Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast · Blue Ewe Media

420: The 1788 Doctors' Riot w/ Andy McPhee

·1 hr 10 min·4 clips

A boy climbed a ladder, saw his mother's arm in the anatomy lab, and ran home to his father.

1. Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast episode 420 covers the 1788 Doctors' Riot, body snatching, bloodletting, and anatomy in New York City. 2. Host Eric Rivenes interviews Andy McPhee, a former critical care nurse, nurse educator, and award-winning writer whose book is titled The Doctors' Riot of 1788, Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy. 3. McPhee uses a motorcycle-crash operating-room case to argue that physicians must see internal anatomy to understand what they are treating. 4. He describes a young man with a badly injured abdomen and says surgeons opened the belly in a rush to find the bleeding source. 5. McPhee says the iliac artery was open by about an inch and a half to two inches and compared it to a zipper pull being dragged down. 6. He links that memory to the need for cadavers, saying doctors cannot learn the liver, stomach, or cirrhosis from living bodies alone. 7. McPhee says resurrectionists were a natural outgrowth of that need and that people like Leonardo da Vinci used bodies for anatomical study. 8. He distinguishes body snatching from grave robbing, saying the first meant stealing the body and the second meant stealing property from the grave. 9. McPhee says body snatching was often legal trouble only when clothing, jewelry, or stones from the grave were taken. 10. He describes resurrectionists working at night in colder months, moving stones back, and pulling the body out through the head of the coffin. 11. McPhee says some body snatchers even drew maps of grave markers so they could replace them exactly and avoid detection. 12. He says medical students in the United States often became the main resurrectionists because medical schools expanded from four schools in the 1800s to sixty by 1860. 13. McPhee names Grandison Harris in Georgia as a hired body thief for the College of Georgia medical school. 14. He says New York's conflict grew after Black citizens petitioned the city council to stop students from taking loved ones from the Negroes Burial Ground and other cemeteries. 15. McPhee says students also took white bodies from Trinity Church because anatomists wanted cadavers that were less malnourished than many poor and Black bodies. 16. He identifies John Hicks Jr. as the student behind the pseudonym Mr. Abductio and says another writer, Humanio, was probably Scipio Gray. 17. McPhee describes how a boy saw an arm hanging from a hospital window, climbed a ladder, and was told the arm was his mother's. 18. He says the boy ran home, his family found the grave disturbed, and the crowd moved toward the hospital, Bridewell Prison, and the physicians' houses. 19. The conversation moves in an interview style, with Eric asking direct factual questions and McPhee answering with detailed historical examples and occasional humor. 20. Listeners interested in New York history, medical history, and cemetery politics will get the most from this episode, while people avoiding long-form historical explanation may skip it.

As heard by us

A clear, measured look at body snatching, anatomy training, and the fear that made mort safes feel necessary.

The Doctors' Riot of 1788 comes through as a clash between mourning families who wanted the dead left undisturbed and medical students looking for bodies to study anatomy.

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Want to know why learning medicine once meant guarding a grave?

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