Medical Schools Are Still Desecrating the Corpses of the Poor
Medical schools in the United States used to acquire corpses for research from literal grave robbers. They don’t anymore — but in most US states, your corpse may still end up on a medical slab without your consent if no one will pick up the tab to bury you.
In the US, if no one pays for the cremation and burial of your body, it will be donated to be used for medical education. (Andrew Fox / Getty Images)
In the nineteenth-century folklore of black Southerners, “night doctors” were doctors or medical students who kidnapped and murdered people they thought no one would miss to supply medical schools with the cadavers students use to learn anatomy. Regional variations sometimes called them “bottle men” or “needle men” for the methods they supposedly used to sedate their victims.
The belief seems to have persisted as late as the 1950s. One 1954 article in Time magazine reported that “in some southern states, mothers threaten children with ‘the night doctor will get you. . . . ’”
There are no confirmed cases of this happening in the United States — although there were at least two very real “night doctors,” William Burke and William Hare, in nineteenth-century Scotland. The pair killed sixteen people before they were caught. Hare took a deal with prosecutors to testify, and Burke was hanged.
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