10/10/2026
: Body Snatchers
(Content warning: this post discusses death, dissection, and exhumation. Read at your own risk.)
18th century medicine was not like we know it today. It was based on the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) and most educated doctors tried to balance the humors with practices like bloodletting. Doctors were gentlemen and most considered surgery barbaric – the work of lower-class surgeons.
However, by the mid-18th century, medical research was becoming more scientific, and with that included anatomy and dissection. A British law passed in 1752 allowed the dissection of executed criminals and academies of medicine and teaching doctors leapt at the chance to dissect humans (rather than animals).
The demand for dissections, however, soon exceeded the supply of executed criminals, so medical students turned to grave robbing. Pauper’s fields were often targeted first, but soon any fresh grave was a target. Unscrupulous laborers, known as resurrectionists, would dig up fresh co**ses in the dead of night and then sell them to medical students who did not ask questions about where they came from.
The practice spread to New York and by early 1788, a rash of grave robberies haunted the city. The African burial ground in particular was targeted, to the horror of Manhattan’s free Black and enslaved population. When they engaged a private yard to try to protect the bodies of their dead, it too, was targeted. Even Trinity Church was not exempt. On February 24, 1788, Robert C. Livingston posted a $100 reward for the return of a “person recently interred.”
By April, the callous behavior of the medical students, which included waving the arm of a co**se at children and claiming it belonged to the mother of one of the boys, resulted in a riot. The boy’s father, exhuming his wife’s grave and finding her missing, marched on New York Hospital with thousands of citizens, where partially dissected bodies were found. Physicians and medical students went into hiding, and several were arrested, but the riot continued for several days, until Governor Clinton sent in the militia.
Known as the Doctor’s Riot of 1788, it brought the practice of body-snatching for anatomists to light, and the following year a law was passed protecting co**ses from mutilation. The riot also led to deep suspicion and distrust of physicians and medical students for years to come.
Images:
1. "The anatomist," undated. Wellcome collection.
2. "The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch: Carrying off Miss W-- in a Hamper," by William Austin, 1773.
3. "Resurrectionists at work," by Hablot Knight Browne, 1887.
4. "100 Dollars Reward" advertisement placed by Robert C. Livingston, February 21, 1788, in the New York "Daily Advertiser."
