Bathsheba Smith

**Bathsheba Smith** was a young woman of the 19th century and daughter of a farmer in New Haven, Connecticut. Her dead body was dug up for study by students from the Yale Medical School. The disturbance of her grave and body was the catalyst to the Resurrection Riot, also known as the Dissection Riot, in 1824.

## Biography

Bathsheba Smith was the daughter of a New Haven farmer. When she was seventeen, Bathsheba died of unknown causes and was buried in West Haven burial ground.

On January 10, 1824, the recently-dead body of Bathsheba was stolen from her grave. Authorities and townspeople immediately suspected the medical school as it was known medical students of the time were often left to commit grave-robbery, stealing their own cadavers for study from public burial grounds. Inspecting the grounds, they found her body in the basement of the Yale Medical School.

The ensuing week-long riot headed by the locals of New Haven threatened to burn the university to the ground. A medical assistant took the fall for the grave robbery, faced sentencing by the court, and was declared guilty.

### Lethe House

Lethe House delegates posit that instead of anatomy study, Bathsheba's body was used for an early, unrefined attempt to communicate with the dead. Bathsheba was only one of many incidents of unregulated and reckless implementation of magic by Yale students before Lethe was founded in 1898. Bathsheba is mentioned in *The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House*.

## Behind the Scenes

* Bathsheba Smith was a real person whose death really caused a week-long riot in New Haven in anger toward the Yale Medical School. Although some sources state that she was 19 at the time of her death. When her body was eventually found, there was no notable description made that implies Bathsheba's body was used for occult practices.
* The claim that the medical assistant Ephraim Colbert was a scapegoat and was innocent of the crime of grave-robbery has merit.
	+ *"Writing about the incident in 1935 for the Yale Journal of Biology, Hannibal Hamlin argued Colborn may have unjustly taken the fall. “He was the only person indicted, two suspected medical students having transferred their studies with great alacrity to other parts before they could be [dragged] into court.” Hamlin adds that the evidence against Colborn was circumstantial and there were no witnesses"*
* Soon after, Connecticut passed an act that established more severe penalties for grave robbing and made it legal for the bodies of those dying in prison and those capitally punished “to be used for the purpose of advancing medical science.” This landmark legislation, well ahead of that in other states and preceding the Warburton Anatomy Act of 1832 in England, helped bring about progress in medical teaching at Yale.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Ninth House Chapter 4 (Last Fall)
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2601176/?page=1
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/anatomy-of-an-insurrection/
4. ↑ https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/article/When-Yale-Medical-Students-Robbed-a-Grave-for-17043596.php