A waved arm in a window sparked New York's 1788 riot over stolen bodies
Medical schools once got their bodies from the gallows and from grave robbers. In 1788 a New York doctor waved a dissected arm at a boy peering through a window, the boy's father found his wife's grave emptied, and a crowd of 5,000 turned on the city's physicians. Six people died.
Dissecting the dead to learn anatomy began in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, where the physicians Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos made it the main teaching method. After they died, the practice faded away entirely and only returned in the 12th century. For centuries it carried a stigma of dishonour and immorality rooted in religious and aesthetic taboos. A turning point came in 1231, when the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II decreed that a body be dissected every five years and that medical trainees and practitioners attend. Mondino de Liuzzi performed the resulting public dissection, the first sanctioned one since 300 BC.
Public hostility lingered. The only legal supply came from executed criminals, and some condemned people and their families found the prospect of dissection more frightening than the hanging itself. Relatives sometimes fought to stop bodies reaching the anatomists. In the 17th century the government exploited that dread as a deterrent and pushed the number of hanging offences past 200. When demand still outstripped supply, grave robbing filled the gap, and people mostly looked away because the victims were usually poor.
The Resurrection Riot changed that. Beaten doctors and students, deaths and public outrage pushed American legislators towards Anatomy Acts. Massachusetts led, allowing unclaimed bodies to be dissected in 1830 and 1833, other states followed, and grave robbing all but vanished. Early 20th-century Americans still disliked the practice, linking it with pauper burials, even after 200 prominent New York physicians pledged their own bodies. Exposés of overcharging funeral homes did more to make people consider donating.
Artists have long depended on the dead too. Leonardo da Vinci trained under Andrea del Verrocchio from 1466 and could draw muscles and tendons in fine detail by 1472. Andreas Vesalius worked with artists to illustrate De Humani Corporis Fabrica, helping start the habit of labelling anatomical features, and probably relied on executed criminals for his material. The word cadaver itself comes from the Latin cadere, meaning to fall.
Source: Cadaver
