body snatching

body snatching, the illicit removal of corpses from graves or morgues during the 18th and 19th centuries. Cadavers thus obtained were typically sold to medical schools for use in the study of anatomy.

In his The Devil’s Dictionary, the acerbic lexicographer Ambrose Bierce defined a body snatcher as “one who supplies the young physicians with that which the old physicians have supplied the undertaker.” While Bierce may have been harsh on the physicians of his day, he was correct in linking body snatching to medicine—the demand for fresh bodies in 18th- and 19th-century Britain and the United States was created by anatomy professors, surgeons, and medical students. Because the only bodies legally available for medical dissection were the remains of executed criminals, demand far outpaced supply.

Until the enactment of the Anatomy Act of 1832 in Britain, the taking of corpses from graves was not itself illegal, as the corpse had no legal standing and was not owned by anyone. What was illegal was the dissection of the corpses and the theft of items other than the corpse itself. Physicians and medical students who purchased corpses had little interest in where they came from, and the body snatchers (who were also known as resurrectionists) usually left behind everything except the body in the coffin. While body snatching might not have been illegal, the practice was considered morally and religiously reprehensible, as was dissection itself. It was not until the late 19th century that medicine became widely respected, and, especially in the18th century, dissection was generally viewed as a form of criminal punishment that followed execution.

Body snatchers and their methods

Those who obtained corpses for use in medical education included the medical students themselves, middlemen who paid church officials or undertakers for cadavers, con artists who claimed the bodies of the poor, amateurs who stumbled upon a body or a fresh grave, murderers who produced corpses, and professional body snatchers who dug up and removed bodies from graveyards. Although the evidence is incomplete, it is likely that the majority of bodies used in medical schools in Britain and the United States in the 18th and early 19th centuries were supplied by body snatchers.

Body snatching was a lucrative business, paying as much as several months’ worth of a workman’s wages per body, but it could also be difficult and dangerous. Body snatchers needed to remove the body and deliver it before it was too badly decomposed, no easy task in the days before bodies were embalmed. They had to avoid detection as they dug the body up and transported it to the medical facility, and they faced the threat of physical assault during so-called “resurrection riots,” when the snatchers and their customers were attacked by citizens who disapproved of both body snatching and medical dissection.

Body snatchers frequented graveyards for the poor in Britain and for the poor and African Americans in the United States. It is also possible that Jewish cemeteries were popular, as Jewish custom dictates burial within 24 hours of death, and corpses would therefore be relatively fresh. The graves of the poor were preferred because they were unlikely to be guarded. Body snatchers usually worked at night and in teams. They also preferred graves that were covered roughly so that their work would go undetected. Contrary to popular depictions, body snatchers rarely dug up the entire coffin. Instead, they dug a vertical tunnel down to the head end of the coffin, broke the lid, and hoisted the body to the surface with a rope or a long metal hook. The clothes were tossed back into the coffin, the tunnel filled in, and the ground smoothed to make it appear undisturbed. The practice of returning the possessions of the deceased to the coffin created an important distinction between body snatchers and grave robbers. Because body snatching was fairly common in some places (near medical schools, such as in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia), the relatives of the recently buried often tried to thwart the body snatchers. They hired guards to watch over graves, erected metal cages around graves, used burial vaults, placed metal or heavy wooden planks over the coffin, used iron coffins, and filled graves with heavy stones. They also tried to deter body snatchers from entering graveyards by building high walls, fixing broken glass to the tops of the walls, and setting trip lines attached to guns.

Related to body snatching was murder for the purpose of obtaining bodies to sell to medical schools. A person murdered for this purpose was said to have been “burked,” after William Burke, an Irish cobbler who was hanged and dissected in 1829 for his role in murdering and selling the bodies of at least 16 people in Edinburgh. Burke’s accomplices cooperated with the authorities and avoided punishment. Robert Knox, the anatomist who bought the bodies of the victims, also went unpunished, although his reputation and career were damaged. Murders for anatomical specimens are documented elsewhere in Britain and in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States. Such murders were not common, but they always brought public outrage and played a role in the introduction of legislation that normalized and regulated the procurement of cadavers.

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Reform

The combination of body snatchings, murder, and resurrection riots led to the enactment of the Anatomy Act in Britain in 1832 and similar acts in U.S. states in subsequent years. These acts, which were amended and refined over the years, recognized the need for bodies for medical education and research and sought to control snatching by making more bodies available—at first by allowing medical schools to take unclaimed bodies of the poor and ill and later requiring family permission before a body could be taken. Although these laws had some effect by making more bodies available, it was really embalming, which was in regular use by the 1880s and which enabled medical schools to keep bodies for months, that led to the demise of body snatching.