October True Crime Book Club

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists” – body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist – usually for around $100.
In April 1788, word of one particular body snatching quickly spread, and over the course of days, thousands of New Yorkers descended upon a New York City anatomy lab in a growing and dangerous riot. This book reveals the forgotten history of the so-called Doctors' Riot of 1788, along the way explaining the history of body snatching in the United States and England and exploring the moral questions behind an existential medical crisis: Does the need for medical students to learn anatomy on cadavers override society’s demand for maintaining the dignity of its dead?