Resurrection & Riot Part 3

Home | Biography | Events | Links | Contact

Resurrection and Riot
by Francesca Miller (c) All rights reserved

The Aftermath

F or the next few days, the militia patrolled the streets and normal life began anew. John Jay and Baron von Steuben survived but their wounds were significant enough to put them on bed rest for ten days. The city jail was almost destroyed and extra guards stood watch in the Fields as the building was being rebuilt. The anger towards doctors was so great that the students and their professors were ousted from the New York Hospital building and presented with a bill for the damages.

T hree months in jail was the usual sentence for stealing a body but anger remained over purloining the young woman’s corpse purloined from the Trinity Courtyard. The trial began in late April and the first students to be brought to justice were a youth named George Swinney. He along with another student, Isaac Gano, had taken the “dead body of a white woman out of a coffin from a grave in Trinity Church Yard”. The ringleader, John Hicks Jr., was indicted on four counts of body stealing but his case was never heard. His name was on the lips of everyone in New York and possibly in an attempt to avoid another riot, the grand jury adjourned without bringing Hicks to trial.

T he anger and ill will towards the physicians did not end with the riot and the doctors who remained in the city had to tread lightly. Repercussions from the riot continued for years and according to Dr. Jules C. Ladenheim, author of the definitive paper on the riot, was a factor in New York being one of the last colonies to ratify the Constitution . In January of 1789, the State Legislature pushed forward a statute to prevent “ the odious practice of digging up and removing for the purpose of dissection, dead bodies interred in cemeteries or burial places”. Those who broke the law would stand on the pillory or be publicly whipped, fined or imprisoned. The statute also permitted the bodies of executed criminals to be used in dissection, “ in order that science [might not] be injured by preventing the dissection of proper subjects ”. Now medical students could do legally what they had already been doing for years, cool their heels by the hangman’s gibbet as they waited for the body to fall. Thomas Gallagher wrote that the riot curtailed American medical advances for years but he ignored the fact that medical studies continued in Albany and throughout New England especially Harvard .

T he statute was a weak attempt at satisfying the concerned parties. The corpses of executed criminals were never sufficient enough to fulfill the needs of doctors and medical students. Doctors’ riots continued happening for decades in American and Great Britain though resurrection men were eventually recruited to replace the students and furnish cadavers. The most famous account of resurrection gone wrong was Burke and Hare, the Irish duo who in their zealousness to make money, created their own cadavers by murdering them.

T he slavery issue continued into the next century. Though Jay and Hamilton won out, at least in state statutes, freedom for blacks was slow and painful. Many slave holders made a profit from human misery by selling their slaves down South. After a slave died, the owners continued making money on them by selling their bodies to medical schools. The riot may have slowed down the trafficking black bodies for dissection in New York; however, American medical schools, especially in the South, continued the practice for generations.

H istorians noted the names of many of the medical students who resurrected bodies from cemeteries around New York; John Hicks Jr., George Swinney, Isaac Gano, David Hosack, Ebenezer Graham, John Parker and George Gillaspy; except for David Hosack and William Gofoth, the fates of the other students are unknown.

T he mob in the New York Hospital beat David Hosack s so that he didn’t join Post and the other three students in the jail and was spirited away from the city. After he recuperated, he transferred to the College of New Jersey where he completed his medical instruction. He returned to New York where he worked as a physician then later traveled to London and became a student of botany. Upon his return to New York, he was celebrated as a physician, botanist and educator. Dr. Hosack was the physician who tended to Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr.

W illiam Goforth was a student of Dr. McKnight’s who fled from the New York Hospital building when the riot broke out. He found it advisable to leave New York and settled in Kentucky. He became a physician of note and is believed to be the first doctor west of the Alleghenies to vaccinate his patients for smallpox.

P ost riot, Dr. Charles McKnight continued his work as a Professor of Anatomy at Columbia College and remained highly regarded by his peers. He published a number of papers on medical and surgical subjects before his death from pneumonia in 1791 at the age of forty-one.

D r. Wright Post also managed to survive the riot and, in 1790, married Mary Magdalene, Dr. Bayley’s oldest daughter. Two years later, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed Professor of Surgery at Columbia College. He and Mary Magdalene travelled abroad and returned to New York with an even more impressive collection of anatomical specimens than the ones destroyed in the riot. In 1793 he became Professor of Anatomy at Columbia and eventually, President of Columbia. The Posts went on to have a fruitful marriage with Mary Magdalene bearing seven children.

D espite the hostility leveled at him, Dr. Richard Bayley remained in New York. In 1792, he became a Professor of Surgery at Columbia College and taught a number of subjects including anatomy and surgery. He continued to be an innovator of surgical techniques and was the first person in the United States to successfully remove an arm at the shoulder joint. Perhaps to right the wrongs of the riot, Bayley took up the cause of public health and assisted New York’s poor by becoming one of the founders of the New York Dispensary. New York was beset with yellow fever epidemics at the end of the 18th century and Bayley headed the Quarantine Station for the Port of New York. Dr. Bayley became fatally ill after having boarded a ship full of immigrants infected with yellow fever. He came down with the disease and died aboard ship in August, 1801. His second daughter, Elizabeth, converted to Catholicism and followed her father’s call to help the poor. After her husband’s death, she founded the religious order, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph. On September 14, 1975, Elizabeth Bayley Seton became the first American-born Catholic to be canonized a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

T he African Burial Ground fell into disuse in the 1790s and became a casualty to the extension of Chambers Street. The name disappeared from city maps and was forgotten until what remained was unearthed in 1991. The General Services Administration began excavating the site and found over four hundred remains of the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 bodies originally buried there. The grounds are now a National Monument.

S everal unearthed skeletons bore signs of post-mortem dissection and the body of one woman showed evidence of being killed by a musket shot in the back. Could she have been a rioter in 1788? Any answer to that question is lost to the ages.

T he Doctors’ Mob has been the genesis for several scholarly papers but the most complete was written by Dr. Julius Ladenheim in 1950. The late Thomas Gallagher made use of Dr. Ladenheim’s work in the 1960s. An intriguing except from Gallagher’s book, “The Doctors’ Story”, was published in the 1960s by American Heritage Magazine. Years later, a rock band named themselves “The Doctors’ Mob” in tribute to the riot.

S pecial thanks to my friend Dr. Caroline de Costa who co-wrote a shorter version of this article for The Lancet . Thanks to Dr. Michele Moore, Professor William James and most importantly to Dr. Edward Halperin, Dean of Medicine at the University of Louisville and author of The Poor, the Black and the marginalized as the source of cadavers in the United States anatomical education . Dr. Halperin provided me with a treasure trove of documents used in this paper. Thank you to the historical re-enactors of the New Jersey Militia for answering a number of questions. Also, special thanks to Dr. Julius Calvin Ladenheim, who wrote the definitive paper on the Doctors’ Riot in 1950. In addition to being a surgeon, Dr. Landenheim is a student of American history and was able to put the riot into historical perspective. Thank to David Blue for editing the piece.

S ource material that illuminated American Resurrection included; Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; The Midwife’s Tale; The Life of Martha Ballard by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; The Doctor in Colonial America by Dr. Zachary B. Friedenberg; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore; The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan , Jill Lepore, The Story of Medicine In America by Geoffrey Marks and William K. Beatty; Medical Education in New York by William Henry Rideing, Harpers Monthly, 1882; The Negro In New York by Roi Ottley; History of Medicine of New York , James J. Walsh, M.D; The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873 by Joel T. Headley; The Doctors’ Mob of 1788 by Jules C. Ladenheim; It Happened in New York by Fran Capo, Frank Borzellieri; Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in the Early Nineteenth Century by Suzanne M. Shultz: The Epic of New York City; A Narrative History by Edward Robb: The Body Snatchers by Thomas Gallagher, The Dress Lodge r by Sheri Holman; The Lane Archives, Stanford University, article by Dr. Daniel Drake

Website design by David MacDowell Blue

Part One | Part Two | Part Three