The Doctor's Riot of 1788
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The Doctor's Riot of 1788
If you a medical student busy in the anatomy lab dissecting body and someone peer at you curiously, please do not scare him using any part of the cadaver, it might ingnite a riot, a deadly one.
One day in April 1788, and while medical student John Hicks, Jr. was busy dissecting a body at New York Hospital, he was shortly interrupted by a group of kids playing outside.
One of them was curiously watching the dissection room.
Noticing the kid, Hicks quickly picked up the corpse's arm and waved it to deter the kid, yelling:
This is your mother’s hand. I just dug it up. Watch it or I’ll smack you with it!
This was a period when the incidents of body snatching rose significantly in New York. The Paupers Cemetery was where New York's poorest, including slaves, were buried.
The boy ran away. Knowing that his mother had died few days earlier, he believed every word that came out of Hick's mouth. He told his father and together they went to Trinity Church Graveyard, only to discover that her grave had been robbed.
John Hicks was one of the students of Richard Bayley an anatomist who had trained and worked under the guidance of Scottish surgeon and anatomist -William Hunter. Bayley picked up the practice of body snatching from his Hunter and eventually was passing it to his students at New York Hospital.
The boy's father, now angry and frustrated, went around his neighbourhood telling everyone about what happened. He incited a mob. They marched to the hospital. They assaulted as many medical students as they could locate.
To ensure their safety, numerous doctors and medical students had to be incarcerated.
They stormed the anatomy lab at New York Hospital and they raided the home of Dr. Sir John Temple because his name sounded like a surgeon!
The next day, the mob numbered at around 5,000, stormed Columbia College. Then they headed for the jail demanding that the doctors and students kept there be handed to them.
Observing the events quickly escalating, the Governor dispatched the militia. And of the rioting group hit a baron with a rock in the head. That led to shooting and twenty people dead.