Dear Shadow Tribe,
My Waterloo teeth post asked what the living took from the dead and placed into the mouths of the living. This is the direct sequel: the body itself, not just the teeth.
From the mid-1700s into the 1830s, medical schools in Britain needed fresh bodies to teach anatomy. They could not get enough legally, so a trade grew up to fill the gap: body snatching. The men in it were called Resurrection Men. They did not bring anyone back dead. Instead, they dug them up and sold them.
The shortage was written into the law. After 1752, the only bodies a school could take legally were those of executed murderers, handed over by the court for dissection. Hangings did not keep pace with the needs of the schools. London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow were turning out more surgeons every year, and each student was expected to dissect a corpse. There simply weren't enough even if they shared.
A Legal Loophole
The workaround sat in a loophole in the common law. A dead body was not property, therefore you couldn't be charged with with theft. Take the body and leave the linen and coffin in the grave, and you hadn't stolen anything the courts recognized. That was the whole business model. Go in at night, work fast, pull the corpse out, refill the grave so it looked untouched, and be gone before dawn. Relatives hired watchers. Churches built iron cages, called mortsafes, over new graves. Gangs of body snatchers still worked because the price was worth the risk.
My Waterloo teeth post asked what the living took from the dead and placed into the mouths of the living. This is the direct sequel: the body itself, not just the teeth.
From the mid-1700s into the 1830s, medical schools in Britain needed fresh bodies to teach anatomy. They could not get enough legally, so a trade grew up to fill the gap: body snatching. The men in it were called Resurrection Men. They did not bring anyone back dead. Instead, they dug them up and sold them.
The shortage was written into the law. After 1752, the only bodies a school could take legally were those of executed murderers, handed over by the court for dissection. Hangings did not keep pace with the needs of the schools. London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow were turning out more surgeons every year, and each student was expected to dissect a corpse. There simply weren't enough even if they shared.
A Legal Loophole
The workaround sat in a loophole in the common law. A dead body was not property, therefore you couldn't be charged with with theft. Take the body and leave the linen and coffin in the grave, and you hadn't stolen anything the courts recognized. That was the whole business model. Go in at night, work fast, pull the corpse out, refill the grave so it looked untouched, and be gone before dawn. Relatives hired watchers. Churches built iron cages, called mortsafes, over new graves. Gangs of body snatchers still worked because the price was worth the risk.
 |
Mortsafes, photo by Judy Wilson |
A body in London in the 1810s and 1820s typically brought four to twelve guineas, sometimes more in the teaching season, when cold weather also kept the goods usable. A guinea was twenty-one shillings. A weaver in the East End might clear five shillings a week. Split among a gang of three or four, one night’s work could still beat a month of more honest labor. The big London outfit, the Borough Gang of Ben Crouch, supplied St Thomas’s and St Bartholomew’s teaching hospitals, and the private anatomy schools.
One of the Resurrection Men, Joseph Naples, kept a diary for 1811–12. It reads like a delivery ledger: which churchyard, which hospital, what was paid, who had to be bribed to look the other way. The schools were the customers. They asked few questions and paid cash.
Burke and Hare, and Murder
Edinburgh, Scotland, ran the same market, just smaller tighter, and even more macabre. In November 1827 a tenant died in a lodging house in Tanner’s Close owing back rent. No family came for the body. William Hare and his wife ran the house, and they sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, the most popular anatomy lecturer in the city, for £7 10s. Knox wanted a steady supply and taught in the Paris style, which meant a corpse for the students, not a diagram.
William Burke was a lodger and laborer who lived at that same lodging house. Burke and Hare did the arithmetic and skipped the churchyard entirely. Over the next ten months they killed sixteen people, mostly poor, old, drunk, or alone, the sort of folks nobody would miss quickly. The method was suffocation: one held the victim down, the other closed the mouth and nose. No wounds, so the body still looked like a natural death when it reached the table. The word “burking” came out of that. Knox’s assistants paid £8 to £10 a body and did not inspect too closely. Hare turned king’s evidence. Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829, then dissected in public. His skeleton is still in Edinburgh. Knox was never charged. The crowd burned him in effigy anyway.
Bishop, Williams, and May: the London Burkers
London eventually produced its own murderous gang. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May already worked the churchyards. Bishop later claimed five hundred to a thousand bodies over twelve years, sold to St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’s, and King’s College. In November 1831 they brought a suspiciously fresh boy to King’s College and asked twelve guineas. The school offered nine and then noticed the body had not been buried. Bishop and Williams were hanged that December. May was transported. The papers called them the London Burkers.
Parliament had tolerated grave robbery for decades because the schools needed the bodies and the victims were mostly poor. Murder made the arrangement indefensible. The Anatomy Act of 1832 did not stop the body snatching. It changed who did it and who got paid. Unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals could now be sent to the schools by law. The Resurrection Men lost their market almost overnight. The supply became the poor who died with no one to claim them, and the payment was made to an institution instead of a gang.
The living needed something the dead still had. The schools needed subjects. The gangs needed cash. After 1832 the state needed the schools supplied without a scandal. The corpse was the goods in every version of the deal. Only the middleman changed.
Similar questions as the teeth: If the only way to train the surgeon who might cut on you later was a body taken from someone who could not refuse, whose body should it be, and who should be allowed to sell it?
Suggested Reading
Burke and Hare, and Murder
Edinburgh, Scotland, ran the same market, just smaller tighter, and even more macabre. In November 1827 a tenant died in a lodging house in Tanner’s Close owing back rent. No family came for the body. William Hare and his wife ran the house, and they sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, the most popular anatomy lecturer in the city, for £7 10s. Knox wanted a steady supply and taught in the Paris style, which meant a corpse for the students, not a diagram.
William Burke was a lodger and laborer who lived at that same lodging house. Burke and Hare did the arithmetic and skipped the churchyard entirely. Over the next ten months they killed sixteen people, mostly poor, old, drunk, or alone, the sort of folks nobody would miss quickly. The method was suffocation: one held the victim down, the other closed the mouth and nose. No wounds, so the body still looked like a natural death when it reached the table. The word “burking” came out of that. Knox’s assistants paid £8 to £10 a body and did not inspect too closely. Hare turned king’s evidence. Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829, then dissected in public. His skeleton is still in Edinburgh. Knox was never charged. The crowd burned him in effigy anyway.
Bishop, Williams, and May: the London Burkers
London eventually produced its own murderous gang. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May already worked the churchyards. Bishop later claimed five hundred to a thousand bodies over twelve years, sold to St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’s, and King’s College. In November 1831 they brought a suspiciously fresh boy to King’s College and asked twelve guineas. The school offered nine and then noticed the body had not been buried. Bishop and Williams were hanged that December. May was transported. The papers called them the London Burkers.
Parliament had tolerated grave robbery for decades because the schools needed the bodies and the victims were mostly poor. Murder made the arrangement indefensible. The Anatomy Act of 1832 did not stop the body snatching. It changed who did it and who got paid. Unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals could now be sent to the schools by law. The Resurrection Men lost their market almost overnight. The supply became the poor who died with no one to claim them, and the payment was made to an institution instead of a gang.
The living needed something the dead still had. The schools needed subjects. The gangs needed cash. After 1832 the state needed the schools supplied without a scandal. The corpse was the goods in every version of the deal. Only the middleman changed.
Similar questions as the teeth: If the only way to train the surgeon who might cut on you later was a body taken from someone who could not refuse, whose body should it be, and who should be allowed to sell it?
Suggested Reading
- Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987, revised 2001)
- Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (2004)
- Lisa Rosner, The Anatomy Murders (2009)
Between Shadows and Light,
Cade Shadowlight ☠
Please subscribe for free! Just click here.
If this post exposed a dark world to you, consider buying me a coffee so I can keep tracking the shadows they hope stay buried! → https://buymeacoffee.com/cadeshadowlight
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are posted without moderation. Use caution when following links. Please keep discussions civil and on-topic.