‘Mob” is short for “mobile vulgus,” the people on the move. Any community, however small, can assemble one, and the city has been producing them for years.
One of the largest mobs of the 18th century was responsible for the Doctors Riot. Then as now doctors studied anatomy by dissecting corpses, but then not as now they procured their corpses by digging them up in cemeteries (the doctors or middlemen who performed these feats were known as “resurrection men”). In April 1788, some children were peering through a window of New York Hospital at med students working on a cadaver. One of the students picked up an arm, waved it at a boy, and told him facetiously that it belonged to his mother. The child’s mother had in fact recently died, and he ran home to tell his father. When the man went to the burial ground of Trinity Church he found that his late wife’s casket had been rifled.
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