Body snatching
[1] Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom, who often worked in teams and who primarily targeted more recently dug graves, would be hired in order to provide medical institutions and practitioners with a supply of fresh cadavers for the purpose of anatomical study.
[4] However, in 1832, Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Anatomy Act 1832, which gave doctors and medical students the right to dissect donated bodies for education and research purposes.
Later, in 1847, physicians formed the American Medical Association, in an effort to differentiate between the "true science" of medicine and "the assumptions of ignorance and empiricism" based on an education without the experience of human dissection.
[21] His advertisement in the local paper stated the following: "A Course of lectures will be delivered this Winter upon the several Branches of Physick, for the Improvement of all such as are desirous of obtaining medical Knowledge: Those who propose attending, are requested to make Application as soon as possible, as the Course will commence in a few days."
Horner, professor of anatomy at University of Pennsylvania, who wrote back: "Since the opening of our lectures, the town has been so uncommonly healthy, that I have not been able to obtain a fourth part of subjects required for our dissecting rooms.
Revere called upon John Godman who suggested that Warren employ the services of James Henderson, "a trusty old friend and servant" who could "at any time, and almost to any number, obtain the articles you desire.
In February 1787, a group of free blacks petitioned the city's common council about the medical students, who "under cover of night...dig up the bodies of the deceased, friends and relatives of the petitioners, carry them away without respect to age or sex, mangle their flesh out of wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.
"Burglar proof grave vaults made of steel" were sold with the promise that loved ones' remains would not be one of the 40,000 bodies "mutilated every year on dissecting tables in medical colleges in the United States.
Lanne's head, hands and feet were removed illegally by surgeon William Crowther and members of the Royal Society of Tasmania before he was buried, and the rest of his body was stolen after his burial.
[37] Project Sunshine was launched during the height of the Cold War as a series of multinational studies concerning the danger posed to humans by radioactive isotopes as a result of nuclear fallout.
The Australian government became involved in the program during the mid-1950s, and began collecting body parts from citizens during autopsies, including many children, most often without their next of kin consenting or even being made aware.
[38] The practice was also common in other parts of the British Empire, such as Canada, where religious customs as well as the lack of means of preservation made it hard for medical students to obtain a steady supply of fresh bodies.
[45] Although the practice has long been abandoned in modern China, some superstitious families in isolated rural areas still pay very high prices for the procurement of female corpses for deceased unmarried male relatives.
It is speculated that the very high death toll among young male miners in these areas has led more and more entrepreneurial body snatchers to steal female cadavers from graves and then resell them through the black market to families of the deceased.
In 2014 two local funerary practice officials in the Guangdong province of China were arrested for hiring body snatchers to acquire corpses in order to meet cremation quotas.
[49] For over 200 years, the city of Kolkata, in the north-eastern region of India, has been known to be the center of a network of bone traders who remove skeletons from graveyards in order to sell them to universities and hospitals abroad.
[50] According to journalist Scott Carney, historically members of the Domar caste, who traditionally performed cremations, were pressed into service processing bones;[51] skeletons were exported from India to be used in anatomy classes worldwide.
The Indian government banned the export of human remains in the mid-1980s, but body snatching is still thriving, even if secretly, in many parts of the country as a result of ineffective laws and poverty.
[55] In The Netherlands, poorhouses were accustomed to receiving a small fee by undertakers who paid a fine for ignoring burial laws and resold the bodies (especially those with no family) to doctors.
The act was politically motivated, as a message reading "murderers and traitors cannot rest in sacred ground 1956–2006" (taken from a song by far-right rock band Kárpátia) was left nearby.
[65] This gang was arrested after they exhumed dozens of graves from Muslim cemeteries in Burdwan district, and smuggled the skeletons not just to medical institutions in need of cadavers across the world, but also to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for use in Buddhist monasteries.
The investigating officer of the incident, Ravinder Nalwa, reported to a Reuters journalist that, "during the interrogation the gang members confessed that the hollow human thigh bones were in great demand in monasteries and were used as blow-horns, and the skulls as vessels to drink from at religious ceremonies."
The criminal lawyer, Majid Menon, acknowledges that the dire economic conditions for vast numbers of people living in such states as Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand and some parts of Uttar Pradesh, have favored the practice of body snatching till date and given room for bone smugglers to flourish.
[66] And even though to date police have been unable to unearth any irregularity in the skeleton trade, the exporter-turned-moralist, Sanker Narayan Sen, maintains that the people from the Domar caste are often responsible for body snatching and later process the procured cadavers for export.
[69] Hammond's remains were taken by animal rights activists who were campaigning against Darley Oaks Farm, a licensed facility that bred guinea pigs for scientific research.
In February 2006, Michael Mastromarino, then a 42-year-old former New Jersey-based oral surgeon and CEO and executive director of operations at Biomedical Tissue Services, was convicted along with three employees of illegally harvesting human bones, organs, tissue and other cadaver parts from individuals awaiting cremation, for forging numerous consent forms, and for selling the illegally obtained body parts to medical companies without consent of their families, and then sentenced to long prison terms.
One of the main characters Joseph Curwen is a merchant and slave trader who steals corpses of well-known individuals around the world and brings them to Providence to torture them until they share their secrets.
In Tess Gerritsen's 2007 novel The Bone Garden, set in Boston in 1830, the protagonist Norris Marshall, a talented but poor medical student, attempts to pay his college tuition by working as a "resurrectionist".
[82] The main character Injun Joe in the popular literature work The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, takes the opportunity to murder Dr. Robinson when he and Muff Potter are hired by him for body snatching.
[85] In popular culture, music referencing the act of body snatching includes the Pet Shop Boys' song "The Resurrectionist" which appeared as a bonus track on "I'm with Stupid", the first single from their 2006 album Fundamental.
