Description

The Night Doctor of Richmond (June 2024) by Tony Gentry is a deeply researched and richly imagined biographical novel about the Medical College of Virginia's notorious 19th Century grave robber Chris Baker, who readily admitted to robbing hundreds of graves from the city's Black cemeteries across his long career. Reviled in his time, Baker was regularly featured on the front page of local papers, which called him a ghoul, a witch doctor, a suspected murderer and even a cannibal. He was hounded, jailed, beaten and shot, finding his only shelter inside the walls of MCV's Egyptian Building, where he prepared and disposed of cadavers. To the medical community, however, Baker was a respected essential worker, his efforts key to the teaching of future doctors. As he plied his gruesome trade, Baker walked a tightrope along the fraught racial lines of his time.