THE DOCTORS' RIOT OF 1788

Science and religious sentiment clash at the dawn of the Republic.

Before formaldehyde and refrigeration, writes author and retired nurse McPhee, anatomists took extraordinary measures to study the body’s inner workings. In England and colonial America, medical schools were given the bodies of executed convicts or the recent dead from almshouses. Even then, because of the speed at which bodies decay, demand for study subjects outpaced supply. Thus arose the shadowy profession of the “resurrectionist,” better known as the body snatcher, who traded in expertly procured bodies from fresh graves. In New York City in April 1788, as revolutionists Alexander Hamilton and John Jay were publishing the Federalist Papers in local broadsheets to argue for the yet-to-be-ratified Constitution, a young boy playing with friends near New York Hospital noticed a severed arm hanging from a window of an anatomy class and was told by one snotty student, “This is your mother’s arm! I just dug it up!” Turns out the boy’s mother really had just died, and as news of the incident spread, an outraged mob formed to teach these students a different lesson. Three days of rioting ensued, during which Hamilton and Jay, along with other dignitaries and luminaries of the Revolution, tried to calm the crowd and suffered injuries for their troubles. Shots were fired, and a rioter killed. With an enchanting vividness, McPhee tells the story of New York in its colonial days, when familiar institutions were then new and the people whom city streets and landmarks are named for were still walking the earth. The author places his account in the medical, cultural, and racial context of the time. Although interesting, a consideration of contemporary practices, including unsavory for-profit organ markets, is, alas, anticlimactic.

A brief, fast-paced history, loaded with surprising detail.