Night Doctors (also known as Night Riders, Night Witches, Ku Klux Doctors and Student Doctors) are bogeymen of African American folklore, resulting from some factual basis.
The term Night Doctor is often broadly used, referring to doctors who would illegally or unethically find means of procuring African American corpses for study during cadaver shortages – a result of southern black bodies being a valuable resource for dissection and autopsy studies in medical colleges.[1] Multiple methods were used, the most common being graverobbing (or body snatching) of impoverished communities; other doctors would pay slave owners for the bodies of deceased slaves.[2] For many slaves, death was thought of as the time their body would finally rest and suffer no longer. In contrast, many slave owners believed they had right to a slave's body even after death. Other Night Doctors, known as Needle Men or Black Bottle Men, would secretly poison African American patients for their cadavers after death. Stories of graverobbing, murder, and various enforced medical experimentation led to the development of African American folklore that told of doctors who would abduct, kill, and dissect bodies.[2]