Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom

By allowing judges to substitute the public display of executed criminals with dissection (a fate generally viewed with horror), the new law significantly increased the number of bodies anatomists could legally access.

Night watches patrolled grave sites, the rich placed their dead in secure coffins, and physical barriers such as mortsafes and heavy stone slabs made extraction of corpses more difficult.

Parliament responded by setting up the 1828 Select Committee on anatomy, whose report emphasised the importance of anatomical science and recommended that the bodies of paupers be given over for dissection.

In response to the discovery in 1831 of a gang known as the London Burkers, who apparently modelled their activities on those of Burke and Hare, Parliament debated a bill submitted by Henry Warburton, author of the Select Committee's report.

Although it did not make body snatching illegal, the resulting Act of Parliament effectively put an end to the work of the resurrectionists by allowing anatomists access to the workhouse dead.

Human cadavers have been dissected by physicians since at least the 3rd century BC, but throughout history, prevailing religious views on the desecration of corpses often meant that such work was performed in secrecy.

Some local authorities had already attempted to alleviate the problem, with limited success; in 1694, Edinburgh allowed anatomists to dissect corpses "found dead in the streets, and the bodies of such as die violent deaths ... who shall have nobody to own them".

For example, William Shakespeare's epitaph on his gravestone in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon reads "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here.

[14] Pupils accompanied professional body snatchers as observers, and were reported to have obtained and paid for their studies with human corpses, perhaps indicating that their tutors were complicit.

Most (if not all) of these incidents were perpetrated by surgeons educated at St Thomas' Hospital, who bribed corrupt sextons and grave diggers to steal on their behalf, and then dissected the stolen corpses during private anatomy lecture courses.

[16] "The Corporation of Corpse-stealers, I am told, support themselves and Families very comfortably; and that no one should be surpriz'd at the Name of such a Society, the late Resurrections in St. Saviour's, St. Giles's, and St. Pancras's Churchyards, are memorable Instances of this laudable Profession."

Corpses and parts thereof were traded like any other merchandise: packed into suitable containers, salted and preserved, stored in cellars and quays and transported in carts, waggons and boats.

[c] The report into their activities lists a price of two guineas and a crown for a dead body, six shillings for the first foot, and nine pence per inch "for all it measures more in length".

[21] Compared to the five shillings an East End silk weaver could earn each week, or the single guinea a manservant to a wealthy household was paid, these were considerable sums of money and body snatching was therefore a highly profitable business.

When the suspects were brought out to be transported to the local magistrates, the approximately 40-strong force of police officers found it difficult to "prevent their prisoners being sacrificed by the indignant multitude, which was most anxious to inflict such punishment upon them as it thought they deserved.

[40] The London Borough Gang, which operated from about 1802 to 1825, at its peak consisted of at least six men, led first by a former hospital porter named Ben Crouch, and later by a man called Patrick Murphy.

The gang also attempted to put rivals out of business, sometimes by desecrating a graveyard (thereby rendering it unsafe to rob graves from for weeks thereafter) and other times by reporting freelance resurrectionists to the police, recruiting them once freed from prison.

Such deterrents were sometimes deployed in vain; at least one London graveyard was owned by an anatomist who, it was reported, "obtained a famous supply [of cadavers] ... and he could charge pretty handsomely for burying a body there, and afterwards get from his pupils from eight to twelve guineas for taking it up again!

[44][45] They may not have been secure enough; as one 20th-century writer observed, an empty coffin found beneath a buried mortsafe in Aberlour had probably been "opened during the night succeeding the funeral, and carefully closed again, so that the disturbance of the soil had escaped notice or had been attributed to the original burial.

Bribes were also paid, usually to servants of recently deceased employers then lying in state, although this method carried its own risks as corpses were often placed on public display before they were buried.

"[54] Vincent Davis, convicted in 1725 of murdering his wife, said he would rather be "hang'd in Chains" than "anatomiz'd", and to that effect had "sent many Letters to all his former Friends and Acquaintance to form a Company, and prevent the Surgeons in their Designs upon his Body".

Relatives of a man executed in 1820 killed one anatomist and shot another in the face,[57][58] while in 1831, following the discovery of buried human flesh and three dissected bodies, a mob burnt down an anatomy theatre in Aberdeen.

[59] Some aspects of the popular view of dissection were exemplified by the final panel of William Hogarth's The Four Stages of Cruelty, a series of engravings that depict a felon's journey to the anatomical theatre.

According to author Fiona Haslam, the scene reflects a popular view that surgeons were "on the whole, disreputable, insensitive to human suffering and prone to victimis[ing] people in the same way that criminals victimised their prey.

Joshua Brookes once admitted that he had kicked a corpse in a sack down a flight of stairs,[63] while Robert Christison complained of the "shocking indecency without any qualifying wit" demonstrated by a male lecturer who dissected a woman.

[65] In March 1828, in Liverpool, three defendants charged with conspiracy and unlawfully procuring and receiving a corpse buried in Warrington were acquitted, while the remaining two were found guilty of possession.

[69] Following a spirited defence of the poor by peers in the House of Lords, it was withdrawn,[i] but almost two years later Warburton introduced a second bill, shortly after the execution of John Bishop and Thomas Williams.

[72] The resulting wave of social anxiety helped speed Warburton's bill through Parliament,[73] and despite much public opprobrium, with little Parliamentary opposition the Anatomy Act 1832 became law on 1 August 1832.

[74] It abolished that part of the 1752 Act that allowed murderers to be dissected, ending the centuries-old tradition of anatomising felons, although it neither discouraged nor prohibited body snatching, or the sale of corpses (whose legal status remained uncertain).

As the poor were often barely literate and therefore unable to leave written directions in the event of their death, this meant that masters of charitable institutions such as workhouses decided who went to the anatomist's table.