Just a quick note before we begin.

In order to best honor the stories of the people you will meet here,

this episode features some sensitive material and language about racially motivated violence.

Listener discretion is advised. It's possible that giving someone a hand had never been such a bad idea.

On that April morning of 1788, John Hicks Jr. was hard at work at the New York Hospital. As one version of

the story goes, he leaned out the window and waved to some boys playing below. But it wasn't his

hand that he gestured with. Instead, he was holding an entire severed arm, freshly dislodged from its

corpse, which lay flayed open nearby.

The boys climbed up to the window on a ladder. Once inside, they had questions, and Hicks, no pun intended, was armed with answers.

Ever the trickster, Hicks teased that the limb belonged to one of the boy's mothers.

And if that wasn't bad enough, what Hicks didn't know was this.

The boy's mother had, in fact, recently died. The boy ran off to tell his father, who was working as a mason nearby. According to some accounts, the grieving father was alarmed. He rushed off to

his wife's grave, and sure enough, when they opened her coffin, her body was gone.

He went back and told his co-workers about what happened and about the medical student who had claimed to be the perpetrator.

The group of workers quickly formed into a mob and marched off towards the hospital.

Once there, they rushed the doors, and the rioting began.

They poured into the building, smashing anatomical specimens as they went.

They came upon cowering medical students, hanging corpses and boiling kettles full of bodies.

News of the rabble made its way to the mayor, who ordered doctors and medical

students to be held in jail for their own protection. The mob eventually dispersed for the day,

and things settled down. But people continued to talk about what they had seen at the hospital

that evening, and by the next morning unrest and anger about the use of robbed bodies for anatomical

...