The Doctors’ Riot of 1788: Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America
Price: $29.95
Format: Hardcover and Digital
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Publication date: January 6, 2026
Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 978-149308805
Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists”—body snatchers.
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 against doctors and their students. In this fascinating history, Andy McPhee reveals the forgotten story of the so-called Doctors’ Riot of 1788, along the way explaining the history of body snatching 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?
As the Doctors’ Riot boiled over, Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay as well as Revolutionary War hero Baron von Steuben were called in to quell the rioters, to no avail. Eventually, the state militia was ordered to fire into the crowd, killing several and injuring far more.
The Doctors’ Riot of 1788 traces the foundational changes spurred by the riot, the formation of Black-only churches and graveyards, how the discovery of formaldehyde heralded a new era in embalming practices, what body snatching looks like today, and how the teaching of anatomy continues to change and adapt to new technologies.
McPhee has leapt into a hotbed of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century controversy in American history: the conflict between the advance of American medical education and the time-honored tradition of providing ‘a decent burial’ for deceased loved ones. The Doctors’ Riot of 1788 is the cogent account of a populist rebellion against the evil perceived in that era’s medical and scientific elite, to be commended for its broad and painstaking research and balanced narrative and for engaging the reader with every turn of the page.”
—Mark Frazier Lloyd, University Archivist Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania
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