The United States of Absurdity: Untold Stories from American History by Dave Anthony & Gareth Reynolds

Author:Dave Anthony & Gareth Reynolds [Anthony, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780399578755
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

FUN FACT

Stomach acid is corrosive enough to eat through metal and bone. It is the same acid used in factories to strip rust off steel and iron. Your stomach makes up to three liters of acid every day.

RESURRECTION MEN

(1788–1911)

Let’s start with a fun fact: From 1758 to 1788, roughly 3,500 doctors practiced medicine in America, but only 10 percent had medical degrees. So, many of those doctors were, well, idiots. To become less stupid doctors, they needed to conduct research. To do so, they needed humans—or more specifically, human bodies. Or super more specifically, dead human bodies. But cadavers were hard to come by. Cue the grave robbers.

Apparently “grave robbers” didn’t sound good, so they became known as resurrectionists or resurrection men. A resurrectionist would dig up a grave, remove the corpse, strip the body naked, and then rebury the coffin. Now, you may be asking why they stripped them naked. Well, we don’t know, but they did. People noticed the grave robbing—sorry, resurrectioning—and they didn’t like it.

The rich could afford to hire armed guards to watch graves for two weeks until the body was too “mushy” to use. (We mentioned not to eat while reading this chapter, right?) Others insane defenses included coffin torpedoes. These were booby-trapped graves that would shoot balls at anyone who opened one. Not the person’s balls, but weighted ones. Eventually the Dead Guard Men were formed; members stood guard in graveyards with guns to stop all the robbing.

It was gross and weird, but people overlooked it. That was until one fateful day in 1788 in New York. A group of lads were on a jaunt when they saw an arm dangling out of a hospital window and grew curious. So they peeked inside and saw hanging bodies. That freaked them out, but then a man inside saw the boys, picked up the arm of one of the bodies, and waved it at them. Annnnnnnd in no time an angry mob with torches (torches were a mob must) gathered at the hospital with their heads full of questions. They stormed inside, where they saw one body being boiled and what we can only envision as a bunch of hanging dicks. Like a butcher’s store window—but with dicks. The mob took all the bodies that they found hanging and, in a puzzling move, burned them (dicks and all). And so began America’s “Doctor’s Riot.” The doctors were all taken to jail to keep them safe from the wrath of the mob.

The mob grew to five thousand people. They rioted for four days, attacking the jail where the doctors were being kept. It was total madness. A militia was formed, and its members used muskets to stop the mob. Many rioters were injured. And in an adorable twist, the doctors had to leave the jail to treat the wounded men. So doctors were jailed, and when the people trying to kill them got hurt, the doctors treated those same rioters/would-be doctor killers.

After this incident, grave robbing was outlawed.

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