Resurrectionists and the Doctors Mob

Although Goforth had served two successive apprenticeships with well- qualified practicing physicians, he did not attend medical school and hold a medical degree. He was a native of New York City where, according to Drake, he was engaged in medical studies in 1788 at the time of "The Doctors Mob." Because of life-threatening danger to physicians and medical students during this episode, Goforth fled to New Jersey where he decided to join his brother-in-law, John S. Gano, the Drakes and others of the party preparing to migrate to Kentucky. ^[56]

The Doctors Mob, one of the most violent outbreaks of civil unrest in early American history, was a furious response to the common practice of obtaining cadavers for anatomical dissection by robbing graves. This hazardous and loathsome business, made necessary by the gross inadequacy of legal provisions for obtaining cadavers for medical instruction, was carried out by a disparate group, generally referred to as "resurrectionists." Medical students and teachers of anatomy were frequently involved in grave robbing, and there was a more or less disreputable assortment of entrepreneurs who sold cadavers to medical schools or private teachers of anatomy.

Resurrectionists preferred to rob the graves of the poor, the unknown, and enslaved Blacks as least likely to be noticed and cause public outcry; but no graves were exempt unless there was some protection such as an iron coffin, a vault, or a watchman standing guard with a shotgun from dusk to dawn for two weeks, after which the corpse was so decomposed as to be of little use for dissection.

Grave robbing at its best was a complicated and dangerous undertaking that required careful planning to avoid detection, and considerable skill to complete the task with dispatch. Two strong men, two large canvas tarpaulins, digging tools, and a dark lantern to light the scene but invisible from a distance, were the essentials. Dirt was removed from only the head end of the coffin and placed on one of the tarpaulins. After silently breaking through the lid of the coffin, weakened by a row of holes bored across it, the corpse was hauled up by a hook inserted under the chin or, alternatively, by a rope attached to a ring on the back of a harness strapped under the arms. The body was then stripped of all clothing and wrapped in the other tarpaulin. The clothes were thrown back into the coffin, the excavated dirt returned to the grave, and its surface restored exactly to its prior appearance to disarm suspicion of tampering.

In the hands of experts, the over-all job required about an hour. The deceased, wrapped in the tarpaulin, was placed in a wagon, whose inconspicuous drive past the graveyard was carefully timed to coincide with the completion of the disinterment, and thence the cadaver was delivered to the medical school through a clandestine entrance. Bodies were usually procured during the cool season from November to February when anatomy courses were given, and were dissected immediately because embalming was not in use, putrefaction progressed rapidly, and discovery was always to be feared. ^{[57] [58]}

Elias Cooper's obsessive commitment to anatomical dissection as the basis for his surgical teaching and research brought him repeatedly into conflict with the community over the issue of obtaining anatomical material. This exposed him to a degree of condemnation and personal risk that one can best understand in light of the riot, ambiguously referred to as "The Doctors Mob," that erupted in New York in 1788 in response to a grave robbing incident. Accounts of the tumultuous event vary, but the facts are probably about as follows.

In a building that was later to be used as the New York Hospital, there was a laboratory used by medical students and physicians for anatomical dissection. Here, at 3 o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday, 13 April 1788, several medical students or physicians with at least one instructor were dissecting a cadaver. Outside some small boys were playing and one of them, the son of a mason, placed a ladder laying nearby up to the window of the dissecting room and peered inside. Surprised and annoyed at the apparition in the window, one of the dissectors brandished a dismembered arm in the boy's face and told him that it was the arm of his mother. It so happened that the boy's mother had recently died, leading him to flee in terror to his father who was at work on masonry in the neighborhood. The enraged father quickly gathered his fellow workers and broke into the dissecting room where the finding of some partially dissected and some fresh bodies put them in a frenzy during which they wrecked the laboratory before carrying off the bodies in carts to be buried the same day.

A mob rapidly formed and reentered the premises bent on further destruction and determined to capture the physicians, all of whom escaped except for four whose lives were doubtless saved by the city officials who put them in jail for safe keeping. Over the next four days, rampaging mobs invaded and vandalized the homes of many local doctors who fled for their lives (as did the medical students, including Goforth); besieged the jail seeking to apprehend the dissectionists; and remained generally uncontrollable until sufficient militia could be mobilized to confront the rioters. Then, hard pressed and bombarded with rocks and paving stones by the surging rabble, the militia fired several volleys into the crowd, resulting in seven killed and eight injured, according to reports the accuracy of which cannot be verified. It is amazing that no doctors or medical students were killed or injured during the turmoil. ^{[59] [60]}

Elias Cooper introduced resolutions before both the Illinois State Medical Society and the California State Medical Society calling for the legalization of dissection and of the procurement of bodies for that purpose, but favorable legislation in those states was not to be enacted until years after his death. Between 1765 and 1852 there were at least 13, and possibly more, anatomy riots in the United States, taking place in Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Vermont. We shall have occasion to refer later to the riot in Illinois. ^[61]