for you. And there are instances of that.

I cover one of them in the book. There was a gentleman named Grandison Harris in Georgia, who wound up working for College of Georgia Medical School, and he was hired specifically to steal bodies. And that was his job.

They didn't say that was his job publicly. He was a maintenance person or something like that. But his job was to go out, watch cemeteries, dig up the body, bring it back to the anatomy lab, where they would be dissected.

And I have an actual picture of him in the book, in a class of medical students, and he's in the upper right, waving. He's the only one, he just decided to wave. Fascinating stuff.

And a lot of universities, colleges hired people to do that very thing. So there was a great deal of resurrectionists work in America, principally because of the rapid growth in medical schools and the need for anatomy in the states.

So would these students have been compensated in 1788 in any way with...

Well, the students wouldn't be compensated if there's an outside resurrection, a freelancer, if you would. The freelancer would be paid, and at one point, it was $100 per body. And that's what would be transferred to the anatomist.

The anatomist would give the freelancer money, cash money, and the freelancer would go on his way. And the anatomist and the students would dissect that body the next day, and for several days thereafter. The students got insured.

They weren't paid. That was part of it. That was the expectation of the course.

So they didn't get paid. They would have just said, the professor would have said, listen, we need a body. We're going to be doing the abdomen.

See if you can find one. And they would go get them. And they took it from anywhere.

That was one of the things that started the Doctors' Riot to begin with. They would get it from anywhere. In New York City, it was predominantly the Negroes burial ground, what is now called the African Burial Grounds National Monument.

But they get them at Poppers Graveyard in towns, outside cities, which is where the medical schools were located for a fair amount of time. They would travel out, resurrections travel out to towns and grab them there.

So there was always, they went where the deaths were, where the bodies were. And in 1788, the main student that everyone talks about is a guy named John Hicks Jr. And he was a very vocal student about the need for stealing bodies in New York City.

So the students did it, but to sort of satisfy their own requirements for school, because they wanted a career. That's what they had to do.

Right. Right.

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Now, there was a lot of lively debate going on about this problem in newspapers.

Oh, yes.

It was a charged issue.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And people didn't have a problem with taking from the Black cemeteries or the Popper cemeteries.

That wasn't an issue. It wasn't until students at the New York Hospital, the anatomy program in New York Hospital, that they started taking bodies from Trinity Church, which was at that time still allowed Blacks, but they had to sit way in the back.

But so it was a white-dominated church. And the majority of bodies interred in the graveyard of Trinity Church were white bodies.

Those bodies were particularly cherished by anatomists, because they weren't the typical Black bodies and poor bodies that might have been, because Blacks and the poor in those days were so much more malnourished, emaciated, things that happened in

the body over time to someone who doesn't have the proper nutrition, people who are beaten, people who are in accidents more often than people who had money. Those individuals presented a certain type of cadaver for the disectors.

But whites in that time, although they certainly were subject to all of the same kinds of communicable diseases, as anybody who's not white, they died less often because they could get some kind of care.

It was horrible care compared to what we have now, but that's beside the point. They were in better shape.

So that you tried to get whites, and it wouldn't have surprised me, I have no idea if this is true, but it wouldn't have surprised me if one of the anatomy professors at the hospital said, hey, listen, there are more white bodies.

See, if you look at Trinity Church, take a look there. And if you can get one of those, that'd be great. Otherwise, just go to the black cemetery or the pauper's graveyard and get one of those.

There was a lot of that kind of racial intonations at work in those days.

So who were the people arguing back and forth in the newspaper?

Yeah, the people who wrote... There was a petition by black citizens of New York City saying, listen, we have had our loved ones' bodies dug up for so long now. Please stop this.

Do something. We understand that the students need to have a dead body to learn. We understand that.

But please don't take so many from us to treat us with a little dignity. So that letter went to the council, the New York City Council, and nothing really happened to it. It was published, but nothing else happened to it.

Some of the students, including Hicks, especially Hicks, wrote letters back to the newspaper. At the time, and people are generally aware of this, Hamilton and others would write under a surname. And so this student did as well.

So historians don't know that the letters that Hicks wrote, or that were written, actually came from Hicks, but it looks very, very strongly positive that it was.

And so there was a back and forth, if you think back to SNL, Jane, you ignorant slut, the back and forth, back and forth kind of arguments. That's what happened in the late 1700s with this particular council letter.

And the student wrote back, and then someone else wrote back, and the other person we believe owned a cemetery nearby, Black Cemetery. And they were fighting back and forth. Now, it wasn't like, it was all very gentlemanly, the letter writing.

But when you really look at it, you can understand that there's a great deal of anger there on both sides.

Here you have Black citizens raging, kindly so, against white medical students, and they're all white, for taking their bodies and leaving them a disgraceful grave, basically.

And you have on the other side, anatomy students who are telling them, well, you don't get this. We have to have these bodies. What's wrong with you?

We're not bright enough to understand this, but we are, and this is what we need. It was that kind of back and forth that happened in a newspaper shortly before the riots.

So there was already a pent up disgruntlement about anatomy students and about medicine. Medicine at that time did not have a good reputation.

The doctors were, I mean, if you think back now, they were as good as they could be, but they were horrible. Anybody could hang a shingle out back then.

So the populace were really not happy about medicine, which is why they went to all of the oddball kinds of preparations that Aunt Sally would make in her basement and then sell in a little bottle.

That's why, because the doctors couldn't really do much of anything. So there was already, excuse me, this undercurrent of anger. Add to that, there had only been five years since the Revolutionary War ended officially.

And during that time, laws were being recreated and changed. And the whole bunch, we were becoming America. We were organized under the British organization.

We were subject to British laws and the way they were written. We had British medicine that came over from England. That we were British.

And it took quite some while before we became America. But in that five years, that period, it was no where near enough. We were all still British, and we were fighting within ourselves.

To be, are we American? Are we British? There are laws against loyalists on the books.

That really restricted movements and things that loyalists could do. And sometimes they kicked them out of towns and cities. Loyalists were people who were loyal to the British crown.

So a lot of stuff going on nationally at that point. And so the people involved in the body snatching and in the riot that followed, all of those feelings kind of bubbled to the surface.

Now, the pseudonym for the person defending the body snatching was Mr. Abductio, right?

Abductio, yes.

What a name. And you believe that this was John Hicks.

That was John Hicks, yes. And the humanio, humanio, however you pronounce that, I haven't been sure, was probably a guy named Scipio Gray, who owned his backyard was a cemetery for the blacks.

And Hicks, Abductio, and humanio had a confrontation one night when Hicks went to, and a few other students went to humanio's graveyard, Scipio Gray's graveyard. And he basically tried to kick him out.

He was successful the first time and not successful the second time. But it was, they, they'd met these two writers almost on the battlefield. It just wasn't the African burial grounds, it was Scipio Gray's backyard, in a manner of speaking.

Interesting.

Mr. Abductio, student of Physic, right?

Right. That's what it was called. Physic was medicine back then.

Just because surgery, that's an interesting history too. The surgeons were much better thought of than regular physicians, internists and the like. But Physic with a K was what the, that's what the courses were known for at the time.

That was their name.

It's hard to imagine this debate now in 2026, right? Who would ever defend the act of stealing a body from a grieving family? It's hard to fathom this discussion.

Oh, it's horrible.

I can't imagine it.

In England, they would create things called mort safes, M-O-R-T-S-A-F-E-S, and they were the cages that you might have heard about, plunked over a grave because they thought that would prevent the body from being taken by resurrectionists.

So the public was like, don't leave our bodies alone. That was one issue.

That was one side of the coin, and the other side of the coin was I want my doctor to be good, and I want him to know how to take teeth out, or to fix a broken bone, or the real simple things that they could do back in the long time ago days.

It just, it was a very contradictory thought, belief in the public. And I don't think those two beliefs met in the middle. They, you know, you can compartmentalize a lot of different things.

And I think that's what regular people did. How else could they do it? The grieving family, of course, leave my loved one's body alone.

But the people who were not feeling well and wanted to go to the doctor, they had a different, they pulled from that side of the coin. So yeah, it was contradictory to say the least.

And the doctor central to these events, his name was Richard Bailey.

Yes, right. So Richard Bailey studied in Edinburgh and a little bit in London.

And all of the medical students who studied in Edinburgh, which was one of the preeminent institutions in Great Britain, or London, another preeminent institution, medical school, they had to go out and steal bodies. They learned that at school.

One of the main people in London, for example, was an anatomist named William Hunter. And Hunter did a number of protests outside his anatomy school, his anatomy lab, on Great Windmill Street. People who were saying, stop stealing.

We know something's going on in there because people, the becoming and goings of people and wagons and things, in the middle of the night, and they could smell human flesh.

They didn't like the smell because he was either burning bodies or they were dumping them down into a well, and there was smell during decomposition. It wasn't good. So there, he learned that, Bailey, in Great Britain.

He brought it back, that learning, to the US and taught anatomy in the same way as he had always known it from his time in Europe. All of the physicians that had some training in those early years, they all came from Europe.

They went to Europe to get trained, and then came back. They had apprentices that also became physicians, and they learned, but they learned the same thing that the original physician who had gone to Europe did.

And one of the things that they did on a regular basis was steal bodies from local cemeteries, because that's how you get bodies.

So Richard Bailey, and he had a protege named Wright Post, they were working that day in April when the Doctors' Riots started. They had students there. They were teaching them something.

I don't know what. I made some educated guesses at what they might have been doing in the book, but no one knows, and no one will ever know because the documentation doesn't exist.

But they were teaching their anatomy students that day, just as they have done. And they had them stealing bodies right along, just as they had done in school, just as their masters before them had done in school. So that's just what happened.

That's what you did even then. And Richard Bailey was very good at it.

And Bailey was not some black and white villain. I mean, despite encouraging his students to steal bodies.

Absolutely.

He actively worked to alleviate the suffering of the poor in the city.

Sure, sure. I mean, he was a physician. He treated everybody.

He, I mean, he was teaching students, but before that, when he was in actual practice, and he probably did a lot of that anyway on the side. He couldn't live just teaching anatomy. So I'm sure he had a little office, although I don't know for sure.

But yeah, he was treating people. This is not, to them, anything that they had any kind of emotional qualm about or moral qualm.

This was necessary to live, and it was necessary for Bailey to have done that so that he could now come over and take care of people and teach anatomy in an effort to help people. This is not somebody evil.

This is somebody who is just as doing what we always do. That's how we have to learn. And my students will learn, and I'm very proud of that.

That's the type of thinking and feeling that was going on there, and rightly so. I wouldn't have wanted a physician who didn't already know what was going on in the body.

Don't come at me with a knife, a scalpel, and think you're going to get after me if you haven't done this already with the body, if you haven't already understood that.

So, yeah, they were very, it was very much a hopeful, a helpful kind of mentality that the students had as well.

And to have someone like Scipio Gray or Humanio make not make fun of them, but to criticize what they were doing, that's anathema to a medical student because what they're doing, they want to help people. Don't you understand that?

And rightly, as I say, rightly so. You know, we put up, medicine doesn't change very, it's a very slow change oftentimes. And think, think about a residency, a medical residency or surgical residency.

We know that residents in a hospital work absurdly long hours, so many days in a row. It's an exhausting period of time.

Why do we do that when we know that fatigue affects our thinking, it affects our physical reflexes, our understanding of what's before us? But we still do that. We still do that.

And the older physicians say, well, that's how they got to learn. You have to be on call, you have to work long hours to see enough patients so you have a good understanding of medicine and surgery.

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So could you walk us through the events that led up to the riots?

They started on a Sunday, correct?

Yeah, it was a Sunday. The anatomy lab at the hospital was in the back of the hospital, and on the second floor, what the first floor would look were windows basically into the basement.

So in the first floor of actual stuff going on, my sense is probably raised up about 15, 20 feet. So there was an arm hanging out of a window to dry.

Apparently, they might have just cleaned it, they might have just taken a bunch of blood out of it, but it was left up there to dry, hanging somehow. Bunch of kids were playing below, boys.

And you can imagine that an arm sticking out of a window would have been rather a curiosity to anyone. So at some point, a few of the boys grabbed the ladder that Workman had left behind. They were still working on the interior of the hospital.

They put a ladder up to the window, and one of the boys climbed up. We have no idea who he was. He climbed up and I'm sure he took a real good look at the arm, and he looked into the anatomy lab, and there were students gathered around tables.

On one table was a woman, a naked woman that they were working on. What they were working on, I don't know. There was another body at the time of a black man who was on another table.

And I found out that at a later point, there was a third body in some kind of a barrel, and his flesh was being melted, for lack of a better word, so that they could have a skeleton. But in any case, the student saw two bodies.

And one of the students, we believe it was John Hicks Jr., said to the student, Hey, this is your mother's arm. I just dug it up. This kid must have been mortified or stunned beyond belief.

Scrambles back down the ladder, runs home, tells his father. The father's wife had just died, the boy's mother had just died. He and a few friends run to the cemetery and find the grave disturbed and there's no body in the coffin.

Now, they got a whole bunch more of their friends. And this guy was a mason working in the area.

So a lot of his friends, I'm sure it was very easy to get, they marched on the school and stormed up the back stairwell of the school, excuse me, of the hospital into the room where the students were had been dissecting bodies.

Bailey was very concerned after these boys ran home. And once, especially once they heard the approaching mob, probably 20 or 30 people by that point. And he told his students, run away, get out, hide, do anything you want.

His protege, the other physician, Wright Post, stayed with a couple of students to try to protect Bailey's quite extensive anatomy collection, tissue collection of organs and bones and the like.

So they broke in the mob, and they destroyed whatever they could find. And then they decided, we got to go find this guy, this boy, these other students.

We got to find Hicks, we got to find the other students, and we have to find the physicians especially. We have to find Bailey and anyone associated with them.

40:55

And that was basically the start of the second day. That was the rioting that they were looking for, the physicians. They wound up going to the house of pretty much every physician in town.

There was one that was noted particularly, and they were very gentlemanly in their rioting. They got to the doctor's house, and they said, we want to search the house for these students, and the doctor let them in.

Up they go, all around the rooms, and they can't find Hicks. They can't find anybody. But they did go up in the roof, and they missed Hicks, who apparently had been hiding behind a chimney of a house next door.

But in any case, they leave, and they did that same thing to as many physician houses as they could find. Never finding anybody. Hicks apparently, it somehow got out of the city, and he literally was never heard from again.

There's no documentation of a John Hicks Jr. anywhere in our documents, newspapers or anything else. He just kind of disappears.

So it was a very calm riot until they get to Bridewell Prison. Now, why were they there? Well, the mayor and the chief of police basically, got to the hospital and broke up the riot there.

They heard from someone that there were a whole bunch of people rioting at the hospital. So he went out, they went out, and told them to disperse, which they did.

He then grabbed as many students as he could find, those who and the physicians who were still around or hiding, brought them to the jail, which is a Bridewell prison for what it was called.

And then they appointed guards and military people, malicious men at the prison to protect the students.

And so Monday, pretty much all day, this is the riot people, the rioters going to the jail, working their way there and trying to get at these students. John Jay get into the mix.

John Jay was the first Supreme Court Justice of the United States, and he had a lovely house down off of Broadway. A newly, a guy named Matthew Clarkson, who was a Colonel, I think he was a Colonel.

And he rushed to Jay's house and he wanted John Jay to come up, and maybe he can help quell the fear and the anger with the rioters. And he told Jay, hey, listen, go get a sword. And Jay ran upstairs, came back down with a sword, and off they went.

And not his wife, Sarah, was none too pleased, let me tell you. But off they went to the jail, where eventually the rioters got up there and tried to storm the jail unsuccessfully. And so up there at that jail was a big collection of city officials.

The mayor was up there, the governor, George Clinton, was up there. Baron Von Steuben went. Baron Von Steuben was the military man at Valley Forge, who helped to get the troops in shape.

And he was there. Jay was there now, and a number of other dignitaries. Hamilton was there at least for a time, it seems, that was at least one account.

I'm not sure that he went there that day. He certainly had tried to quell the rioters downtown, where they were. I believe he was there as well, but I don't think he would have left.

But there was only one source I could find that said that. But in any case, a whole bunch of people there.

The rioters eventually began to throw sticks and stones, and what they call brick bats, pieces of brick, pieces of stone, to get in, to at these dignitaries, and the militiamen who were around them.

And a whole bunch of the people got injured, mildly injured. Jay was struck in the head, as was the Baron von Steuben. And when von Steuben was struck, he told Jay, my god, fire, Dwayne, fire.

Dwayne was the mayor at the time. And the militia fired into the crowd. They killed a few.

The crowd dispersed. And that was essentially it for the rioting, although the groups did go out the next day. So it was quite a thing.

But it was not the only time that people rioted against anatomists and medical students who had been stealing bodies. Quite the contrary.

So what's your best guess, the number of people who were killed during the riot?

At least one died when he tried to climb through one of the windows of the jail that he had broken or that someone had broken, and he was bayoneted. The closest thing we came with otherwise is there were several who were killed.

The troops fired initially over the heads of the rioters. That wasn't working, so they just fired into that first group. Those people in the front, they didn't do well.

There were a number injured and a number killed, and we don't know a lot about that number today.

When Hicks taunted the boy, told him it was his mother's arm, did Hicks, did he know it was the boy's mother? No. Or was it just some crazy coincidence?

Crazy coincidence.

He had no idea that was his mother. I just tried to imagine myself on 12 years old, 13 years old, if that much, and it probably was 9 to 11 years old.

But I'm very young, and I'm looking in and I'm seeing a body split open, or at least a naked female body on a table surrounded by a bunch of young men. It's going to scare the hell out of me. What are you doing?

What is going on? So the guy tells him it's his mother. He goes, no.

I don't know what the boy thought, obviously, but I can imagine him thinking, it is? That's my mother's body? So he might have known.

Known is a tough word to get around. He might have assumed that it was his mother. Then he ran home to tell his father, and he must have later learned that it was his mother.

He had to have. But whether he knew at the time, no, probably not, but he assumed it when he was told that that was his mother's arm. But it was just pure happenstance.

Why did he happen to go up the ladder, and not one of the other boys whose mother was still alive? I don't know, but he did.

In the rioters, after destroying the specimens, chasing the students out, they picked up the bodies and returned them to their respective cemeteries.

They did. The rioters themselves said, they were going to remove these to the cemeteries. The black body, I assume, they brought back to the African barrier grounds or the Negroes barrier grounds, it was called them.

And the white body, they took back to Trinity, or at least to the father, who then could re-enter his wife. So yeah, that was this dignity there. They knew what was right.

We're going to take care of these bodies. And the benefits that the medical students were getting out of dissecting those bodies, they didn't care in the least about it. They were so angry.

I wonder how many of them later said, yeah, you know, they were doing something good for us. I don't know. You know, that dichotomy, that internal contradiction was there no matter what, whether they recognized it or not consciously.

It was there.

So yeah, you mentioned that there were other riots happening.

Yeah, the other riots. Yeah. There were anatomy riots in pretty much every medical school in the rest of the 1700s and into the 1800s.

There's a big one at Baltimore not long after the New York riot. It's the same kind of thing that the populace picks up, their bodies being taken from local cemeteries. And where are they?

They're in this medical building here. So Baltimore had a big riot. There were riots in New Haven, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Ohio, all over the place.

And one of the authors of a terrific book, whose name is Michael Sapo, said that pretty much, you can assume that every medical school in the country had some kind of protest or riot against them.

They weren't always deadly like the one in New York was. But people got injured in a lot of them, or at least they were large protests.

So those protests, that anger popped up here and there throughout the country for the next 60 years or more, as medical schools grew.

It was just, you have to be able to live with that incongruence, that contradiction, and sometimes they just couldn't. So we finally got out of that, but we didn't get out of those riots until after the Civil War.

During the Civil War, there was a new kind of practice being done for dead bodies. You think about the soldiers in the Civil War. Let's look at the Revolutionary War first.

In the Revolutionary War, people fought pretty much near to them. And if they died elsewhere, if they went, if they lived in Connecticut, and they traveled down and wound up in West Virginia, and died in West Virginia, they were buried there.

Civil War, they could be sent back, because this new procedure of injecting the body with, it was prior to formaldehyde, but it was a formaldehyde cousin, they could keep the body non-decomposed for about a week.

So you could begin to see bodies being sent back from the battlefield to their home. And actually, the person who is, that was first done with in the US, or at least in the Civil War, was someone that Lincoln knew.

He'd known him from when Lincoln was a kind of a gangly lawyer in Illinois, as they say. And this fella died. He was killed during the early part of the war.

And so Lincoln said, yes, please use this new procedure on this man, who I truly adored. They did. And then Lincoln was later embalmed with the same procedure.

Now, formaldehyde itself didn't get discovered until a number of years after the Civil War.

But once it was discovered, and once they found out that it had a use, very good use in embalming, where they could put formaldehyde throughout the body and drain the blood out and replace it with formaldehydes, which is what happened.

Then body snatching pretty much disappeared. You didn't need that. There wasn't a need for rapid dissection of the freshly dead.

So they could wait and hold on to it for a year, and then dissect it next year. So that died out.

Interesting. You do go a bit into the Burke and Hare murders. And they happened a few years after this riot.

Yeah.

Well, Burke was hanged in 1829, but the murders took place 1826, 27, around then there. There were three of them, really.

There was a guy named William Burke and William Hare, and they came to know each other, rooming at the same boarding house of a woman named Helen MacDougall. And Burke wound up marrying her. Oh, when evil begets evil.

So they got together, and one of the other rumors in the house, because it was a boarding house, one of the other rumors died.

And they grabbed his body and they brought it to Robert Knox, a physician, and he paid them for the body and said, if you've got any more of those, I'll take them.

And so these two ne'er-do-wells said, hmm, well, if they like that, if he liked that one, we can just start killing rumors. We can start killing people. And that's what they did.

They would kill someone in there, in the boarding house, and take them to Knox, and Knox would buy them. And they'd kill another one and he'd buy that one.

They were eventually found out, and Hare and MacDougall both escaped, so they were never punished. But Burke, William Burke, was hung in a square, hanged, excuse me, in a square. And so he took, and he was a ringleader anyway.

That gave rise to a term called birking. So if you kill someone so you could sell their body for whatever reason, that's, you're birking. You're birking someone.

That's still used to this day in certain circumstances, obviously.

So in the aftermath of all of this, did anything change legislatively?

Legislatively, yeah, there were some bone bills that were passed. The first bone bill was passed in 1797.

It was a number of years after the riots, and they were these weak-willed pieces of legislation that would try to restrict body snatching, that would try to find other ways, other bodies that they could use, that the physicians could use, mostly from

the indigent and poor, the bodies who had been unclaimed. But they didn't really do a whole lot, because the consequences were not strong enough. And I believe that it was because they knew that there was a benefit from them.

Don't penalize the doctors that much. Just sort of, it's a misdemeanor kind of a thing. And so obviously had no teeth.

And it, they didn't need teeth. Well, I shouldn't say that. No legislation put more teeth into it that were effective until after formaldehyde was discovered, at which point they didn't need it anymore.

So it was like, whew, we don't have to legislate that anymore because none of them really worked. They did work in England, and that's what's interesting about it. As soon as the first bone bill in England was passed, body snatching took a nosedive.

There were far fewer done after the passage of that bill than before. But in the US, it just wasn't quite the same. Americans are different, or the laws were written differently.

But I'm not sure. But it didn't really do anything until formaldehyde, until body snatching went out of its own accord.

56:57

So you do discuss in your book some of the modern-day body snatching going on.

And one of the cases involves the body of Alastair Cook.

Yes, poor Alastair. Well, he didn't know, of course. Yeah, so that story is interesting.

For those who don't know, Mr. Alastair was a long time, I mean, like decades long, host of a radio show that was enormously popular, and he was also host of Massive Peace Theater, which I think many Americans are familiar with.

And he died in his 90s.

He was sent to a funeral home that wound up taking his bones, taking some other organs, and like for his long bones, the bones in his legs, and the upper leg and the lower leg, they were replaced with piping, so that in the casket the legs would

still look good. And those bones and other organs were left, were sold out of this funeral home. Ashes were returned to the daughter, and she assumed they were his ashes, but at the time, they might have been, they might not have been.

So it still happens to this day, this kind of stealing of organs, tissues.

If a body is going to be cremated, at a funeral parlor, where the mortician and or his technical help are bad, let's put it that way, they will sell off whatever parts of the body they can, and then provide back to the family ashes. Somebody's ashes.

Some of them could be the loved one, some of them could be from any number of other things, including, I suppose, animals. The reason being that physicians and surgeons now need to learn surgeries.

Medical device manufacturers need to test their devices and create their devices. They have to learn on something other than alive humans, living humans. You have to teach other people how to do surgeries, new surgeries.

And so there is a healthy industry of tissues being sold. And I call them tissues rather than, excuse me, I call them body parts rather than tissues.

Because a tissue bank, you've probably heard of tissue banks, is they take your body, your loved one's body, and then it's donated to science.

It's donated for, it's going to help people, it's going to help researchers understand better, and they'll learn to cure a new disease with these body parts. Number one, that doesn't ever happen. Number two, the body parts can go anywhere.

So his bones were sold to God knows where, and his body was left and then later cremated. The body part market is very, very active and completely unregulated.

Organs, organ donations, somebody wants to give up a lung, part of a lung, a part of a liver, a kidney, those kinds of things. So a loved one because they match, they have a tissue match.

That is extremely well regulated and has been for a number of years. But the body part market is not remotely regulated. Anyone could set up a lab and decide they're going to be a body part broker.

They call body brokers. And they will sell to universities, to conferences. I need three shoulders to demonstrate a new surgical technique at a conference.

Okay? Here you go, three shoulders. I need four knees, 15 hips, and 12 feet for another conference I'm working on.

The military uses body parts in its research on how weapons affect the body.

As I say, medical device manufacturers, not especially, but including for teeth, they'll want a head with teeth intact to teach a new or to try out some new dental prosthetic or some new surgical procedure for the teeth.

There are lots and lots of different ways to use a body part. There is overseas international trade of body parts. Australia has been a particular, they buy body parts from the US.

So it's really, and there was a very recent incident of a bad body market. It was at the University of North Texas. And that program closed down after it was investigated.

And I believe it was, I think NBC had a special out on it called Body Brokers. It was a few years ago. But this has been going on for many, many years.

And the problem is that there's no information passed back to the relatives.

So when you give a body to a, even some university body procurement programs, and you think it's all well and good, unless the person of loved ones have said, you have to, I don't want the body moving overseas. I don't want it crossing state lines.

I don't want it used in a demonstration. I don't want to use this way or that way. Unless you've done that, these programs can do anything they want.

And that's what happened. So they've really taken a market that on one hand with organ donation is highly regulated, and on the other, a body part market that is not remotely regulated.

You'd want to have clear and complete communication with the family of the loved ones, so they understand how that body might be used. Now, me, and I write about this in the book as well, I'm okay with it.

If I give my body, I think I'm going to a body procurement program. If they use my shoulder in a demonstration of a new surgical technique, if they use my torso for the military, if they use my shoulder for the military, I'm okay with that.

But if I give my body, I'm okay with that. And I'm okay with that. And if I give my body, I'm okay with that.

But if I give my body, I'm okay with that. And I'm okay with that. And if it's the ashes, not my ashes, it could pass back well, there'll be some ashes, and it will be me.

So I actually am okay with that, but not everyone is. And there are a lot of people who have really been short-shifted, short-shifted, I should say.

People who have, they think their loved one's body is being used to cure diseases, when that literally never happens. They're never used for that.

And there are some very sad cases where the body, the family, excuse me, of a loved one is just dumbstruck by how their loved one's body was used, or whether it was used at all.

There are families that they know that their loved one never wanted his body anywhere other than a grave, and yet that's not what happened. So there's a lot of that stuff going on still.

The most important thing before we close down, I know I'm over my time, but the lesson is, if you're going to donate a loved one's body, make sure that the place you donate it to has been completely up front with you. You've toured the facilities.

You've spoken to the people involved. You've been given a list of the kinds of places that the body might go, and that you signed up on all those uses or crossed them off.

Once you do that, if you go in with a full understanding of what could happen, then you'll be okay. It's just like buying a house. Do you do diligence on the house and also on the body procurement program?

Oh, gosh.

That's so fascinating.

Yeah. It's interesting. Yes.

Well, I really appreciate your time.

And again, your book came out on January 6th.

Yes.

And you have a website too, right?

I do have a website. Yes. It's andymcfee.com.

And on that site are links to the places you can get the book. It's available on bookshop.org, or the publisher's website, of course, Globe Pequot Press. You can also get an M's on Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore.

If they don't have it, you can order it. So it's out there. And I appreciate you having me on the show.

I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, it's been great having you. And we'll put the links in the show notes. And yeah, thank you so much.

You're very welcome.

Thank you very much. I really, I had fun.

Again, I have been speaking to Andy McPhee. He is the author of The Doctors' Riot of 1788, Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy.

This has been another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world. I'm Eric Rivenes, and have a safe tomorrow.

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