Taken in New Haven: Bodysnatching at Yale School of Medicine
This video recounts how, in 1836, a group of Yale medical students stole the body of a Black sailor who they found had been stabbed to death. They hauled the body across the breadth of New Haven to the dissection room while being pursued by some of the sailor’s friends whom the student recounting the scene described as a “rabel” murmuring “threats and blasphemy.” At a time when the legal supply of bodies for dissection was very limited at most American medical schools, students sometimes resorted to graverobbing. The civic silence that met this instance of bodysnatching, however, contrasts sharply with the response twelve years earlier when the body of a young white woman stolen from her grave was discovered in the medical school cellar, inciting a riot on the New Haven Green and leading to swift and public action, including newspaper attention, a trial, and new anatomy laws.