Dr. Joseph Warren: American Revolutionist and Secret Spunker

in the walls of the building's basement. That may sound suspicious and like the start of a big murder mystery, but they had not been hidden there by a serial killer or any sort of murderer. They had been put there by the faculty, staff and students of the school on purpose. Those were the bones of the many people whose corpses had been snatched from local cemeteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be used as cadavers by

those who were learning anatomy at Harvard. Just like any other medical school in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Harvard had a shortage of cadavers. If you've been listening this season, that should sound pretty familiar to you at this point. Laws at this time in Massachusetts, where Harvard is located, we're a little bit less restrictive when it came to dissection than in other places, but not really

by a whole lot. Legally, a medical school was allowed one cadaver her human body dissection once every four years. According to a seventeen eight issue of the Boston Gazette, a single body was made to do duty for a whole course of lectures. That may have been the law on the books, but in reality not all schools received

equals share. The more prestigious the institution, sometimes the more cadavers they received, sometimes, though no not Harvard legally received one caldaver annually, but though they had more than other schools, it still was not enough. Medical education in the eighteenth century was a lot different than today and varied a lot among schools. It consisted of a few central things, though formal lectures for one or two semesters, followed by

an apprenticeship with an established physician. There was really no academic preparation to attend lectures such as those an anatomy for instance, one would purchase a ticket for entry. As the lack of clinical material limited instructional experiences, class sizes, and opportunities for up close to section, the quality and quantity of doctors in Boston and in the United States as a whole really started to wane. Without the proper course materials and yes that did include fresh corpses, Harvard

decided to change how it educated new doctors. It adopted a more hands on study of anatomy known as the Paris method, and according to that, each student learned by dissecting their own assigned cadaver. You can see where the

problem is going to come up. Because while that would provide a more intense hands on training experience than just watching your anatomy lecturer dissect a single cadaver at the head of the class, it now also put the school in the position of needing to obtain all of the fresh corpses it would need to continue that type of curriculum. So Harvard, like many other schools, began to skirt the law.

They hired body snatchers. Just around sev seventy, around the time the college was gifted funds to begin a professorship in anatomy. A group of Harvard's own took matters into their own hands when it came to the school's cadaver supply. Dr Joseph Warren, along with some very well known name founded an ilicit secret society known as the Anatomical Club, but it was better known as the Spunker Club, which

appropriately featured a shovel as its representative symbol. The Spunker Club was, at least when it came to secrecy, kind of like fight club. The first rule of being a Spunker was you didn't talk about being a Spunker. The second rule of being as Funker was you didn't write or speak the name of the club. So you get the idea here. The purpose of the Spunker Club was to participate in anatomic dissection, and to do so using

cadavers that they themselves had procured. John Warren, who was Joseph's brother, was also a member, and he is a notable member because he was also the founder of Harvard Medical School. Some of the club's other notable members included the sons of both Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, as well as William Eustace, the future Secretary of War under President James is Madison. Stealing a body from a fresh

grave required at least three participants. You needed to to exhume the corpse and one to get ready to go with the getaway wagon. The club really took pride in their work. In a letter written in seventeen and published in the Journal of Social Archaeology, John Warren, remember Joseph's brother, and a club member who was not supposed to be writing about this, I need to point out, described body snatching by others as quote done with so little decency

and caution that it quote needed scarcely be said. It could not have been the work of any of our friends of the Spunker Club when he wasn't leading doctors and students through the graveyard. As a physician and a popular one, Dr Warren treated everyone young old Wig Tory, it really didn't matter. His reputation in the city was impeccable, and he treated prominent people in Boston, including John Adam,

Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. It's said he once saved seven year old future President John Quincy Adams's finger from amputation. He's also known to have treated the American born wife of British General Thomas Gage, and this year is with

a mark of possible historical scandal. That's right, because some historians believe it was Margaret Gage who shared intelligence with Warren about the British Army's strategies and tactics, in particular British plans to raid Conquered Joseph never revealed his informants identity. But why you might be wondering, and most appropriately, would your family physician have an informant? That's because Bostonian physician and patriot Joseph Warren played a central role in the

events leading up to the American Revolution. In addition to being a remarkable physician and resurrection man, Joseph was a remarkable revolutionist military officer. Paula Here's ride from Boston towards Conquered to Warren revolutionaries there that the British were planning to raid ammunition stores and arrest prominent patriots John Hancock and Samuel Adams is a famous story in American history. But did you know it was Dr Joseph Warren who

dispatched him on that famous ride. Indeed, it was We're gonna take a quick break here for a word from our sponsor, and when we're back, we're gonna speculate what Dr Warren and his allies talked about at the Green Dragon Tavern. Welcome back to Criminaliat. Let's talk about why Joseph Warren has been called the quote de facto leader of the American Revolution. So let's talk for a minute

about Joseph Warren's young life. He was born in the town of Roxbury, Massachusetts, in June of seventeen forty one, and he was the eldest of Joseph and Mary Stevens Warren's four sons. He was raised in a three story brick house surrounded by acres of pastures and orchards. It really sounds pretty idyllic. His father was a successful farmer, but unfortunately died after accidentally falling out of an apple tree while tending to those orchards. When he was ten

years old. Joseph attended Roxbury Latin School, one of America's oldest public schools as well as one of its most prestigious prep schools, known for preparing students seeking admission to Harvard. At age fourteen, Joseph was admitted to Harvard as one of the youngest of a freshman class of forty five students. He graduated in seventeen fifty nine at the age of eighteen, and went on, of course, to become a physician and for his personal life. He married Elizabeth Houghton in September

of seventeen sixty four. She was a woman of considerable fortune, so he married very well, and the couple had four children. Joseph was a Freemason. In fact, he was the grand master of his group. Together, the men were known to meet at the Green Dragon Tavern to talk about the Revolution. Joseph's revolutionary writings caught the eye of Samuel Adams, a statesman and political philosopher who became one of the founding

fathers of the United States. It was through Samuel Adams that Warren met Paul Revere, John Hancock, John Adams, and other politically active and motivated people. Many of these names appear on some very important documents in the history of the United States. In February of seventeen seventy, it was Joseph who performed the autopsy of an eleven year old boy named Christopher Cider. Christopher was at the time allegedly killed by a loyalist during a protest in the North

End of Boston. Warren was the doctor who confirmed that Cider's death at the hands of British customs officer Ebenezer Richardson, was the first in the American Revolution. Christopher had been fatally shot when Richardson, attempting to disperse the turbulent crowd, had fired a load of what's called swan shot, basically a lot of pea size lead balls out of a window. That was actually his second shot, his first he wasn't loaded.

Cider was struck in the chest by one of these pieces of swan shot and also had a secondary hit. It's frequently described as hitting him above the eye, although sometimes you'll read that it hit him in the arm. Christopher Cider died on February seventeen seventy. That same gunfire also injured a local teenager, Samuel Gore, although he survived.

Cider became a symbol of the Liberty movement. Richardson was tried and convicted for killing the boy, although then he was pardoned by King George the Third before fleeing North America for England. And Joseph Or was closely associated with this entire story because of his role in examining Citer's body Joseph was also talented in rhetoric and was asked to give a speech commemorating the Boston Massacre, an event

when British soldiers shot and killed five Bostonians. Other names had been considered to speak, concluding John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Church, but it was Warren who was chosen for his oratorical talent. He delivered the speech. In fact, he delivered it twice. The first time was in March of seventeen seventy two, during the marking of the anniversary of the massacre, and the second time was in seventeen seventy five, during a time when the revolution in the

air was palpable. He wore a costume during that second speech, a Ciceronian toga, the garment of a free born Roman male citizen. Of his forty five minute address, the Boston Gazette reported that Warren's words were quote celebrated with unanimous applause. The British, it was reported, were in attendance and they were not amused. In response to the set of punative laws called the Coercive Acts passed by British Parliament in seventeen seventy four after the Boston Tea Party. It was

Joseph Warren who wrote the Suffolk Resolves. The Suffolk Resolves document basically said that the colonists weren't going to tolerate British rules. The text also encouraged the people of the British colonies to stop paying their taxes and to start training for armed conflict. The Continental Congress endorsed his declaration, which resulted in a boycott of imported goods from Britain until the intolerable Acts, as they were called by the

colonists were repealed. We mentioned earlier that Warren was involved with the Freemasons, but he was also part of the Sons of Liberty, the North End Caucus, the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, and the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. That, it turns out, made him involved in so many organizations that that is how he got that nickname the de facto leader of the American Revolution. He touched every branch of every group that was kind of

forming as this revolution was fomenting. This man had more time in his day than I do for busy be He is a busy busy bee. He also was a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he was killed in action alongside the infantry, just six days after his thirty fourth birthday and three days after he was chosen as major general. According to British General Thomas Gage, Warren's death was quote worth the death of five hundred men.

So we're going to take another break for a word from our sponsor here, and when we come back, we'll talk about what Harvard did without the Spunker Club, and the answer to that is a few different things. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about what became of the

Spunker Club. Samuel Foreman, a visiting scientist in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health and president of Oak and Ivy Health Systems, has called Joseph Warren quote a seminal figure, not only for his participation in proto public health activities, but more generally in the founding of medically related institutions of all types at Harvard.

Foreman believes that had Warren lived beyond his early thirties, he would likely have gone on to do more great things in his role as a physician and his role as a politician. Foreman wrote, quote, he was a proponent of disciplined medical education and pushed for the most up to date knowledge and techniques in medicine, both in individual cases and in public health. A few years after Joseph's death, the founding of the Medical School in seventeen eighty two

made Harvard a university. Previously, it had been known as Harvard College. In seventeen eighty three, when Harvard Medical School officially opened its doors, it opened as the Medical Institution of Harvard University, and its first home was yes the Holden Chapel in Harvard Yard. In eighteen fifteen, Massachusetts seems to have collectively felt like enough was enough when it

came to stealing corpses. The state government passed the Act to Protect the Sepulchers of the Dead, which made it a felony to disturb a grave or steal a corpse. As you can imagine, this received a lot of pushback from the Massachusetts Medical Society. Air were they going to get fresh corpses now? For a brief period during the Revolutionary War, corpses had been, unfortunately pretty abundant. It's believed the members of the Spunker Club likely collected corpses from

both sides. That was a practice that George Washington referred to and we're quoting him from the Journal of the American Revolution, as an abominable crime. But in the years after the war ended, that supply had dwindled back to pre conflict status, making it harder than ever to keep

up with demand. In a rapidly growing country a lot of people who wanted to be doctors, So in eighteen thirty one, Massachusetts passed another law, the Anatomy Act, which allowed medical professionals to legally obtain the bodies of those who had been imprisoned, those who had been determined to be mentally ill, and those who had died in poverty. Around this time, to Harvard Medical School began moving to a new supply chain. They began bribing New York City

officials to ship corpses from New York to Boston. It was, according to an article in the Boston Gazette, where body snatchers were quote emptying at least six hundred or seven hundred graves annually. By eighteen forty two, Harvard Medical School employed from Littlefield as a janitor, but his actual job was to supply the school with fresh corpses, and they

paid him twenty five dollars per body. Now it's unclear if Efrem himself was snatching the bodies or if maybe instead he was a go between who was just kind of managing the whole thing. He was, though, also tasked with the disposal of the remains left over after dissections

from dumped them in the basement of Holden Chapel. That makes those the bodies that construction workers discovered in n It's been determined that the remains belonged to at least eleven males and females, but most of the remaining bones are pretty bad condition and they make identification impossible or

at least very unlikely. According to aarticle in student run Harvard Daily newspaper The Crimson, Carol A. S. Mandrick, the director of the Ocean Lifelong Learning Institute at University of Hawaii at MANOAH and former anthropology professor at Harvard, noted that quote, some of the bones have metal pieces sticking out of them, as if someone was trying to construct

a skeleton. Amid these changes in the mid eight hundreds, the body snatching spunker club wasn't really needed anymore, although no one is exactly certain when they closed down, with their being a secret club and all. Surely somebody blabbed it in a letter, right, John Warren? Where are surely you could be better than this. We didn't really talk about embalming or anything in this episode, but would you like some embalming fluid, Marina? I would love some, perhaps

to go along with my revolutionist reading materials. There you go over. In thinking about a cocktail for this one, I wanted to think of something at least vaguely related to time and place, and so I immediately thought about one of the popular drinks during this time, which would have been cider. But then I also got to thinking about how a lot of the founding fathers were also distillers, to varying degrees of success, and George Washington in particular

made a lot of whiskey and brandy. You can actually still buy whiskey and brandy from the restored distilleries that he had. It's pricey. I do not have any on hand and did not use it in this recipe, although there is whiskey coming up, and I also just wanted to think of other yummy things to combine with such items. So this is a little drink that is a very delicious and I'm calling it secret society. But it's very easy to throw together, very easy drinking, and I think

the mocktail version is really quite lovely as well. So for this, you are going to throw into your cocktail shaker a half ounce of lemon juice, a half ounce of simple syrup, and ten fat blueberries, and then you're gonna muddle those together. And then once you've done that, and again it's like what we've talked about before, this is not a pulverizer. You just kind of want to break those berries up. Usually if they're fat and right, they'll break up pretty easily anyway. And then you're going

to add an ounce of whiskey of your choice. Rye is great for some folks, not everybody loves Rye. So really whichever whiskey you desire, and some ice, and you're gonna shake that all together. Just give it a good shake, make sure it's an all nice and cold, and then you'll pour it. You won't strain it. You'll pour it with the ice into a rocks glass and then you just top it with four ounces of hard cider. This is so stink and delicious. I don't even know it.

I don't normally consider myself a big hard cider drinker, but this might change that game. A little whiskey and blueberries made everything new, and it doesn't really lends it and I don't know a different flavor, it's not. The blueberry is interesting. There are a lot of um whiskey and cider cocktails out in the world. A lot of people like to play with those two together, especially in autumn. But I wanted to do something that was a little summary and I again, I always like putting fresh fruit

in a drink. It feels somehow a little fancier. But I also know I've been doing a lot of strawberry actions, so it was time to trot out. And also blueberries, so yum. This one's very easy to make. Is a mocktail. You'll start out the same way with the blueberries, the lemon juice and the simple syrup, and then you're not gonna put whiskey in there, but you can shake it. You can use a sparkling nonalcoholic cider here, and it's great if you want to give it a little kick

of something that's different. Since you're skipping the whiskey, this becomes that choose your own adventure a little bit. We often throw in like a very strong, heavily steeped tea in lieu of a whiskey, which you can do and it almost makes it like an apple iced tea situation. But I would also suggest if you want more of

that like alcohol, bite to it without the alcohol. This is a great time to trot out your habanero or your hallopeen, you know, syrup if you have it, and just throw a little in there and make it have that little bit of chi chow that feels a little bity on your tongue yet is just a delicious syrup and no alcohol in it. Yeah, and then pour several more for yourself. We're friends. I do like ciders, and I'm actually I'm happy to see that one has popped up.

Done dune, dun listen. I'm trying to get around to everything eventually. If we did only what I naturally gravitate to would be all vodka and chartreuse all the time, which would be amazing but boring diet, and then a cordial of chartreuse some cogniac every evening and not predictable at all, not at all. I mean, did I want to put a cogniac or a brandy in it. Yes, did I know? Because I always try to stretch a little.

I actually was wondering if you were going to go in a direction of an apple brandy, because that's a very New England kind of a business. I thought about it. But I'm actually I'm so like happy to see this direction that you have gone into, because there's how many apple jacks do we need in the world. Like, I'm very yummy, but it's fun to play with stuff and

make new fun things. Blueberries are They do a magical thing here because it doesn't you don't really taste blueberry, but you taste like a fruity essence to it that is discernibly different from just apple, which is nice. The skins tended to settle on the bottom, and then the interior is like pulpy and lurks in like the middle range with your ice more than anything. And then the rest is about the golden tone you would expect. But

you do get that nice, nice berry something. If I think if somebody didn't know blueberries were in it, they would be like, what, there's something in here I can't pick out. It is a fruit and possibly a berry, but they it's hard to figure out, like where the blueberry flavor is actually moving amongst your apple sip. So try it, but you can if you don't love blueberries, you could put in other things. You could try it with,

of course strawberries which we mentioned, a raspberry. I think this would be very interesting and I don't think a disaster to try it with a mashed kiwi in it. Hey, that's interesting. Yeah. I love playing with fruit in a basic drink. It changes it considerably without becoming overwhelming usually unless you use some really pungent fruit, which I suppose you could. You could put a mango in this get a completely different drink out of it, So it would

be a very different drink. I'm sure it'd be a very good drink, but it would be it would suddenly feel much more tropical and lass New England in like a second definitely not Roxbury like, not even a little. Hopefully you will give this a whirl and hopefully you will enjoy it as much as I do. And we also want to make sure we thank you for spending this time with us, and we hope we will see you back here next week for more digging up bodies

on Criminalia. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.