Medical Schools Needed Corpses. So They Paid People to Steal Them.
Quick Answer
What were body snatchers? Body snatchers, also called resurrection men, were people who dug up fresh graves and sold the bodies to medical schools in 18th and 19th century Britain and America. It was legal: a corpse had no owner under English law, so taking one wasn't a crime. The trade ended after Britain's Anatomy Act of 1832 and similar American laws made unclaimed bodies from workhouses legally available to anatomy schools, eliminating the market.
Body snatchers had a simple business model: dig up a fresh grave, pull out the body, and sell it to a medical school. They did this because medical schools needed cadavers to teach surgery and were running out of legal ways to get them. For about a hundred years, nobody in power found a better solution, so the grave robbing continued, got worse, and eventually produced William Burke and William Hare, who decided that waiting for people to die was inefficient.
The anatomy problem
Britain's official answer to the cadaver shortage, formalized in the Murder Act of 1752, was to allow dissection as an extra punishment for convicted murderers. Dissection was considered deeply shameful. It denied the body a Christian burial. It was meant to terrify. The problem was that there were never enough executions to supply the demand. Edinburgh's anatomy schools alone needed hundreds of bodies a year by the early 1800s. Executions produced dozens.
The gap between supply and demand was filled by professionals.
How the resurrection men worked
They typically worked at night, two or three to a crew. They didn't excavate the entire grave. They dug at the head end only, exposing the top of the coffin, broke it open, and used a rope or hook to drag the body out. Before leaving, they stripped it of all clothing and jewelry and put those back in the ground.
This wasn't respect. It was law. A corpse had no legal owner in English law. Taking a body wasn't a crime. Taking clothing or jewelry was theft, a serious offense. The resurrection men understood the distinction and operated accordingly.
A fresh body could fetch £8 to £10 in early 19th century Edinburgh, more than a laborer earned in a month. Some anatomy schools had standing arrangements with specific crews and paid by subscription. The trade ran like any other supply chain, complete with pricing tiers for freshness and condition.
What families did to protect their dead
The people who could afford to protect their dead did. Iron cages called mortsafes were bolted over graves, too heavy to move without equipment. Some cemeteries built watch houses, small stone buildings at the gate where families or hired guards would sit through the night for several weeks after a burial, until the body had decomposed past usefulness for anatomy. Some families buried their dead in their gardens. Some in their cellars.
The Victorians' elaborate rituals around death and burial, which we covered in our post on Victorian mourning culture, were partly a response to exactly this: the fear that a burial wasn't permanent, that the body could be taken, that death itself could be undone by someone with a shovel and a buyer. The mortsafe is the iron logic of that fear, made literal.
Burke and Hare
The trade's natural conclusion arrived in Edinburgh in 1828. William Burke and William Hare didn't bother with graves. They murdered people instead.
Their method was suffocation, which left no obvious marks and didn't damage the merchandise. They sold the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox at the Edinburgh anatomy school, who charged premium prices for freshness and got it. Knox asked no questions. Sixteen victims in roughly a year, mostly poor people, immigrants, and lodgers at Hare's boarding house: the kind of people who wouldn't be immediately missed.
They were caught when two other lodgers found a body hidden under a bed of straw. Hare turned King's evidence against Burke and walked free. Knox was never charged. Burke was hanged in January 1829 in front of a crowd of 25,000 people who reportedly screamed "Burke him!" during the proceedings. His body was publicly dissected the next morning, as the law required for executed murderers.
His skeleton is still on display at the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh. His skin was tanned and used to bind a small pocketbook. The pocketbook also still exists.
The Anatomy Act and what it actually meant
Parliament passed the Anatomy Act of 1832, partly in direct response to Burke and Hare. It solved the supply problem by making unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals legally available to anatomy schools.
The grave robbing stopped, mostly. The anatomy schools got their cadavers. The people being dissected were no longer executed murderers. They were the destitute: people who died in workhouses with no family to claim them. Critics pointed this out at the time. Parliament wasn't particularly troubled by it.
The United States passed similar laws state by state throughout the 19th century. American body snatchers had disproportionately targeted Black cemeteries, where communities had less legal protection and less ability to mount a watch. The transition to legally obtained unclaimed bodies didn't change that pattern. It just changed the paperwork. Historians have documented that Black Americans continued to be disproportionately dissected under the new laws, for the same reason they'd been disproportionately dug up under the old ones.
If you're drawn to the darker side of history, our Coming Out of the Grave T-shirt is a fitting tribute. The full death collection has more where that came from.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What were body snatchers?
Body snatchers, also called resurrection men, were people who dug up freshly buried corpses and sold them to medical schools and anatomy schools in 18th and 19th century Britain and America. The practice was technically legal in England because a corpse had no owner under English law, meaning stealing a body wasn't a crime the way stealing property was. The trade was driven by a chronic shortage of legally available cadavers for medical education.
Why did medical schools buy stolen bodies?
Anatomical dissection was the only way to learn surgery in the 18th and 19th centuries. The legal supply of cadavers, primarily executed murderers, was far too small to meet demand. Medical schools, facing a choice between turning away students or asking no questions about where the bodies came from, largely chose the latter. The anatomy schools at Edinburgh, London, and later American cities had established relationships with resurrection men and paid competitive rates for fresh specimens.
Who were Burke and Hare?
William Burke and William Hare were Irish immigrants living in Edinburgh who murdered at least 16 people between 1827 and 1828 and sold the bodies to the anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Unlike typical body snatchers, they didn't rob graves; they killed people directly, using suffocation to avoid visible injuries. Hare testified against Burke in exchange for immunity and was never convicted. Burke was hanged in January 1829 and his body publicly dissected. His skeleton remains on display at the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh.
What is a mortsafe?
A mortsafe is a heavy iron cage or framework designed to be bolted over a fresh grave to prevent body snatching. They were used primarily in Scotland and parts of England in the early 19th century. Once the body had decomposed sufficiently to be useless for anatomy, the mortsafe would be removed and reused. Some churchyards also built mort houses, stone vaults where bodies were stored until decomposition made them unsaleable, and watch houses where guards could monitor the cemetery at night.
How did body snatching end?
In Britain, the Anatomy Act of 1832 ended the trade by making unclaimed bodies from workhouses, hospitals, and prisons legally available to anatomy schools. This created a reliable legal supply of cadavers and eliminated the economic incentive for grave robbing. The United States passed similar anatomy acts state by state through the 19th century. Critics at the time noted that the laws effectively substituted the poor for criminals as the primary source of dissection subjects, since unclaimed bodies came overwhelmingly from workhouses and paupers' graves.
Did body snatching happen in America?
Yes, extensively. American body snatching followed a similar pattern to Britain, driven by the same gap between medical school demand and legal cadaver supply. American resurrection men disproportionately targeted Black cemeteries, particularly in the South, where communities had less legal protection and fewer resources to guard graves. This wasn't incidental: Black burial grounds were targeted because the perpetrators calculated, often correctly, that the crime would face less legal consequence. Anatomy acts passed through the 19th century nominally solved the supply problem but continued to draw disproportionately on the bodies of the poor and Black Americans.
