During the 19th century, the sensational serial murders associated with Burke and Hare and the London Burkers led to legislation which provided scientists and medical schools with legal ways of obtaining cadavers.
During his years at the University of Padua, Andreas Vesalius made it clear that he had taken human remains from graveyards and ossuaries for his classic anatomical text De humani corporis fabrica.
[7] The most recent account of anatomy murders was in 1992, when a Colombian activist, Juan Pablo Ordoñez, claimed that 14 poor residents of Barranquilla, Colombia, had been killed to provide cadavers for the local medical school.
For these reasons, legislation from the 19th century on has focused on removing the motive for murder by providing legal sources of cadavers for medical research and teaching.
In Great Britain, the Anatomy Act 1832 provided for cheap, legal cadavers by turning over the bodies of those who died in caretaker institutions to medical schools.
Although there were public protests at using the bodies of the poor as raw material for medical students, proponents of the act were able to use fear of burking in order to get it passed.