The Doctors' Riot of 1788: Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists” – body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist – usually for around $100.

In April 1788, word of one particular body snatching quickly spread, and over the course of days, thousands of New Yorkers descended upon a New York City anatomy lab in a growing and dangerous riot. This book reveals the forgotten history of the so-called Doctors' Riot of 1788, along the way explaining the history of body snatching in the United States and England and exploring the moral questions behind an existential medical crisis: Does the need for medical students to learn anatomy on cadavers override society’s demand for maintaining the dignity of its dead?

As the Doctors' Riot boiled over, Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and Revolutionary War hero Baron von Steuben were called in to quell the rioters, to no avail. Eventually, the state militia was ordered to fire into the crowd, killing several and injuring far more.

In this riveting and revelatory history, Andy McPhee delves into the post-revolutionary period of America to trace the foundational changes spurred by the riot, the influence of the riot on framers of the Constitution, the formation of Black-only churches and graveyards, how the discovery of formaldehyde heralded a new era in embalming practices, what body snatching looks like today, and how the teaching of anatomy continues to change and adapt to new technologies.

Andy McPhee has worked in the publishing field for more than 30 years, starting as a writer and editor at Weekly Reader’s mid-level science magazine and finishing as a healthcare textbook publisher for F. A. Davis, a major publishing house in Philadelphia. His narrative nonfiction book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, published in 2023 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. McPhee is a Consultant and Fellow of the National Writing Project, and has earned two Feature Writing awards from the Association of Educational Publishers, now a division of the American Association of Publishers. McPhee is also a former registered nurse in critical and acute care—he practiced nursing for twenty-five years and taught nursing for ten. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.