Episode
The Resurrection Men in America
- Podcast
- Disturbing History
- Published
- May 8, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4294
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
For most of the nineteenth century, American medicine had a problem nobody wanted to talk about. The medical schools needed bodies. There was no legal way to get them. So a quiet trade grew up in the shadows of every major American city, and for nearly a hundred years, the foundation of American medical education was built on graves that had been emptied in the dark. This episode walks through the full arc of the Resurrection Men in America. We start in 1788, with the Doctors' Riot in New York City, where a careless medical student waving a severed arm at a child sparked a three-day riot that left as many as twenty people dead and forced the state to pass one of the country's earliest grave-robbing laws. From there we move into the actual mechanics of the trade — who did the digging, how they did it, what they were paid, and how the bodies traveled. We meet William "Old Cunny" Cunningham of Cincinnati, who supplied the Medical College of Ohio for sixteen years and ended up posed as a wired skeleton in the school's own cabinet. We meet Grandison Harris, the enslaved man purchased in Charleston in 1852 by the Medical College of Georgia for seven hundred dollars and forced to rob the graves of his own community at Cedar Grove Cemetery for more than fifty years. And we meet the unnamed Frank, the University of Maryland's principal body snatcher, praised in a faculty letter as a man of whom a better never lifted a spade.We talk about who was vulnerable and who wasn't. Black graves, both enslaved and free, were targeted across every region of the country at rates that vastly exceeded their share of the population, because Black families had almost no legal recourse and the white press rarely covered crimes that took place in their cemeteries. Poor whites, immigrants, paupers…