By the early 19th century, the rise of medical science – coinciding with a reduction in the number of executions – had caused demand to outstrip supply.

Among its members were John Abernethy, Charles Bell, Everard Home, Benjamin Brodie, Astley Cooper, and Henry Cline.

Public revulsion at the recent West Port murders swayed opinion in favour of a change in the law.

Henry Hunt, the MP for Preston, criticised the proposals, recommending instead "that the bodies of all our Kings be dissected, instead of expending seven or eight hundred thousand pounds of the public money for their interment.

In 1829 the Royal College of Surgeons petitioned against it, and it was withdrawn in the House of Lords owing to the opposition of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Howley.

The principal provision of the act was section 7, which stipulated that a person having lawful possession of a body could permit it to undergo "anatomical examination" (dissection) provided that no relative objected.

The act was effective in ending the practice of resurrectionists, who robbed graves as a means of obtaining corpses for medical study.

[3][6] Mobs continued to protest against the Act into the 1840s, in the belief that it still failed to prevent the sale of paupers' bodies for medical research without their consent.

An anatomical theatre in Cambridge was vandalised late in 1833 "by an angry mob determined to put a stop to the dissection of a man; this wave of popular protest alarmed the medical profession who resolved to hide its activities from the general public, and to a greater or lesser extent it has been doing so ever since".