Resurrectionists were body snatchers who were commonly employed by anatomists in the United Kingdom during the 18th and 19th centuries to exhume the bodies of the recently dead. Between 1506 and 1752 very few cadavers were legally available each year for anatomical research. The supply was increased when, in an attempt to intensify the deterrent effect of the death penalty, Parliament passed the 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. This proved insufficient to meet the needs of the hospitals and teaching centres that opened during the 18th century. Corpses and their component parts became a commodity, but although the practice of disinterment was hated by the general public, bodies were not legally anyone's property. The resurrectionists therefore operated in a legal grey area.

Nevertheless, resurrectionists caught plying their trade ran the risk of physical attack. Measures taken to stop them included increased security at graveyards. 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. Body snatchers were not the only people to come under attack; in the public's view, the 1752 Act made anatomists agents of the law, enforcers of the death penalty. Riots at execution sites, from where anatomists collected legal corpses, were commonplace.

Matters came to a head following the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. 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.

Legal background

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. The Christian church forbade human dissection until the 14th century, when the first recorded anatomisation of a cadaver took place in Bologna. Until then, anatomical research was limited to the dissection of animals. In Britain, human dissection was proscribed by law until 1506, when King James IV of Scotland gave royal patronage to the Barber-Surgeons of Edinburgh, allowing them to dissect the "bodies of certain executed criminals". England followed in 1540, when Henry VIII gave patronage to the Company of Barber-Surgeons, allowing them access to four executed felons each year (Charles II later increased this to six felons each year). Elizabeth I granted the College of Physicians the right to anatomise four felons annually in 1564.

Several major hospitals and teaching centres were established in Britain during the 18th century, but with only a very few corpses legally available for dissection, these institutions suffered from severe shortages. 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". Suicide victims were given over, as were infants who had died while being born and also the unclaimed bodies of abandoned children. But even though they were supported by the common law, anatomists occasionally found it difficult to collect what was granted to them. Fuelled by resentment of how readily the death penalty was used, and imbued with superstitious beliefs, crowds sometimes sought to keep the bodies of executed felons away from the authorities. Riots at execution sites were commonplace; worried about possible disorder, in 1749 the Sheriff of London ignored the surgeons and gave the dead to their relatives.

These problems, together with a desire to enhance the deterrent effect of the death penalty, resulted in the passage of the Murder Act 1752. It required that "every murderer shall, after execution, either be dissected or hung in chains". Dissection was generally viewed as "a fate worse than death"; giving judges the ability to substitute gibbeting with dissection was an attempt to invoke that horror. While the Act gave anatomists statutory access to many more cadavers than were previously available, it proved insufficient. Attempting to bolster the supply, some surgeons offered money to pay the prison expenses and funeral clothing costs of condemned prisoners, while bribes were paid to officials present at the gallows, sometimes leading to an unfortunate situation in which corpses not legally given over for dissection were taken anyway.

Commodification Documented cases of grave robbery for medical purposes can be found as far back as 1319. The 15th-century polymath Leonardo da Vinci may have secretly dissected around 30 corpses, although their provenance remains unknown. In Britain, the practice appears to have been common early in the 17th century. 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. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones" and in 1678, anatomists were suspected of being involved in the disappearance of an executed gypsy's body. Contracts issued in 1721 by the Edinburgh College of Surgeons include a clause directing students not to become involved in exhumation, suggesting, according to historian Ruth Richardson, that students had already done the exact opposite. 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.

It has long been thought that the unauthorised removal of bodies from London graveyards became commonplace by the 1720s and that fresh corpses had likely undergone commodification, probably as a direct result of the lack of legally available bodies for anatomical research. Recent research has discovered and examined a spate of early cases of churchyard body snatching. These cases suggest the practice emerged in London during the 1710s, that the earliest known prosecutions for body snatching probably set judicial precedent in London, and that the thefts were usually well-organised and by proxy. 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.

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. Encouraged by fierce competition, anatomy schools usually paid more promptly than their peers, who included individual surgeons, artists and others with an interest in human anatomy. As one body snatcher testified, "a man may make a good living at it, if he is a sober man, and acts with judgement, and supplies the schools".

In London, by the late 18th century, anatomists may have delegated their grave-robbing almost entirely to body snatchers, or, as they were commonly known, resurrectionists. A fifteen-strong gang of such men, exposed in Lambeth in 1795, supplied "eight surgeons of public repute, and a man who calls himself an Articulator". 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". These prices were by no means fixed; the black market value of corpses varied considerably. Giving evidence to the 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy, the surgeon Astley Cooper testified that in 1828 the price for a corpse was about eight guineas, but also that he had paid anything from two to fourteen guineas previously; others claimed they had paid up to twenty guineas per corpse. 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. Surgeons at the Royal College in Edinburgh complained that resurrectionists were profiteering, particularly when local shortages forced prices up. One surgeon told the Select Committee that he thought the body snatchers were manipulating the market for their own benefit, though no criticism was made of the "Anatomy Club", an attempt by anatomists to control the price of corpses for their benefit.

Prices also varied depending on what type of corpse was for sale. With greater opportunity for the study of musculature, males were preferable to females, while freaks were more highly valued. The body of Charles Byrne, the so-called "Irish Giant", fetched about £500 when it was bought by John Hunter. Byrne's skeleton remains on display at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Children's bodies were also traded, as "big smalls", "smalls" or foetuses. Parts of corpses, such as a scalp with long hair attached, or good quality teeth, also fetched good prices—not because they held any intrinsic value to the anatomist, but rather because they were used to refurbish the living.

With no reliable figures for the number of dissections that took place in 18th-century Britain, the true scale of body snatching can only be estimated. Richardson suggests that nationally, several thousand bodies were robbed each year. The 1828 Select Committee reported that in 1826, 592 bodies were dissected by 701 students. In 1831, only 52 of 1,601 death penalties handed down were enacted, a number far too small to meet demand. Since corpses were not viewed as property and could neither be owned nor stolen, body snatching remained quasi-legal, the crime being committed against the grave rather than the body. On the rare occasions they were caught, resurrectionists might have received a public whipping, or a sentence for crimes against public mores, but generally the practice was treated by the authorities as an open secret and ignored. A notable exception occurred in Great Yarmouth in 1827, with the capture of three resurrectionists. At a time when thieves were regularly transported for theft, two of the body snatchers were discharged and the third, sent to London for trial, was imprisoned for only six months. Resurrectionists were also aided by the corpse's anatomisation; since the process also destroyed the evidence, a successful prosecution was unlikely.

Resurrection

Method