Doctors’ Riot of 1788:
Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America
by Andy McPhee (Globe Pequot)
The inaccurately-named Doctors’ Riot is a moment in post-Revolutionary Era America where the fad of mob violence towards physicians was in vogue. The rationale for this violence was body snatching, which was, in fact, generally going on, as the need for cadavers to train doctors about anatomy was high, and that lead to some sideways dealing about how they were sourced.
It is an under-reported event largely due to a lack of sources. It also has a lot of the signs of a moral panic with people engaging in bizarre anti-body theft measures, except that we know that it was going on, would continue to go on, and still goes on today in some definition of the term. People are not stealing corpses, but the need for bodies is still high. While things like embalming and refrigeration has reduced the numbers needed for anatomy training, the sorts of ways in which there are a need for bodies or body parts, even excluding the more infamous organ trade, has only increased. Moreover the question of who gets chosen to be a body is still a matter that produces concern.
The flaw here is more the title than the text. The section on the riot itself is slight. This is something that I was going to ding the book for. Except that the book overall is excellent.
This is a book about the concept of human anatomy more generally, and how it develops through the observations of corpses. It turns quite poetic at the end in thinking about what it means to donate one’s body ‘to science’ and in conversations with the medical professionals describing their relationships with cadavers, how they learn, and how they think about the people who once lived to give them the opportunity to help others. So whatever editor decided that, you are really putting a light under a bushel here.
The book also earned my favor in its history. The author is express about how he goes about making suppositions for the sake of the narrative. And in our age of treating the Framers as sacred cows, it is just fun to find some point where they were all on their back foot, and all the pomp and rhetoric would not stop an angry crowd who were worried about grandmother missing parts for Judgement Day.
And if we are going off-road here, there is a different sort of political history here about the tradition of anti-intellectual behavior in the American populace, a tricky sort of thing because the hoi polloi are wrong in the concrete while right in the abstract, which is very much in evidence in the contemporary national psyche.
My thanks to the author, Andy McPhee, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Globe Pequot, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 