Just after the Revolutionary War into the early 1800s, there were no professional organizations or laws regulating the practice of medicine. Anyone could call themselves a doctor, and were free to practice their specialty with no accountability to any governing body.

These early doctors were pillars of society, but often revered for their regal bearing and oratory eloquence than their medical successes, for in those days, patients may have survived not because of the doctor’s knowledge and procedures, but in spite of them.

Since medicine was so unregulated, small medical schools sprung up around Virginia in the years prior to the establishment of the University of Virginia medical department in 1825.

In Staunton, a well-known and respected physician named Dr. Alexander Humphreys started a small school in 1787 in his office in the wharf area after emigrating from Edinburgh, Scotland four years earlier.

As the only local doctor, his practice and his school grew rapidly. Although there are no records of his surgical success rates, a few of his students did attain eminence of some kind.

William Henry Harrison studied in Staunton after a short stint in Richmond, then later became ninth President of the United States. Andrew Kean became chief surgeon of the Eighth Regiment of the Virginia Militia in the War of 1812. Ephriam McDowell went to Danville, Kentucky, after his Staunton training and in 1809 performed — under the threat of hanging if he failed — what is widely believed to be the first successful removal of an ovarian tumor.

To study medicine, however, students needed bodies.

Since surgeries were mostly limited to extremities (diseases were more commonly treated with poultices, ingested toxic chemicals such as mercury and arsenic, emetics and blood-letting), cadavers were required to study how the body worked — but this presented numerous problems.

Anatomical dissections of the recently deceased were considered offensive, even sacrilegious by most people, but were tolerated as long as they were performed on poor blacks taken from what were known as negro burial grounds.

But in New York City in 1788, an insurrection broke out when it was discovered that a white body was being dissected at Columbia College. The resulting “doctor’s riot” killed twenty people, and triggered an epidemic of “anatomy riots” in other states that continued sporadically until 1854.

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While there was no riot in Staunton, two of Humphreys’ students, William Wardlaw and James McPheeters, did manage to get Dr. Humphreys arrested and charged with murder.

After finishing their dissection of a male body which they had exhumed from a nearby cemetery, they sewed up the remains in a burlap bag and dropped them inside a cave on Abney’s (now Sears) Hill.

Unfortunately, the bag had Dr. Humphreys name on it, and after it was found, and after it was discovered that a traveler had disappeared the night before from a town tavern, a grand jury convened.

Testimony by the students acquitted Dr. Humphreys, but the case led to using only the bodies of executed criminals for dissection purposes.

Even this became problematic for the local students. John Wayland wrote in his 1912 history of Rockingham County that in 1824, a Fluvanna County man named Sprouse was brought to Harrisonburg to be hanged for murdering his wife. Hearing of the impending execution, the Staunton boys rushed to Harrisonburg, where they heard that a group of students from a nearby medical school founded by Dr. Peachy Harrison had the same idea.

Immediately after the hanging, the body was buried near the gallows, and the Staunton students, who arrived first, dug it up and hid it in some brush with the intent to carry it back after nightfall.

The delayed Harrisonburg students discovered the body, however, and carried it by horseback around the west side of town, where they hid it in a tanning house belonging to a Mrs. Gibbons.

According to a small undated book titled “My recollections of Rocktown, now known as Harrisonburg, 1817-1820,” author Maria Carr recalled that Sprouse’s “skinned and tanned” body was later moved from Mrs. Gibbons’ tannery to the attic of a small log Presbyterian meeting house. “The Presbyterian prayer meeting was held every Wednesday evening in this log house,” Carr wrote, “and we did not know that Sprouse’s body was above us.”

The opening of the UVA medical school, as well as the College of Physicians in Winchester in 1829, and medical schools at Randolph-Macon and Hampton-Sydney in 1837, spelled the end of the era of Virginia’s small, physician-run medical schools.

Dale Brumfield can be reached at

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