{"id":295809,"date":"2021-07-10T16:11:02","date_gmt":"2021-07-10T13:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/inside-the-grisly-practices-of-grave-robbing-doctors\/"},"modified":"2021-07-10T16:11:02","modified_gmt":"2021-07-10T13:11:02","slug":"inside-the-grisly-practices-of-grave-robbing-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-grisly-practices-of-grave-robbing-doctors\/","title":{"rendered":"#Inside the grisly practices of grave-robbing doctors"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Inside the grisly practices of grave-robbing doctors<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

In April 1788, a medical student named John Hicks was dissecting a body at New York Hospital, then located on the corner of Broadway and Pearl Street.<\/p>\n

According to legend, a group of local children gathered at the building\u2019s window to gawk at the procedure. Annoyed at the intrusion, Hicks supposedly grabbed a severed limb and waved it at the kids, yelling, \u201cThis is your mother\u2019s arm! I just dug it up!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As it happ<\/a>ened, one of the kids had recently lost his mother, and he ran home to tell his dad what he\u2019d seen at the hospital. Enraged, the father grabbed a shovel and headed to the graveyard, where he dug up his wife\u2019s grave to find the coffin empty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The father notified others, and a mob soon marched on the hospital, touching off violent unrest that lasted for two days. The group ransacked the hospital, destroying equipment and dragging dissected bodies out into the street to be burned or reburied. The mob\u2019s numbers ultimately swelled to 5,000, according to some reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At one point, Alexander Hamilton intervened to try and calm the crowd. Eventually the militia was called in, and opened fire, killing 20 in some accounts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The
The Doctor\u2019s Riot of 1788 (depicted above) was one of at least 17 anatomy uprisings across the US, sparked by outrage that doctors were digging up the dead.<\/figcaption>
Alamy<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This so-called \u201cDoctor\u2019s Riot\u201d was just one of at least 17 anatomy uprisings across the country, which were driven by a widespread problem at the time \u2014 the public\u2019s distrust of medical schools and where exactly they got their bodies to dissect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The public had good reason to be upset. As detailed in the new book, \u201cThe Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science<\/a>\u201d (Little, Brown and Company), out Tuesday, scientists throughout history often operated on the wrong side of morality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Author Sam Kean says these stories interested him more than those about common criminals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people were taking a good thing \u2014 the pursuit of knowledge \u2014 and twisting it in this dark way,\u201d he told The Post.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grave robbing, which fueled the anatomy riots, was a common-if-distasteful practice driven by necessity at the time. Doctors and med students, desperate for corpses to dissect, had few legal means to obtain human specimens, and so they turned to stealing bodies from graveyards. Corpses were pilfered from New York\u2019s African American cemeteries and potter\u2019s field, as well as Trinity Church.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"UK
UK surgeon John Hunter (the inspiration for \u201cDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde\u201d)\u00a0routinely hired grave robbers to find corpses for him to dissect.<\/figcaption>
Alamy<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe number of bodies being stolen was enough that a lot of people were affected,\u201d Kean says, noting that the bodies of poor people were disproportionately dug up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the UK, arguably the most famous case involved John Hunter, a surgeon who would serve as the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s \u201cDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hunter reportedly dissected or observed the dissection of 2,000 corpses \u2014 one body every two days.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of these bodies he acquired himself; other times he paid criminals known as \u201cresurrectionists\u201d to get them. He even had a hidden entrance at the rear of his house just for delivery of ill-gotten bodies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGrave-robbers usually worked in teams,\u201d the author writes. Some would rob mass graves, while others deployed a female spy to linger near hospitals and report on deaths. The criminals would then attend the burial and note the location of the plot, returning at night to exhume the body.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\"The<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Families of the deceased tried to stifle criminals by deploying creative countermeasures, including booby-trapping coffins so they exploded when tampered with.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSome families would arrange twigs, stones, or oyster shells into a pattern on the surface of the plot, so they could tell if the dirt had been disturbed,\u201d the author writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The UK and the United States ultimately passed laws providing bodies for medical students. (New York passed one in 1854 gifting unclaimed bodies from the public morgue.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem, however, has not gone away. One 2016 analysis discovered that New York City\u2019s medical schools ended up with 5 percent fewer bodies than they required.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In some places, a robust \u201cred market\u201d for bodies and body parts still thrives, in which a corpse can fetch up to $200,000. In 2004, for example, a Staten Island funeral director was busted for selling bodies to the Army to be used in munitions experiments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing I hope people take away from the book \u2014 especially people involved in science<\/a> \u2014 is to think a little more about the ethics involved,\u201d the author says. \u201cThat\u2019s easy to say but hard to do in practice sometimes.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Inside the grisly practices of grave-robbing doctors” In April 1788, a medical student named John Hicks was dissecting a body at New York Hospital, then located on the corner of Broadway and Pearl Street. According to legend, a group of local children gathered at the building\u2019s window to gawk at the procedure. Annoyed at the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":295810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/07\/grave-robbers.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[111601,71515,2243,88982,5048],"class_list":["post-295809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-7-10-21","tag-cemeteries","tag-doctors","tag-gravesites","tag-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}