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Oct 30, 2012 · Corpses sold for dissection by body snatchers helped improve understanding of how the human body worked, according to a new book that brings together archaeological evidence from their remains.
- No Body Is Safe
- The Resurrection Men
- No Questions Asked
- Bodies For Export
- Measures to Deter Body Snatchers
- Burke and Hare – Exporting Our Body Snatchers
- The End of Body Snatching – The Anatomy Act
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In eighteenth century Ireland the activities of body snatchers was a real problem throughout the country. It was by no means a new occurrence or confined to Ireland. However, with the increase of medical schools and the scarcity of legal cadavers on which anatomists could practice, the sale of fresh bodies became a profitable trade. At this time th...
The Resurrection Men, as they were known, worked in pairs and tended to operate in sprawling urban graveyards or isolated rural ones. There is no way to estimate the number of graves desecrated in this manner. The fresh grave just had to be dug at the top, the lid prised off with a metal tool the ‘coffin crowbar’ and the corpse pulled out by its he...
The bodies of the dead were usually undressed and delivered to the buyer naked. This was because stealing a corpse was considered merely a misdemeanour, but stealing a shroud was an offence punishable by transportation. There always seems to have been physicians, medical students and anatomists willing to purchase fresh bodies ‘no questions asked’....
Not only did body snatchers sell their ‘goods’ to local doctors and surgeons, there appears to have been a trade in bodies to Scotland. An account in Saunders News Letterof November 1824 tells of the body of an old woman being discovered in a wooden box ‘en route’ from Belfast to Greenock. In other cases, Irish medical students studying in Scotland...
Securing the Graves
Naturally families began to employ various devices to protect the remains of their loved ones. The rich could secure their dead in familial stone vaults with sturdy padlocked iron doors or gates. Others employed mort-safes. These were metal cage-like structures fitted over the grave. Large stone slabs were sometimes placed on top of the grave and iron coffins which were more difficult (and noisy) to open were also introduced at this time for those who could afford them. In some cases, the loc...
Keeping Watch at Shankill Graveyard
At Shankill Graveyard in Belfast, two local businessmen, William Sayers and Israel Milliken, paid to have a watch- house complete with fireplace, constructed in the cemetery. Here relatives, for a small fee, could sit guard. This would only last for a couple of weeks for by then the body would be too decomposed to be of value to an anatomist. The antiquarian and historian Francis Joseph Bigger describes how his uncle and cousins watched for 3 weeks over the grave of his deceased father. A tal...
Mort-Houses
Another ploy to thwart the body-snatchers was the construction of ‘mort-houses’. These were stone-built chambers erected in cemeteries. A family could pay to have a loved ones remains stored in the room until no longer fresh. Then the coffin would be interred in its final resting place in the graveyard. Rashee graveyard in the parish of Kilbride (among many others) had a mort-house built. Mort-houses, also known as corpse-houses were built in many graveyards in Ireland and could hold up to si...
The most infamous of the body-snatchers, who resorted to murder to supply ‘fresh goods’ were Burke and Hare. They plied their evil trade in Edinburgh, but both men originally came from Ireland.
In August 1832 the Anatomy Act was passed by parliament, perhaps influenced by a spree of copy-cat murders by a gang known as the London Burkers. Professional medical men could now apply for a free licence from the Home Secretary to preform dissections. New rules were set up to regulate the procedure. The bodies of executed criminals no longer auto...
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These two incidents created a huge public outcry, fuelling revulsion and outrage at the scourge of the body snatchers. Something had to be done, yet, at the same time, it was quietly acknowledged that these gruesome activities had, over the years, helped surgeons and anatomists to achieve significant advances and discoveries in the practice of ...
Yet the need for bodies created a profitable black market and ‘Resurrectionists’ or body snatchers became commonplace, leading to notorious cases of murder for the sole purpose of selling the...
Have you heard of the Resurrection Men, the criminal body snatchers who would rip fresh corpses from their graves and sell them to hospitals for dissection? Body snatching was a distasteful trade that flourished at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries in Britain.
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 ...
People also ask
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Oct 18, 2012 · The excavation evidence suggests that for a period of the 19th Century the London hospital had bypassed the body snatchers and used their unclaimed deceased patients for dissection practice.
