Part One * Part Two * Part Three

Gangs of teenage boys ran rampant through the streets of New York . They tormented the hapless citizenry and pillaged property while thumbing their noses at society. Their story had all the elements of a rap melodrama but these young men were not skinheads or gang bangers wilding through Central Park. The year? 1788 The gangs?  The city’s social elite, doctors and medical students. Their misdeeds started the first recorded riot in American history.

For generations scholars portrayed the rioters as superstitious rabble standing in the path of medical progress: however, retelling the story of the Doctors’ Mob requires delving into history further back than the late 18th century.  It compels us to examine the actions of a handful of callous young men who incited five thousand New Yorkers to take to the streets in the spring of 1788.

The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle on Manhattan in the second decade of the seventeenth century.  Manhattan overflowed with great bounty and was surrounded by natural waterways - a virtual Eden, but an occupied one. After decimating the indigenous tribes, the Dutch introduced African slavery to New Amsterdam. Since the Dutch proved to be as enthusiastic about miscegenation in the Americas as they would later be in South Africa, trysts between white men and black women were commonplace and interracial marriage legal. The Dutch offered citizenship to slaves after manumission and even allowed black ownership of property (a right denied to Jews). This “benevolence” continued until decades of contention between the Dutch and the English ended in 1673. New Amsterdam became New York and years of English racist oppression followed.  The brutality culminated in two slave uprisings, one in 1712, the other in 1741, the particulars of both stomach turning in their ghastliness.

After the 1712 rebellion , twenty blacks hanged in the public square, three burned to death, among them a bondsman roasted for eight hours over a slow flame like a Christmas turkey on a spit. One unfortunate starved to death in chains and another lay spread eagle over a wheel while a sailor broke every bone in his body with a crowbar. The colonists in 18th century New York were never tentative when they punished offenders; as the authors of the masterwork, Gotham , Edwin G. Burrow and Mike Wallace, noted that barbarity towards blacks became institutionalized.

“The real legacy of the 1712 uprising was a new era of routinized brutality and official cynicism toward slaves. Crowds of townsfolk often gathered now to watch slaves hanged or burned to death for one offense or the other. “

There was another insurrection in 1741 which Professor Jill Lepore described in bloodcurdling detail in her tome, New York Burning .  Four whites, two of them women, were named as ringleaders of the plot and hanged while seven more received amnesty on condition that they never set foot in New York again; however, the real ire was reserved for the blacks. More than a hundred black men and women were coerced into confessions that sent many to the noose or the stake. Thirteen blacks burned alive and seventeen dangled from the public gallows, their bodies left to rot.

The enmity between blacks and whites continued well past the Revolutionary War . The city was in ruins but even as workmen labored to put New York back together, partisan politics and race kept the citizenry divided. Despite a history of bad blood between the races and their sadistic treatment under the English, black New Yorkers remained staunchly pro-British. The English promised an end to slavery and people of color sided with the King en masse . General Guy Carlton escorted four thousands of blacks from New York to Canada including Deborah Squash , a young woman owned by General George Washington ; however, even after their exodus, the black population of New York City remained at over fifteen percent.  Gotham had not yet fanned into boroughs and thirty thousand souls of every social class, ethnicity and political stripe crammed into a part of Manhattan that ended at Chambers Street.

Post-colonial New York is often painted in soft pastels of nostalgia but in reality the city was “ the wild west on the Hudson ”.  In 1788, Manhattan was virtually lawless with only the militia and a platoon of unarmed volunteer watchmen despairingly called “ forty odd men with club s” to police it. Gangs of thugs roamed with impunity and a few whale-oil lamps lit the town at nightfall.  On moonless nights most of New York was as dark as pitch and the city ripe for all sorts of nocturnal mischief. Disease had as free a hand in New York as criminals did.  Dirt streets were strewn with dung from livestock that wandered about and the stench from rotting animal carcasses and open sewers perfumed the air. The poor packed into hovels like sardines in a tin and shared their beds with every manner of vermin. New York was a germ factory, rife with small pox , tuberculosis , diphtheria , measles and typhus along with common ailments like broken bones, lockjaw , sepsis and complications from childbirth.

Many doctors abandoned New York at the end of the Revolution and sailed back across the Atlantic to the mother country. Those who remained had their work cut out for them and dangerous, smelly, laborious work it was. Physicians in the 18th century were not the minuet-dancing gents in powdered periwigs and silk breeches of Georgian portraiture. Medicine was a gruesome business at best and a doctor’s stock-in-trade included toxic purgatives and emetics , poisonous elixirs and leeches. The torturous practice of blistering (hot glass cups applied directly to the afflicted person’s body) continued. Most American physicians, including the famed Benjamin Rush , still believed in the Hippocratic doctrine of good and bad humors. Bloodletting was an essential part of medicine at the time and doctors persisted in bleeding their patients well into the 19th century.

Antibiotics would not become a reality until the middle of the twentieth century and amputation was the only treatment for an infected body part. Anesthesia consisted of opium, whiskey or a bullyboy beating the unfortunate patient into unconsciousness. Surgeons had to be masters of anatomy and have the physical strength to remove a limb with lightening speed, in seconds rather than minutes. Dissection of human remains was the essential element in the education of a young physician.  Cleanliness was not.  The work of Semmelweis, Pasteur and Lister was decades away and in their ignorance, surgeons and medical students carried death on their unwashed hands and instruments after leaving the dissection room – death in the form of sepsis.  Doctors were unwitting killers and the results were horrific to women and infants when they practiced obstetrics.

Despite this, the citizenry lamented the lack of doctors, a shortage grown more acute after the War of Independence.

The Beginning

Columbia College (formally the King’s College) housed the only qualified School of Medicine in the city. In 1788, thirty-eight year-old Dr. Charles McKnight , a New Jersey native, had been the Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Columbia for three years and was one of the most esteemed men in New York.  Like every professor of medicine at the time, Dr. McKnight must have bemoaned the lack of medical cadavers for dissection. Post-mortem dissection was considered an indignity to the dead so the city fathers forbade using the bodies abandoned in the rougher parts of the city; however, dissection was an essential part of medical training. Resurrection (the nickname for body snatching) was the cheapest, surest way to obtain remains of the newly deceased.  Doctors turned to the cemeteries of the most disenfranchised of the city, the poor and those of color.

Through most of the 18th century, one in every five New Yorkers was enslaved and though blacks played a major role in the city’s rebuilding, they were banned from associating with whites, even after death. Their bodies were interred in a humble plot of earth above Chamber’s Street, across from the paupers’ graveyard where the city’s indigent were buried, sometimes three or four to a grave. The enslaved could not afford coffins or winding clothes and were usually laid to rest in the bare earth with the head pointed west in the African manner. This graveyard was first called the “Negroes’ Burying Ground” (the name that appears on historic maps) then the “Blacks’ Burial Ground” and finally, the “African Burial Ground”.   Both African Burial Ground and paupers’ graveyard lay a short distance from Columbia College - easy pickings for body snatchers. The medical students or “students of the physic” as they were called, turned to these miserable tracts of earth for their nocturnal thieving. As long as body snatching was limited to these two repositories of the dead, most New Yorkers turned a blind eye.

Another doctor’s name was on the lips of those who frequented the coffee houses and taverns of the city, but it was uttered in less reverential tones than McKnight’s. Though born and bred in Connecticut , Richard Bayley had received his medical education in England where body snatching was endemic. At the time of the Revolution, he served in the British army. No one could argue about his prowess as a surgeon - his pre-war autopsies led to the discovery that diphtheria was a different disease than strep throat, a vital discovery at the time.  He was highly regarded for his skill, but his propensity to separate his emotions from those he treated was off-putting. People whispered about him “cutting up his patients and performing cruel experiments upon the sick soldiery” while working as an army surgeon in Newport, Rhode Island . Luckily for Bayley, his ability and the shortage of physicians kept doors open.

Bayley and his twenty-two-year-old protégé, Dr. Wright Post, were not part of the Columbia faculty but made use of two rooms in what was left of the New York Hospital. A fire damaged the building within months after its completion and the King’s Army used its ruins as a barracks for British soldiers. New York Hospital proved unsuitable for a working hospital but remained adequate for medical dissections and random surgeries. Despite his youth, New York born Dr. Post had apprenticed under Dr. Bayley for two years before completing his medical studies in London. Since New York Hospital was also a short distance from the African Burial Ground, the two doctors probably suggested ways to remedy the scarcity of medical specimen.

In 1771, Harvard medical students formed a secret anatomical society called the Spunkers and managed to empty Boston’s graveyards without angering the citizenry; however, the students of the physic in New York, were rude, rambunctious and devoid of civility, a different lot.  Perhaps their youth made it impossible to understand the value of discretion; college began at age fifteen.  Formal studies continued for another five years after which they apprenticed with a physician. Medical schools in Great Britain had their own problems with over-eager medical students stealing corpses and turned to body snatchers known as resurrectionists or “sack 'em up” men, who stole bodies with skill and stealth.  The story was different in the new Republic where a stray corpse became just another school supply like paper, quills and ink.

Once a corpse had been obtained, dissection began immediately since it was almost impossible to keep a cadaver fresh.  Doctors could pack a limb in snow, pickle individual body parts in wine, whiskey or vinegar or cure them like bacon but there was no method to preserve an entire body. The French chemist, Jean Gannal, would not invent embalming with arsenic until the 19th century and formaldehyde would not be discovered for decades. Decomposition began the moment a person took their last breath, so anatomists were in a desperate race against worms and maggots. In the winters of 1787 and 1788, the students began digging up bodies more frequently than usual without covering their tracks.

The medical students strutted about the city in black suits, the traditional attire of physicians, unconcerned as tales of their behavior began to circulate. They prowled through the paupers’ graveyard and the African Burial Ground like packs of starving ghouls. The poor certainly lamented the loss of their loved ones but it was in the African Burial Ground graveyard where resurrection assumed a disquieting racial element - an element that was to continue in medical schools for decades to come. A citizen who considered himself “a strong advocate for science” voiced these sentiments.

“ I  rather believe that the only subjects procured for dissection, are productions of Africa … and those too, who have … been transmitted to gaols … for … burglary and other capital crimes; and if those characters are the only subjects of dissection, surely no person can object”.

Black New Yorkers did object, quite strongly in fact. Frustrated by the arrogance of the medical students and the indifference of society, a group of freedmen petitioned the Common Council on February 3, 1788 in a bid to prevent further desecration of their graveyard.

Most humbly sirs, we declare that it has lately been the practice of a number of young gentlemen in this city who call themselves students of the physic, to repair to the burying ground, assigned for the use of your petitioners.  Under cover of the night, in the most wanton sallies of excess, they dig up bodies of our deceased friends and relatives of your petitioners, carrying them away without respect for age or sex. The students of the physic mangle their flesh out of a wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds. Your petitioners are well aware of the necessity of physicians and surgeons consulting dead subjects for the benefit of mankind. Your petitioners do not presuppose it as an injury to the deceased and would not be adverse to dissection in particular circumstances, that is, if it is conducted with the decency and propriety which the solemnity of such occasion requires. Your petitioners do not wish to impede the work of these students of the physic but most humbly pray your honors to take our case into consideration and adopt such measure as may seem to prevent similar abuses in the future .

Their petition fell on deaf ears and the looting of the African Burial Ground continued.

The Opening Salvo

On February 16, 1788, the Daily Advertiser published a letter signed with the nom de plume Humanio that had been left at its door. The editor, Francis Childs, was well known for his anti-slavery sentiments and like every citizen of New York, undoubtedly viewed the antics of the medical students with contempt.

Mr. Printer,

The repositories of the dead have been held in a manner sacred, in all ages, and almost in all countries. It is a shame that they should be so very scandalously dealt with, as I have been informed they are in this City. It is said that few blacks are buried, whose bodies are permitted to remain in the grave. And, that even enclosed burying-grounds, belonging to Churches, have been robbed of their dead: That swine have been seen devouring the entrails and flesh of women … that human flesh has been taken up along the docks, sewed up in bags; and that this horrid practice is pursued to make a merchandize of human bones, more than for the purpose of improvement in Anatomy.  If a law was passed, prohibiting the bodies of any other than Criminals from being dissected, unless by particular desire of the dying … for the benefit of mankind, a stop might be put to the horrid practice here; and the minds of a very great number of my fellow-liberated, or still enslaved Negroes, quieted. By publishing this, you will greatly oblige both them, and your very humble servant.

Humanio

The letter and its contents soon circulated throughout the city, stirring up arguments in every coffee house, trade shop and brothel. At the same time, the Advertiser printed a public notice of anatomy lectures by Doctors Bayley and Post.  Anyone seeing a black corpse on the dissection table surely linked it to the looting of the African Burial Ground.

A few days after Childs printed Humanio’s letter, a medical student writing under the penname “A Student of Physic” defended his actions and those of his colleagues in a written response.

Feb. 21, 1788

Great offence, it seems, has been given to some very tender and well meaning souls by gentlemen of the medical department, for taking out of the common burying ground of this city bodies that had been interred there; one in particular, whose philanthropy is truly laudable, has obtained a place for his moving lamentations in your useful paper … Whence is skill in surgery to be derived?

The writer went on to insult Humanio’s intellect.

(Do) not be so rash and imprudent as to again espouse the cause of his fellow sufferers (for I take him to be some manumitted slave) without first applying for another quarter’s tuition at the free blacks school; that he may thereby be enabled to convey his meanings, at least in good, if not in elegant, language.

A Student of Physic,
Jun. Broad-Way

New Yorkers were still reeling from the student’s reply when Childs printed this notice.

100 Dollars REWARD - Whereas one night last week, the grave of a person recently interred in Trinity Churchyard was opened, and the Corpse, with part of the clothes, were carried off. Any person who will discover the offenders, so that they may be convicted and brought to justice, will receive the above reward from the Corporation of the Trinity Church.

By Order of the Vestry
Robert C. Livingston, Treasurer

The pilfered body was that of a young white woman held in high regard in New York. As long as the students pillaged the graves of the poor and enslaved, the populace looked askance and did nothing.  The theft of the body of a person of rank was another matter. As detailed in the first hand account of Colonel William Heth, the medical students had finally gone too far.

The young students of physic have for some time past been loudly complained of for their very frequent and wanton trespasses in the burial ground of this city. The corpse of a young gentleman from the West Indies was lately taken up, the grave left open and the funeral clothing scattered about. A very handsome and much esteemed young lady of good connections was also recently carried off. These with various other acts of a similar kind inflamed the minds of people exceedingly and the young members of the faculty as well as the mansion of the dead have been closely watched .

Snatching the corpse of a white woman forged an alliance between the disenfranchised and the influential.  Families who buried their dead in the Trinity Churchyard expected better. The idea of teen boys stripping and cutting up the body of a virginal beauty smacked of necrophilia. Still, even this crime did not move the Common Council to act and antagonism towards the medical profession spread across the city like wildfire.

Frustrated by the ennui of the Common Council, blacks obtained the use of a private burial plot on Gold Street.  A gentleman of property named Scipio Gray owned a vacant field that adjoined his residence and promised to watch over the makeshift graveyard. Though a slave named Scipio Gray has been mentioned in New York history, the accounts refer to “Mr.” Scipio Gray, signifying a degree of respect not accorded to black men of the period. In addition, Gray was a property owner, something prohibited to people of color until the 19th century. Whether Gray was white or black is a question lost forever, but whoever he was, Scipio Gray was a man of both property and compassion.

One midnight, a group armed with muskets and led by the same “student of physic” who had answered Humanio’s letter, invaded Scipio Gray’s property.  They ordered Gray to remain indoors “at the peril of his life”.  Gray was powerless to act as the students resurrected the body of a child and an elderly person. When he chided the students for their callousness, asking if they were not ashamed of their conduct, the student of physic replied that he would do the same to his own grandfather and grandmother and “ think it no crime ”.

Within the week, the Daily Advertiser printed a letter by Humanio that described the events at Scipio Gray’s house. The missive included an ominous warning to the student of the physic whom Humanio now dubbed “Abductio”.

“You (Childs) will therefore by means of your paper be pleased to work him, (Abductio) and his rash imprudent, inconsiderate companions that they may not alone suffer abduction of their wealth, but perhaps their lives may be the forfeit of their temerity should they dare to persist in their robberies, especially at unlawful hours of the night”.

Another letter, possibly from Humanio, rebuked the student of the physic and his physician comrades with a touch of sarcasm.

“As example is more effectual than argument in rooting out the prejudices of the vulgar and ignorant, I could wish that the Gentleman of the Faculty besides continuing to dissect each other would further lead the way by dissecting the bodies off their nearest relatives and most intimate friends by which means…anatomist would acquire such knowledge to be able to take a diseased body to pieces (and) repair it together again with the same ease and satiety that the most expert watch makers cleans and repairs a watch”.

This letter was a slap in the face of the medical students who strutted about New York like bantam cocks. One of them, a young man named John Hicks Jr., had managed to arouse the ire of most of the city.  Little is known about Hicks except that his father, John Hicks Sr., was also a doctor and Hicks Jr. (Jun. in the letters) lived on Broadway as did the infamous “student of the physic”. Historical accounts portray John Hicks Jr. as a vicious prankster and a leader of the medical students. In modern articles Hicks is always the prime suspect of being both the writer of the student of the physic letters and the young man who threatened Scipio Gray’s life, but definitive proof is probably lost forever.

Like the other Humanio letters, the missive sparked more sparring with Abductio , the student of the physic. In his reply, the student did not deny the charges - in fact, he seemed proud of his conduct and once again made condescending comments about his worthy opponent.

“Kind and generous Humanio (for such words bespeak thee) for thou standest up in defense of the rights and privileges of the dead: and the dead when they recover the use of their tongues, shall gratefully thank thee… your head is too empty, and your heart too full … and to whom would Humanio call for assistance, should he snap his leg, or burst a blood vessel? Run, run to that barbarous man who has dissected the most flesh and anatomized the most bones”.

With this letter printed February 26, 1788, the student not only insulted Humanio, he also threw down the gauntlet to all of New York.

Part One * Part Two * Part Three