Hordes of gang-like resurrection men competed for business as anatomists and doctors competed to find the best suppliers of fresh corpses.

The affluent often buried their loved ones with great iron bands around the coffins, and some people were buried within 'mort-safes': fortress graves complete with walls and gates to keep the grave robbers out. In many graveyards, watchtowers were built within so that people could keep an eye out for body snatchers. Anatomists spawned a new profession: resurrection men.' These body snatchers became the plague of the bereaved. A paper by medical historian, Ruth Richardson, says: 'Body snatching started to happen all over the place. In Britain, surgeons had to take more extreme measures. In some places in Europe, anatomy schools were allowed to take bodies from poor hospitals. There were simply not enough bodies supplied by the hangman's gallows or deceased vagrants to meet demand. Most people believed dissection was equivalent to damnation. In the public eye, there remained a strong belief that in order to stand a chance of redemption, a corpse should be left intact, undisturbed by what was seen a desecration of human bodies. The family of the condemned man sometimes tried to get the body back as soon as possible, since in some rare cases it was possible to revive a recently hanged man. It therefore, was difficult for students of anatomy to get access to others. Public executions provided only one legitimate source of corpses, (the others being transients who died of natural causes). There were an excess of trainee surgeons, but only a small amount of reasonably fresh bodies to study. Cheselden, seeking respectability for this practice, unwittingly set surgery on a darker path. Most started out using bodies of executed criminals or unknown vagrants who'd died of natural causes. Physiology and anatomy was a relatively new science, and the only way for the medical experts to clearly study the human body, and to show and teach students, was growing. The Buisness of Grave Robbing: The Resurrectionstsĭoctor's all across Europe in the early 19th century were in great need of bodies for medical school examination and dissection. In this essay on the infamous pair, spurred on by the demand for fresh human corpses for dissection, we shall look at the facts of this sinister case. But the story we usually get is incorrect and often embellished legend. Their story is a bit different from the usual 'body snatchers' and is a loathsome tale.

Most of us have heard the names of Burke and Hare and other awful grave robbing deeds.

Burke and Hare by Owen Dudley Edwards