Stories of graverobbing, murder, and various enforced medical experimentation led to the development of African American folklore that told of doctors who would abduct, kill, and dissect bodies.
[2] Throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States, the demand for cadavers exceeded the supply when hands-on dissection became popular in medical schools.
[3] The importance of human bodies in explaining general anatomy and fundamental methods like amputation has existed since ancient times.
[1] There is an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting that the bodies of impoverished people, African Americans, and underprivileged individuals were used to improve the medical training of white elites.
Body snatching increased during the post-revolutionary period because medical students started to perform dissections rather than simply observing professors.
[9] Massachusetts passed an identical, albeit less harshly worded, Anatomy Act of 1831, which legalized the use of dead bodies for dissection and anatomical studies.
No records exist, and none of the remains have been identified, but it fits the inflammatory story to claim that they were mainly from working-class individuals and approximately 80% of those were African Americans.
[2] In addition to being the majority of cadavers, many teaching hospitals would only perform new live surgical techniques and demonstrations on African American patients.
[2][12] The usage of African American bodies as experimental subjects has a long history in the United States, dating back to the use of Henrietta Lacks' cancer cells for research purposes without her proper consent to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Cadavers used by Johns Hopkins University were highly disproportionate (2/3 African American) to the surrounding population at the time,[15] and Charity Hospital was known for multiple racist incidents.
The bottle is now thought to have contained a mixture of cascara and milk of magnesia, which when properly administered worked as a common laxative of the period.
Night Doctors, as well as other systemic and racial issues in American medicine (the most notable being the Tuskegee Syphilis Study), have left many modern-day repercussions on black communities in search of medical care.