The Night Doctor of Richmond

Who was the Night Doctor of Richmond? In 1994, during excavation for a new medical building in downtown Richmond, Virginia, work crews made a macabre discovery, an old well full of skeletons. As it turned out, these were the remains of bodies torn from Black cemeteries in the 19th Century and used as anatomical specimens by students at the Medical College of Virginia. While archeologists disinterred some of the bones for study, researchers at the college revealed the man responsible for many of the medical school's transgressions, an employee named Chris Baker, who had by his own admission robbed hundreds of graves during his career.

Baker was notorious in his time, featured regularly on the front pages of local newspapers, which called him a ghoul, a conjure man, a suspected murderer and even a cannibal. Reviled by the Black community, he was hounded, jailed, beaten and shot, finding shelter inside the basement of MCV's old 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 macabre trade, Baker walked a tightrope along the fraught racial lines of his time. In this deeply researched and richly imagined biographical novel, enter the world of Chris Baker, the Night Doctor of Richmond.