The most mundane aspects of his daily routine are the stuff of other people's nightmares. As the Medical College of Virginia's resident grave robber, Chris Baker was probably the most feared and hated man in late nineteenth century Richmond. But Tony Gentry's novel inspired by the forgotten true story of one of the darkest chapters in Richmond history just might leave you sympathizing with (and even liking) this fascinating figure.
Tony Gentry has discovered that rarest of secret places where historical truth and stirring fiction become indistinguishable from one another. In The Night Doctor of Richmond, Gentry brings us the story of Chris Baker, a former slave employed by the medical college to collect cadavers and process them. Baker, however, is much more than he seems: anatomist; accomplished amateur physician; entrepreneur—yet he is also a hated pariah in his own community; a tormented soul; and a wanted criminal. The reader eventually understands that there is no real or unreal Chris Baker—Gentry has written such that one can’t help but be the Other. Both are haunted men whom tragedy and pathos are pre-ordained to rule over; both are fascinating and vivid portraits of the unsettled times they lived in; Both issue a hidden warning to the living about what they think they know about the dead.
An audacious tour-de-force of historical reimagining and radical empathy from one of my favorite writers. In telling the story of Reconstruction-era resurrection man Chris Baker, Gentry resurrects more than just a man--he restores a vanished Richmond whose racial fault lines still have the power to shake a nation.
Author Tony Gentry introduces Chris Baker, the child of an enslaved grave-robber and anatomical expert, and artfully engages all our senses through vivid scenes of Baker’s daily struggle with what he knows, what he must do, and how he must do it in a world that rejects him at every corner. Charged with finding bodies for doctors and students to study, this young man seems physically super-human (existing on naps, not sleep; working night and day, digging up graves in frozen earth), insanely smart and diabolical all at once. While people recoil or abuse him all his life, he does, in the end, receive a modicum of recognition and respect; but to see and feel the lifelong abuse he endured, to smell the stench he grew so accustomed to that fresh air made him swoon, to touch and breathe the chemicals used to strip the bones in his care, is to wonder how he stood so calmly beside upper-class white doctors who met and carved into his stolen cadavers with such ease and societal admiration.
“The Night Doctor of Richmond” is a masterpiece of storytelling rife with Stephen King level creepiness made visceral in the knowledge that this story truly happened. The black and white book cover of Baker at a desk with a skull and bones alone speaks volumes in its portrayal of our primal fear of death and the black and white nature of our national shame —the shame of slavery and the way slaves were used to commit illegal acts for the advancement of upper-class white professionals. In the photo, Baker’s guarded eyes gaze sideways as if sensing a dangerous apparition nearby. But the ghosts are not something he imagines – they are his fellow humans, watching him, judging him, stalking him; the danger he senses is real; it’s the result of the only trade he has been trained to do, and his reward is a dungeon-like existence.
The magic of this book is that we come to realize that the reviled night doctor is a doctor. Chris Baker is a doctor and a scientist deserving of our respect.
While we know that medicine requires the study of the human body, living through what that entails is something entirely different. As we demand and enjoy the surgical miracles that doctors perform every day, let us not forget what has enabled these life-saving and life-changing procedures to exist. Let us not forget the sacrifice and heartache of those who have made modern cures a reality.
