via Wikimedia Commons
St. Louis City Hall, 1900.
The boys were behaving as bored boys do, looking around for something to pass the time on February 24, 1843. One of the boys suggested hopping over the wall of the old Saint Louis University Medical School at Washington and 11th Streets. Clambering around the derelict yard, the boys made a horrific discovery: the bone-filled crypt where dissected cadavers had been dumped unceremoniously after being used for medical lessons. The boys ran home and told their parents, and all hell broke loose.
A crowd of one thousand people began to gather outside the old college, and stories began to swirl about macabre acts having been committed on the premises. Mayor George Maguire called out the state militia, and several of the crowd’s leaders were arrested. Finally, Judge Brian Mullanphy came out and spoke to the teaming mass of people, and an agreement was reached: those arrested would be freed, and the militia would be withdrawn. Standing in front of a crowd of one thousand angry residents must surely have been intimidating, but officials’ quick action saved the day. Calm ostensibly returned to the city for the time being.
But the citizens of St. Louis were not done yet. Later that day, a crowd of three to four thousand people (the city’s population in the 1840 census was 16,469, but would jump to 77,860 in 1850), reassembled at the medical college, and this time, they broke down the doors to the college. The discovery of more bones scattered about in a haphazard way enraged the crowd, which then proceeded to ransack the entire building. A small museum collection was completely destroyed, but then the crowd remembered there was another medical college across town.
The Missouri School medical college was located on the other side of the city, and the distance provided the faculty and students time to prepare. The practices of this college were no better than the aforementioned place of learning, and their vault, shaped like a fireplace heading downward into the ground, was as equally full of damning evidence. The teachers and students quickly found a piece of sheet iron and covered up the fireplace-like hole, and then dragged a large stove over in front of the opening. Walls were scrubbed clean of blood, and any dissecting tools removed. A few quick adjustments here and there, and the ruse was ready just in time. The crowd arrived, ready to trash the college, but were stunned when they were in fact invited in and allowed to examine the interior of the building. After their search for bones turned up fruitless, the crowd dispersed.
The preceding story comes from History of Saint Louis City and County written by John Thomas Scharf, published in 1883. The author will not bore the reader with more tales of unrest, but the history of St. Louis is rife with frequent civil disturbances, even before the Civil War and its infamous Camp Jackson Affair and the resulting deaths of civilians at Olive Street and Compton Avenue. But there seems like there is a common theme, one embodied in the “Medical College Disturbances.” Simply put, in the eyes of a large portion of the community, the two colleges were not behaving in an ethical manner in the proper disposal of cadavers.
It might seem strange now, but throughout Western Civilization, dissection of the human body was extremely controversial, even when it was legal, which was seldom if at all for most of the last one thousand years. Procuring cadavers had always been a seedy business, one that frequently involved robbing graves. While limited dissections of the bodies of executed criminals was allowed in some European countries, it was for the most part a taboo subject. Many of the members of the crowds that attacked the medical colleges were certainly born abroad, as well, and shared those beliefs against violating the sanctity of the human body.
But the real issue was that the medical colleges were creating a problem for themselves of their own doing. Simply dumping bodies in a vault in the yard in what was a deeply religious city was asking for trouble. Would it have been too much to have arranged for the proper burial or cremation of the cadavers after they had served their purpose? Likewise, their secretive behavior allowed for the concoction of rumors, which more often than not were probably not true. The McDowell Medical College was accused of stealing the body of a girl who had died of an unknown disease. Just because a procedure is normal and accepted in a particular profession does not mean that people will not react negatively to it based on their own beliefs and experiences.
It also raises issues of how city leadership should respond to a crisis such as this. While the actions of the mayor in the face of the one-thousand-strong crowd are admirable, he did not solve the fundamental problem: the improper disposal of human remains. Instead of quickly arranging for the proper burial of the bones and passing ordinances to regulate their treatment in the future, he stationed 12 men to guard the medical college. Not surprisingly, another crowd formed and trashed the building—because the underlying problem was still present. A problem that could not be solved, so long as leaders refused to enage with the very citizens they represented.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
