The Night Doctor of Richmond

The Night Doctor of Richmond 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.

Readers say:

"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." - Paul Witcover, author of Lincolnstein and The Emperor of All Things

"Tony Gentry has discovered that rarest of secret places where historical truth and stirring fiction become indistinguishable from one another." -  Jack Trammell, author of The Richmond Slave Trade and Tales of a Soldier Revenant.

"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." - Chris Semptner, artist, author, and Curator of Edgar Allen Poe Museum, Richmond

"Mesmerizing, Enlightening, Haunting - a masterpiece of storytelling rife with Stephen King level creepiness made visceral in the knowledge that this story truly happened." - Rosemary Rawlins, author of All My Silent Years