Blasts from the Past
fortean times brings you the news that time forgot
In 1872, several American newspapers recorded a curious superstition among certain African American communities in and around the city of Washington, DC, involving the existence of what they called ‘night doctors’. According to these beliefs, the night doctors wandered the streets in pairs between midnight and daybreak in search of victims to be abducted for the dissecting room. They took their victims with the help of adhesive plasters, lying in wait for suitable ‘subjects’ in dark alleys, “from which they stealthily but quickly emerge whenever a coloured person of suitable proportions passes. Advancing with muffled step behind the unsuspecting victims, one of these terrible ‘night doctors’ reaches his hand over the shoulder of the coloured man or woman, and dexterously claps the adhesive plaster over his or her mouth, in order to prevent any outcry, while his confederate quickly ties the arms with a cord, with which he is prepared. Unable to give an alarm or make anything like successful resistance, the poor victims are placed in a covered carriage waiting nearby, and carried to the dissecting room where he or she is chloroformed into insensibility, and then bled to death by the heartless students.”
The horrors did not stop there; since, after the body was dissected, the fatty parts of the body were “tryed in caldrons for the purpose of obtaining the oil, which, according to the popular belief among the coloured people, afterward appears at the drug stores in the form of castor oil.” According to the newspapers, these beliefs were held so firmly by the African American community that only with the greatest hesitation, even fear and trembling, would people go out at night, only to “take to their heels whenever they notice anything suspicious in the movements of the passers- by”. Reports even asserted that of late: “The number of coloured people who have disappeared is much larger than usual, and they are convinced that the doctors of Washington are not only supplying the dissecting rooms of the city with subjects, but are furnishing ‘castor oil’, manufactured from coloured adipose matter to the large cities throughout the country… Those who indulge in this singular superstition relative to ‘night doctors’ imagine that young and obese subjects are preferred, on account of the oil which they yield, and that hump-backs are especially desirable, on account of their peculiar physical conformation, which renders their dissection of particular interest to medical students. Indeed, it is reported that as high as $150 each for first class hump-backed subjects is offered by the ‘night doctors’. We know not how this strange hallucination originated, but imagine it must have come down by tradition from ‘the good old times’ before the war.” 1
This ‘superstition’ was an example of how 19th century American slave owners exploited such folkloric fears to control the slave population. One has but to think of the sinister garb of the Klansman and the Ghost Riders or Night Riders (see FT323:34-43). It was, as Gladys-Marie Fry notes in her book Night Riders In Black Folk History: “a system of psychological control”. 2 When the stories of the night doctors began to surface in early 19th century America, one newspaper offered a plausible solution as to their origin: “Where did this belief originate? Perhaps in darker Africa, in days when ancestors of the race in this country were changed from Africans to Americans through the medium of the slave ship, manacle and lash. The more reasonable explanation is to be had in studying the effects upon the coloured people in this country of the crime which gave a new word to the dictionary – ‘burking’ – stealing corpses for purposes of dissection”. 3
Seen in this light, the fears about Night Doctors were not unfounded. The practice of dissection was widespread in 19th century America, and the graves of African Americans were the main source of corpses. It was, after all, less risky to dissect a black cadaver than a white one. As early as March 1827, Freedom’s Journal, an African American newspaper, instructed its readers as to “how to create a cheap mortsafe, a complex contraption of rods and plates that protected the coffin... This contraption ensured that ‘the longest night will not afford time to empty the grave’.” 4
And sometimes a corpse wasn’t quite dead to begin with, as in the gruesome case that was dubbed ‘An Ohio Horror’ by the newspaper that reported on it in 1884: “Wherever there is a medical college the coloured people are in mortal fear of the ‘night doctors’. Most people have laughed at the suggestion that a coloured man is liable to suffer a mysterious disappearance through the need of ‘subjects’ in the dissecting-room, but if the Ohio story is true the coloured people do well to keep as far away from the medical college as possible.
“It appears that the Ohio Medical College was short of subjects and called on the usual purveyors, coloured men. The latter promised to have three subjects that night. Sure enough, the bodies were brought to the dissecting-room on time. They were the bodies of a coloured family named Taylor, and were still warm when placed on the tables. They showed evidence of violent death. It is the common opinion, and it is supported by good evidence, that these coloured persons were murdered by the body-snatchers… In St Louis some years ago, an excitement was created by the dissection of a body under circumstances much less horrible, and it ran so high as to endanger
Sometimes a corpse wasn’t quite dead to begin with, as in the gruesome case that was dubbed ‘An Ohio Horror’ by the newspaper that reported on it...
the existence of the college building. A negro was employed to scrub the dissecting-room and was sent up without being told of the character of the room. When he saw the subjects on the tables he dashed out of the room in great fear, stumbled and fell headlong down the stairs, breaking his neck. Instead of notifying the coroner, a class of subjects quietly carried the body up again and devoted it to the advancement of science. It was with the utmost difficulty that the building was saved from the mob that formed when the facts became known…” 5
In 1879 the fear of the ‘night doctors’ was so strong that it became dangerous if a late-night passer-by were to be mistaken for one of these ghouls, as events in Little Rock, Arkansas, demonstrated: “At rather a late hour I was going along Second Street with a friend. My friend was drunk. I had not been drinking anything. Meeting an old negro man, my companion caught hold of him and good humouredly told him to go on. I requested him not to detain the man. Just then several parties rushed up, when I told my friend to run, which he did. I walked on, not suspecting that I would be molested, when suddenly something struck the back of my head… I was cut in several places, and I have been informed that after I had been knocked down I was dragged under a shed and left for dead. A woman did the cutting, and I understand that when she left me she exclaimed that she had killed one d-----d doctor’s kidnapper. Another statement is that a party of intoxicated men entered the house of a coloured man and pretended as though they were going to put plaster over his mouth. At this juncture a rush by several coloured people was made upon the party, and during the melee which ensued one man was knocked down and it was thought fatally stabbed… So strong is the belief fixed in the minds of coloured people in certain sections of the city, that the streets immediately become deserted, and all business suspended and doors closed as soon as a physician appears.” 6
In 1885 in Washington, surgeons were driven off during an operation on a young African American named William Harris: “The case of Harris became hopeless after the physicians were driven away. There he lay, with his bowels exposed and severed. He sank rapidly, and before the police could drive out the howling mob he was dead. The operation is a critical one at best, but the doctors believe they could have made a successful case but for the interference. There have been demonstrations against night doctors in Washington before, but nothing quite so serious as this.” 7
During a hearing in the Police Court regarding the unfortunate demise of Harris, it emerged that the recently introduced long Ulster coats were thought to be used by their wearers – ‘slab doctors’, as the African American populace called them – to hide kidnapped children victims. 8
An 1889 scare in South Carolina was reported as far away as Boston. It involved a night doctor with the character traits of a phantom anæsthetist (see FT329:28-29, 330:28-29): “The Negroes of Clarendon, Williamsburg and Sumter counties have for several weeks past been in a state of fear and trembling. They claim that there is a white man, a doctor, who at will can make himself invisible, and who then approaches some unsuspecting darkey, and, having rendered him or her insensible with chloroform, proceeds to fill up a bucket with the victim’s blood, for the purpose of making medicine…” 9
The newspapers reported regularly on the fears of night doctors amongst the African American communities right up until the end of the 19th century. Tellingly, one newspaper remarked that the belief was especially prevalent among “a certain grade of negroes in Washington, particularly those who drifted there after the war from the extreme south” 10 – in other words, among those who in all probability would have carried with them tales or personal experiences of persecution by the Klan or the Night Riders. The night doctor belongs in this line of scares, originating at the crossroads of white slave-owners, virulent racism, psychological warfare and suppression. It could manifest itself in various forms. The night doctors travelled in pairs, but could also act alone. One description pictured a night doctor as “a supernatural being, formed like a man, having long, hook-like fingers and a poisonous breath, and that wherever he turns and breathes upon a house where a child lies sick the child is doomed to death before another night. It is not ominous to one to hear the night doctor, as this being of superstition is called, and always after the death of a child the negroes get together and ask who of them heard the night doctor pass by. Some one is sure to assert that he or she heard the low, moaning, rushing sound made by the night doctor’s quick flight. But it is regarded as a surely fatal sign if any one sees the night doctor.” 11
Yet the night doctors are more than a scare stemming from dim folkloric roots. Something evil lies at its heart as well and that is to be found in the relationship between the white medical profession and African American communities. This relationship has been tarnished by some horrible practices; think of the Tuskegee experiment that lasted from 1932 till 1972. There are many more and far older examples. There was, for instance, doctor J Marion Sims (1813-1883) who used enslaved African American women as experimental subjects, “most of whom he bought and kept on his property for this purpose. Some were operated on up to 30 times” without anæsthesia. 12 In her groundbreaking study Medical Apartheid, 13 Harriet A Washington lists the experiences of escaped slave John ‘Fed’ Brown, who recalled in 1855 how a doctor produced painful blisters on his body to observe “how deep my black skin went”. 14 But even before that, in 1817, physician Elias S Bennett published notes on his crude experimental and botched surgery on an African American slave girl suffering from a tumour. 15 The night doctors, then, also serve as a warning that there were times where African Americans could not place their trust in white surgeons and doctors.
As to the current legacy of the night doctors, Dawn Danella points out in Night Doctors: Exhuming The Truth: “There are some that say that the ‘night doctors’ are a myth belonging solely to black folklore, a story used to frighten and manipulate. There is no doubt that is indeed what the lore achieved but the night doctors... did indeed live in more than just whispered stories. The night doctors were a real force that made a lasting impression on history and the repercussions of their horror story can still be felt in African American communities today.” 16