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podcast transcript
In the early days of modern medicine, some of the most important scientific breakthroughs depended on a very confusing underground deal.
In the shadows, a gang known as the Resurrectionists robbed new graves and sold corpses to anatomy schools looking for corpses.
Their work helped train doctors and advance science, but it also terrified the public and changed laws, ethics, and culture.
Learn more about the resurrectionists and their shocking yet important legacy in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
It took a surprisingly long time to understand human anatomy. Especially considering that everything we need to know is locked within each of us.
The reason it took so long is because the only way to really understand what’s under our skin is to dissect corpses. I think you can do that to living people. But I think the problem with it is pretty obvious.
Although they may seem a bit macabre, cadavers are essential to understanding anatomy as they provide a hands-on reference without endangering the safety of others.
Allowing surgeons to train on human cadavers will promote a better understanding of human anatomy, encourage confident handling of patients without risk of harm to the patient, reduce misinformation, and provide insight into anatomical differences.
The reason it took so long to learn anatomy had to do with religious and cultural taboos. Many religions consider dissection of a corpse to be an act of sacrilege or disrespect to a person. This has led to centuries of bans from religious institutions such as the Catholic Church.
These limitations limited our understanding of human anatomy, as doctors could only study anatomical problems using animal cadavers. Animals do not have the same anatomy as humans, which has hindered advancements in medicine.
To study the corpses, medical professionals and students resorted to the unsavory practice of stealing corpses.
Body snatching is rare today, but it was once common as organizations were desperate to expand their knowledge of the human body. As a result, medical facilities often purchased stolen corpses from body snatchers known as resurrectionists.
Body snatching has been around for centuries, with the first recorded incident occurring in Bologna, Italy in 1319. However, this practice became much more common in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in England.
In England, human dissection was completely banned until 1506. That year, King James IV of Scotland allowed a barber in Edinburgh to dissect criminals.
England followed suit in 1540, when King Henry VIII allowed barber-surgeons to receive the bodies of four executed criminals each year. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth I granted the same rights to medical associations. Doctors were unable to practice, and the number of cadavers available was very limited.
The problem worsened as Britain opened more hospitals and medical schools, deepening the shortage of corpses and forcing institutions to desperately look for alternative means of studying anatomy.
To help supply these corpses, the British government passed the Murder Act of 1752. This law required that murderers be executed and then dissected or hanged in chains.
These laws were created to prevent people from committing murder, as many people viewed dissection as a fate worse than death. It also aimed to reduce body snatching by providing more bodies to institutions.
This new law benefited surgeons and increased the supply of cadavers. But it still wasn’t enough. Surgeons visited prisons and bribed guards to secure more corpses. This resulted in many bodies being illegally handed over to medical institutions.
Local authorities in England have recognized the problem and sought further solutions. An example of one of these solutions was that in Edinburgh, anatomists could dissect corpses found on the streets or those that had died violently. They also received the bodies of suicide victims, unclaimed children and deceased babies.
Now you’d think that with the promised supply of criminals and allowing bodies to be picked up off the streets, there would be enough bodies for medical institutions to practice on. But this is far from the truth.
In fact, many medical institutions had difficulty recovering the bodies due to the angry crowd. This was especially true at the execution site.
Since most of the bodies supplied to medical institutions at this time were executed prisoners, people who witnessed executions could try to keep the bodies of executed felons away from the authorities. This was often due to distrust of the government and religious reasons.
The crowd’s anger often caused authorities to not back down, resulting in anatomists being unable to take over the bodies and instead returning them to their families. Authorities weren’t about to put up too much of a fight for the dead felon’s body.
The demand for fresh corpses led to a blossoming of the body snatching industry, and by 1720 body snatching was a common operation in both Edinburgh and London.
Corpses and body parts have become commodities. The market was fierce, and anatomy schools, private surgeons, and artists all wanted bodies. Many body snatchers have made a lot of money.
Body snatchers went by many different names at the time. However, “Resurrection Man” or “Resurrectionist” was the most common name. This is because they “raised” the dead from the grave.
Resurrectionists sneaked into cemeteries at night. They discovered a new grave, dug it up, opened the coffin, and exhumed the body. Robbery was punished more harshly than robbing a corpse, so corpses were stripped naked to avoid charges of theft.
The illegal trade in human remains relied on sophisticated underground conspiracies. Resurrection Men typically operate in organized gangs and utilize extensive networks to promote their activities. These criminals often bribe gravediggers and church officials to obtain information about recent burials or to ignore nightly activity in cemeteries.
Moreover, medical institutions were not simply passive beneficiaries. They were fully aware of these methods and actively promoted the practice to maintain a supply of corpses.
Resurrection men often targeted pauper burial sites to minimize legal risk. These sites, which served as final resting places for unclaimed bodies or for those who could not afford individual plots, were particularly efficient for looters because a single pauper grave could contain up to a dozen bodies.
Because working quietly was the key, the process was meticulous. Body recovery can be completed in under an hour, and our trained team can remove up to six bodies per night. No corpse was safe, as corpses of all ages and genders were needed.
The bodies were taken to various locations and distributed to medical facilities, private schools, or exported to villages in need of bodies. It was common to meet resurrected people in the dissection room, sell corpses, negotiate deals, and take orders.
All corpses were found, but the price of the corpse was usually determined by size. A resurrectionist could earn up to 16 guineas for a corpse, the equivalent of three to four months of normal wages. Even after calculating the cost of bribes and profit sharing among members, the gang remained highly profitable.
Body snatching, already prevalent in the 18th century, boomed in the 19th century. This is because the British judicial system was reformed and the frequency of executions decreased. This created a huge imbalance between supply and demand for corpses.
By the early 19th century, grave robbing had become much more organized. Prestigious institutions such as St Thomas’ Hospital regularly employed gangs to remove corpses.
As body snatching became common in England, friends and family of the newly deceased guarded the bodies until they could be buried. Many people stayed overnight to prevent the graves from being dug up.
It also became common to place sturdy iron cages, called mortises, around graves to keep the remains inside. The jewelry was left on the grave for about a month until the body had decomposed enough that it no longer had monetary value.
As public concern about body snatching grows, one incident has drawn widespread attention to the practice.
In 1828, William Burke and William Hare were friends who ran a boarding house in Edinburgh. They happened to get into the body snatching business when their boarder, Old Donald, died of natural causes. Donald died because of a debt he owed them, and they sold his body to pay off the debt.
They buried a coffin filled with bark and took Donald’s body to a private medical school in Edinburgh run by Professor Robert Knox. They received more than double what Donald owed.
Burke and Hare saw an opportunity and entered the cadava business. However, they circumvented grave robbing by supplying their own victims.
They used boarding houses as cover, inviting people in and giving them lots of alcohol to weaken them. When their victims were unable to fight back, they suffocated them and sold their bodies to Professor Knox in Surgeon’s Square.
Burke and Hare were killed over a 10-month period and are believed to have killed 16 people. They were captured after the body of the last victim was identified during Professor Knox’s class.
Burke and Hare were caught and arrested. Hare turned on Burke and had Burke executed for his crimes. Ironically, Burke’s body was handed over to an anatomist to be dissected.
The pair’s crimes prompted the rest of the gang to skip the grave robbing and commit murder. The most notable example of this was the London Burkers, who were eventually arrested for having “suspiciously fresh” corpses.
The public was appalled by these crimes and demanded swift punishment for the criminals. Public outcry led the government to pay more attention to the problem of body snatching.
The British government first began discussing how to deal with the body snatching crisis in 1828. Congress formed the Special Committee on Anatomy in 1828 to obtain input on the matter from medical experts, eyewitnesses, government officials, and three resurrectionists.
The hearings led Congress to agree that the study of anatomy was important and to gain a deeper understanding of the demand for cadavers and the relationship between resurrectionists and anatomists.
After the hearing, the group recommended that anatomists be given access to the cadavers of the poor or the poor, unclaimed and unidentified, since dissection was so important in the field.
The first bill granting anatomists access to the poor was introduced to Parliament by Henry Warburton in 1829, but it was quickly rejected by the House of Lords and the bill was withdrawn.
The bill was brought back to parliament by Warburton two years later, after the London Burkers were captured and executed. This time there was more public support behind the bill due to fears that more resurrected men would commit murder to supply bodies.
Although there was still significant public outcry against the bill, Warburton was able to speed it through Parliament and pass the Anatomy Act of 1832. The bill took several steps, including repealing the 1752 Murder Act and allowing bodies to be taken for anatomy unless the individual objected.
The Anatomy Act of 1832 was central to body snatching. The Resurrection Man continued to operate for a while after the law was passed, but demand for its corpses continued to decline over the next decade until it became virtually useless.
Body snatching remained a legal gray area until 1857, when the Burial Act was passed. The law made it illegal to exhume human remains without a license, regulated burial practices, and ensured the security of burial sites.
The revivalist story sits at the uneasy intersection of progress and morality. The result was reforms that created better medical knowledge, better trained surgeons, and eventually legal and ethical ways to study the human body.
But their trade also showed how fear and poverty can be exploited when society fails to meet the demands for change. Today, their world of midnight graveyards and stolen corpses seems distant, but the bigger questions remain timeless. That is, how far people will go in pursuit of knowledge.
