How Grave Robbing Ignited a Deadly Riot in New York City

On April 14, 1788, thousands of angry New Yorkers gathered outside the city’s jailhouse armed with rocks and bricks. Shouting, they made their intentions clear: “Bring out yer doctors!”

Inside, several of the city’s physicians and medical students were locked in the jailhouse—not as prisoners but to hide from the mob's fury. The city’s masses had long been dubious of doctors, especially those suspected of procuring bodies for anatomical study through objectionable means. Now, nearly a quarter of New York City’s population was clamoring outside the jailhouse, hoping to rip the doctors limb from limb.

This 1788 event would become known as the Doctors’ Riot, built off of tensions between doctors and the populace that had festered for decades. Much of the conflict revolved around dissection.

While the anatomically inclined had been slicing subjects open since ancient times, the practice became rare during the Middle Ages. The science of dissection experienced a resurgence during the Renaissance and Great Enlightenment, when anatomists began exploring the inner workings of the human body. “There's an increasing sense that in order to become a legitimate doctor or surgeon, you need to have training in anatomical dissection,” says Michael Sappol, a medical historian at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Researchers in countries like Germany and France dissected unclaimed bodies from large public hospitals. But doctors in the United Kingdom had more difficulty finding corpses. Britain’s stringent laws maintained that only executed murderers could be legally dissected. Similar legislation was eventually adopted in the United States.

To combat the perpetual cadaver shortage, doctors in Britain and the United States often employed professional grave robbers to acquire fresh corpses for dissection. Also known as resurrectionists or body snatchers, these men dug up graves under the cover of darkness. Sometimes the ghoulish practice took an even more sinister turn. In 19th-century Edinburgh, two men murdered at least 16 people and sold their bodies to a local doctor. (In a karmic twist of fate, the body of grave robber William Burke was publicly dissected after his execution for the crime and his skeleton remains on display in an anatomical museum.)

To avoid paying top price for fresh bodies, some doctors encouraged their teenage students to act as amateur body snatchers. The practice was sometimes even viewed as an enjoyable pastime, says Sappol. “It was like an extramural sport. There's a whole medical literature about the hijinks and adventures young students had during their body snatching escapades.”

One of the most prominent medical instructors in 18th-century New York City was Richard Bayley. Born in Connecticut and educated in England, the physician conducted his dissections at New York Hospital. Bayley did not have to look far for bodies. The hospital was located near the paupers’ cemetery—where the city’s poor population was laid to rest—and the African Burial Ground, where approximately 15,000 Black New Yorkers were buried over the centuries.

Unlike graveyards in wealthier parts of town, which had guards and coffins outfitted with iron cages, the pauper cemetery and African Burial Ground contained few means of post-mortem security. Bodies were often haphazardly buried in shallow graves that could contain several individuals. Some lacked coffins entirely.

It was no secret that medical students were haunting the graveyards for the city’s poor and disenfranchised bodies. In February 1788—just two months before the riot—a group of Black freedmen petitioned the city to protect their graveyard from looting by “students of physic.” “Under cover of the night, in the most wanton sallies of excess, they dig up bodies of our deceased friends and relatives,” the petition read. The city council ignored the petition.

The events of April, 1788, made it impossible for influential New Yorkers to overlook grave robbing. The most popular telling of the Doctors’ Riot origins involves the medical student John Hicks dissecting a cadaver’s arm at New York Hospital as a noisy gaggle of children mill outside his window. Either out of annoyance or a twisted sense of humor, Hicks allegedly waved the arm at the children and yelled, “This is your mother’s arm! I just dug it up!”

One of the boys had indeed recently lost his mother. Traumatized, he went home to his father, who set out to inspect the grave site. The father was disturbed to find that his late wife’s coffin was empty.

It did not take long for an outraged crowd to surround the hospital. Hicks and other medical students quickly fled as the mob forced their way into the dissection labs. A physician named James Thacher was on site and described the resulting melee in his memoir: “Several human bodies were found in various states of mutilation. Enraged at this discovery, [the mob] seized upon the fragments, as heads, legs and arms, and exposed them from the windows and doors to public view, with horrid imprecations.”

The mob rounded up the remaining doctors and dragged them into the street where the crowd had grown to some 2,000 people. New York City Mayor James Duane ordered the physicians and medical students to be escorted to the jailhouse for their own protection. Bayley later joined them there as the unrest carried into the night.

The following day, the frenzied mob had swelled to some 5,000 people. They marched towards the medical school at Columbia College (now Columbia University). Alexander Hamilton, one of the school’s most prestigious alumni, pleaded for the crowd to disperse. However, the mob pushed past him and into the school, where they found no bodies.

This led them to the doctors’ houses and eventually to the jailhouse. New York Governor George Clinton called in the militia to protect the jailhouse. He also pleaded with local leaders to help calm the mob. This included John Jay, a Founding Father who served as the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. As Jay addressed the crowd from the jailhouse steps, he was struck in the temple by a rock. The impact knocked Jay over and left “two large holes in his forehead,” according to his wife, Sarah Jay.

Other local leaders did not fare any better. Revolutionary War hero Baron Friedrich von Steuben was pelted with a brick. As the dazed general tried to gather himself, he reportedly called on the governor to have the militia fire. The spooked soldiers obliged and shot into the angry crowd. The ensuing battle left six people dead, although around 20 more would eventually die from their wounds. Contributing to the high number of casualties was a lack of medical attention—all the doctors were sheltering in the jail.

The Doctors’ Riot was far from an isolated incident. In his book A Traffic of Dead Bodies, Sappol recorded at least 17 instances of so-called anatomy riots between 1765 and 1854. These events took place everywhere from major cities like Philadelphia and Boston to smaller towns in Vermont and Illinois.

The episodes of violence eventually inspired legislation. In January, 1789, the New York State Legislature created a statute to outlaw “the odious practice of digging up and removing for the purpose of dissection, dead bodies interred in cemeteries or burial places.” In 1831, Massachusetts passed the first “anatomy act,” which allowed medical students to dissect unclaimed dead bodies from poorhouses and hospitals. According to Sappol, this not only provided doctors and students with cadavers to dissect but also reassured people that their graves would not be disturbed after they died.

Eventually, people changed their outlook on dissection and began donating their bodies to science. One of the first to do so was utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832. Today, medical students almost exclusively dissect donated bodies.