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In the summer of 1837, Augustus Warner arrived in Richmond to start a medical school. With the sponsorship of Hampton-Sydney College, construction began to convert the old Union Hotel into that school. At the time, the city had a thriving economy, grounded in slavery and the North American continent’s second-largest market of enslaved people to provide labor for tobacco plantations and processing. Warner, an advocate of anatomical dissection, recognized that slavery could supply corpses. The 1844 catalog for the school advertised the opportunity to practice on dead bodies and touted the cool climate, which enabled dissection from October through March.

Grave robbers, dubbed resurrectionists, commonly stole the bodies of enslaved Black people and white paupers. The junior professor of anatomy at the medical school, Carter Johnson, was assigned the task of obtaining bodies and was called a demonstrator. At this time, such grave robbery was common in other places, such as Harvard. When the Richmond resurrectionists engaged in price gouging, the two competing schools, the University of Virginia and the medical school in Richmond, struck a deal about the allocation of bodies: Two-thirds would go to Richmond. In 1854, the medical school broke ties with Hampden-Sydney and won a charter from the state legislature, creating the Medical College of Virginia. In the summer of 1855, Carter Johnson, the school’s demonstrator, died in a maritime accident.

Both England and the US had a long and violent history of grave robbery. The crime routinely outraged citizens. In New York City, citizens rioted in protest in 1787 and again in 1788. However, a social hierarchy existed for both the dead and the living. The higher one’s social standing, the closer one was buried to the church, which protected graves. African Americans, angry with thefts from a Black burial ground, complained to no avail. After a group of boys looked in the windows at City Hospital in 1788 and witnessed the desecration of dead bodies, the hospital was sacked and medical students were beaten. John Jay, the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court, was injured in the mayhem. Given the public sympathy for the protesters, New York’s governor summoned militia from outside the city to stop the riot. In the aftermath, a law was passed to prevent the removal of dead bodies for dissection, but it did not end the practice or the controversy. Elsewhere, similar issues arose, inciting protests in Philadelphia; Baltimore; New Haven, Connecticut; and Zanesville, Ohio. The public expressed anger at physicians for “despoiling […] sacred grounds” (28).

The education of US doctors was tied to a system of grave robbery that was racially prejudiced and immoral. At MCV, a new demonstrator, Arthur Peticolas, replaced Johnson. In 1847, the American Medical Association (AMA) was established, in part to distinguish doctors from traditional healers and to set higher standards for training. This training, however, depended on a supply of corpses.

With its unusual architecture, the new medical school in Richmond later came to be called the Egyptian Building. It had two important and practical features, however. First, the building had high windows, which prevented outsiders from looking in. Second, it had foreboding-looking obelisks, which were meant to frighten outsiders and serve as a no-trespassing sign. Soon after it opened, rumors of strange occurrences in graveyards began, and citizens complained about the smell emanating from the building. The demonstrator was tasked with keeping the dissecting rooms clean. Dried-up wells were used to dispose of body parts. Still, doubts persisted and reached the white community. In response, the faculty established new guidelines in 1854 for handling deceased patients, claiming that “no white person is ever dissected in the college” (38).

Ironically, the face of MCV’s public relations problem was Chris Baker, an African American, who technically was the janitor. In reality, he was responsible for stealing, preparing, and helping dissect bodies. He took the job over from his stepfather and worked at MCV from the 1870s until his death in 1919. In December 1882, he and two white medical students were arrested for attempting to rob graves at African American cemeteries. However, the governor quickly pardoned all three. In 1884, the Virginia legislature passed a law that made body snatching a felony punishable by five to 10 years in prison. The law allowed for the legal donation of bodies and established dissection classes, allowing prisons and almshouses as sources of bodies. Jones explains that the law drew a boundary between the respectable working poor and those below.

John Mitchell Jr., a crusading journalist who was born into enslavement, knew that Baker was still being sent to graveyards. Thus, the law had limited success. The Black press expressed a “sense of physical violation and moral outrage” (42) at the practice of grave robbery. In comparison, Jones notes the paternalistic tone of MCV’s account of its history.