R.I.P. Rest in Peace.
When you breathe your last, that’s what you want. No more trouble, no drama, no moving around, just eternity in repose. It sounds almost lovely: rest in peace — or, as in the new book, “The Doctor’s Riot of 1788” by Andy McPhee, rest in pieces.
In the years after the colonists separated from Great Britain, new Americans quickly assumed all formerly British public facilities. One of them was King’s College, renamed Columbia College, which was affiliated with New York Hospital. The doctors there, many of whom had studied abroad, hoped to teach the next generation of physicians for a growing American population — but they knew their mission would be nearly impossible without cadavers to dissect.
For centuries, artists and physicians recognized that they’d never fully understand the human body without seeing inside it. Dissection, therefore, was necessary, and the means for it often came from convicted criminals and those who were put to death. When the need for cadavers overwhelmed the gruesome supply, London’s doctors turned to resurrectionists, also known as body snatchers. American doctors had little choice but to follow suit.
Whether the resurrectionists were an organized group, a ragtag bunch of ruffians, or medical students desperate for education, removing a dead body from its grave took a good eye, shovels, a crowbar, a horse and wagon, strength, and cunning. Bodies could be snatched from any cemetery, but especially from Potter’s Fields and Black cemeteries. Astoundingly, snatching a body wasn’t illegal, if the corpse’s clothing was left behind.
Citizens were understandably outraged, which brings us to the Doctors’ Riot…
It began as a coincidence on a mid-April morning, when an impertinent medical student at Columbia College taunted a boy with a corpse’s arm — one that just happened to be the boy’s dead mother’s appendage. The child ran and told his father, who was livid, and he gathered fellow citizens to angrily assemble near the anatomy lab in what eventually became “the ‘largest riot of the late eighteenth century to regulate communal mortality.’”
Ghastly? Oh, yes, deliciously so, but “The Doctors’ Riot of 1788” can also be like a wall of mud: boggy, hard to traverse, and you might get stuck.
At fault, if you can find interesting information to be a fault, is an overabundance of early American history that can seem somewhat irrelevant to the main reason for the book. It’s fascinating, yes, but also belabored and confusing.
Still, stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with an astounding tale that hides in the past, one that’s chilling and not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Get through it, read about body donations today, and you might be a little shocked. You might also think about donating your own body, as author Andy McPhee says he will do.
Surely, early American history fans need this book, but readers of unusual history, medical tales, Black history, or macabre stories will enjoy it, too. So find “The Doctors’ Riot of 1788,” snatch a comfortable seat, and read in peace.
“The Doctors’ Riot of 1788: Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America” by Andy McPhee
c.2026, Prometheus Books $29.95 228 pages