On the evening of April 14, 1788, an angry mob of almost 5,000 people, or one quarter of the population of New York City, stormed the jail on Broadway yelling, “Bring out your doctors!” To control the crowd Governor George Clinton called in the militia but ordered them not to fire their weapons. He plead with rioters to disperse and begged local leaders to help restore order. Among the leaders who answered the call for help was John Jay. As he ascended the stairs of the jail to try to reason with the mob, someone in the crowd threw a large stone, striking Jay in the head, rendering him unconscious. The city was bedlam, the crowd was out of control, and the militiamen opened fire. When it was over six people were confirmed dead, with up to twenty dying later from their wounds.
But why was the crowd so angry? Why were doctors in the city jail? The events that almost brought down the entire city began in a humble graveyard and ended with the establishment of medical ethics in the United States.
In the closing years of the 18th century New York was home to only one medical school: Columbia College (Columbia University). To be a doctor you were not required to have a degree, so many students did not attend college, but enrolled in courses taught by Richard Bayley to meet the professional requirements. Educated in England, Bayley saw dissection and anatomical study as a central component of medical education. But there was one major problem with having dissection as part of your curriculum: there were no bodies. As a result, many medical students resorted to body snatching or grave robbing. The police would often look the other way, knowing that the “resurrectionists” as they were called, needed bodies to study from. In most instances the unmarked graves in potter fields and African American cemeteries were targeted. New Yorkers continued to overlook the body snatching if the bodies came from the African Burying Ground or the Pauper’s Cemetery.
In the winter of 1788, more bodies were getting taken from the African Burying Ground than ever before. On February 3rd, a group of black freedmen petitioned the city’s Common Council to prevent further desecration of their graveyard. Not surprisingly their petition was ignored, and the looting of graves continued. However, on February 21st the newspaper the Advertiser printed that a white woman’s body had been stolen from Trinity Churchyard. With that, the public outcry and resentment began to simmer.
There are conflicting accounts of what caused the riot to begin, but the most accepted version is that a group of boys were playing outside New York Hospital and decided to look into the window of one of the medical suites. A medical student noticed the boys and picked up the arm he was dissecting. He allegedly yelled to one of them, “This is your mother’s arm. I just dug it up!” Unbeknownst to the student, the boy’s mother had just died, and he ran home to his father in hysterics. The father grabbed a shovel, went to the cemetery, and exhumed his wife’s coffin. It was empty. And with that, the riot began.
By the spring of 1788 hatred for medical researchers was widespread in New York City. As the boy’s father began storming the hospital, he found plenty of allies who also wanted justice for the dead. Hundreds of people quickly descended on the hospital. When they arrived, the doctors and students panicked and fled. The mob occupied the hospital, destroying equipment and specimens and recovering bodies in various states of decay, which were reburied. Mayor James Duane ordered all the doctors and medical students be held in the jail for their own protection.
Word rapidly spread through the city of the horrors that had been discovered at New York Hospital and the number of rioters swelled overnight. The next day, several thousand people marched on the medical building at Columbia College. Alumnus Alexander Hamilton implored the crowd to disperse. He was pushed to the ground as the mob ran into the school. Finding no bodies, they moved on to the doctor’s homes. Armed with rocks, bricks and timber torn from the local gallows the mob stormed the jail, demanding justice.
Describing the events Sarah Jay wrote:
“Mr. Jay ran up the stairs & and handed [Gen Matthew] Clarkson one sword, to my great concern arm’d himself with another and went towards the jail. Just as he was going up the steps of the jail, a stone thrown by one of the Mob took him in the forehead & stunn’d him so that he fell…. The stone must have been large as it made two large holes in his forehead… the Dr. immediately examined his wounds & to my unspeakable relief pronounced there was no fracture.”
After Jay fell, Baron von Steuben tried to calm the crowd but was beaned in the head with a brick. As he stumbled bloody and dazed, he called on the mayor to have the militia fire. While not a direct order, when the soldiers heard the word “fire” they began to shoot into the crowd. Warfare erupted in the streets. Multiple people were shot, but there was no one to tend to their wounds; most of the doctors were locked in the jail.
In the days that followed the riot, local newspapers stopped running ads for doctors and medical classes. Citizens formed an armed group known as “Dead Guard Men” to protect the cemeteries, and the militia patrolled the streets.
The riots led to New York establishing one of the earliest medical licensing systems in the country. In 1792 the New York Assembly and Senate passed an act that required all would-be doctors to apprentice with a respected physician for three years or attend two years of medical school in addition to passing a government exam.
However, the New York riot was hardly a singular event. At least seventeen anatomy riots took place in the United States before the Civil War. In response to this many states passed anatomy acts or “bone bills” to supply cadavers. In 1789 New York outlawed grave robbing, and provided a clause that criminals executed for murder, arson or burglary could be sentenced to dissection after death. Other laws allowed medical schools to secure unclaimed bodies from the hospitals and poorhouses. If a body was unclaimed or if the friends and family were too poor to pay for a burial, dissectionists could claim the body. Many poor people began avoiding hospitals out of the fear that the doctors would experiment on them and try to induce death. As a result, the fear of medical mistreatment or neglect is still prevalent today in many low-income communities.
Eventually, the voluntary donation of bodies eliminated the need to use unclaimed corpses. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, was the first person to donate his body to science in 1832. However, the conversation about medical ethics and societal responsibility is one that is still happening today, 235 years after one of the first riots in our nation’s history.