The Macabre Market: 6 Surprising Truths About the 18th-Century Body Snatching Trade
In the modern landscape of medical science, we operate under the strict governance of institutional review boards and a profound, legally codified respect for the deceased. However, the history of how we attained this knowledge contains a chapter that is as "lurid and entertaining" as it is ethically harrowing. In 18th-century England, the medical profession and the public found themselves at a violent cross-purpose. As scientific inquiry accelerated, surgeons faced a desperate choice: abandon the study of anatomy or embrace the black market. The result was the rise of the "resurrectionists," a class of men who turned the graveyard into a marketplace and the human corpse into the most sought-after commodity in London.
1. The Legal Loophole: It Wasn’t Illegal to Steal a Body
The explosion of the resurrection trade was facilitated by a bizarre "quirk of English law." In the 1700s, while the legal system was obsessed with property rights, the human cadaver occupied a strange vacuum: a corpse was not considered property. It could not be owned, bought, or willed. Consequently, stealing a body was not a felony—unless it was done for the purpose of witchcraft.
However, the items inside the grave (the shroud, the coffin, or the jewelry) were property belonging to the deceased’s heirs. To take these was a "hanging matter." This legal gray area effectively turned body snatching into a "common medical practice" because it allowed resurrectionists to avoid theft charges if they were careful. An anatomy professor in Dublin famously articulated this loophole to his students while eyeing the body of the giant Corney Magrath, warning them: "If you take only the body, there is no law whereby you can be touched, but if you so much as take a rag or a stocking with it, it is a hanging matter."
2. The Math of Medicine: 1,000 Students vs. 100 Legal Corpses
By the late 18th century, the demand for anatomical subjects reached a fever pitch. In 1793, there were roughly 200 medical students in London; by 1823, that number had surged to over 1,000. Each student was required to attend two full courses of anatomy, and surgeons, seeking to avoid "difficult cases" on living patients, practiced their techniques on cadavers first. The legal supply was tragically inadequate. Under a 1752 act by George II, the only bodies legally available for dissection were those of executed murderers. This law was intended to add "further terror and peculiar infamy" to the death penalty, essentially turning the medical profession into a de facto extension of the executioner. This backfired spectacularly; it made the prospect of dissection so repugnant to the public that they became fiercely protective of their dead. With the medical community competing for fewer than 100 legal bodies per year, the "thirst for knowledge" could only be quenched by the criminal underworld.
3. Infernal Machines: The Arms Race in the Graveyard
As the resurrectionists became more professional, the public responded with a literal arms race in the cemetery. Families who could afford it mounted night watches, guarding fresh graves for two to three weeks, the specific window of time required for the body to reach a state of decomposition that rendered it useless for dissection. For those who could not keep watch, the market provided "infernal machines" and deterrents, including:
• Spring guns: Booby traps rigged to fire at anyone disturbing the soil.
• Mort-safes: Heavy iron cages or fences locked over the grave.
• Patent Wrought Iron Coffins: Advertised by undertakers like Edward Lillie Bridgeman as "burglarproof" substitutes for wood.
The desperation of the era is best captured by the report of a father who, unable to secure his child’s grave, filled the coffin with gunpowder and a fuse, designed to explode the moment the lid was disturbed.
4. From Amateurs to the "Borough Gang" Mafia
Body snatching began with "gentlemen" amateurs, students and porters, but the high profitability soon attracted organized crime. The most notorious syndicate was the London Borough Gang, led by Ben Crouch, a "powerful, overbearing man" of superior intelligence. Under Crouch and his successor, Patrick Murphy, the gang ran the trade like a violent monopoly.
We see the cold economics of the trade in the 1811 diary of gang member Joseph Naples. While an adult corpse typically fetched £4/4/0 (a "small" was worth about £1/10), the market could be manipulated. Murphy utilized systematic extortion, demanding "starting money" and "finishing money" of up to 50 guineas from surgeons just to begin the season. To maintain their "seller's market," the gang would deliberately desecrate graveyards by leaving empty coffins on walls to provoke public fury, rendering the site "unsafe" for rival operators. When St. Thomas Hospital tried to buy from freelancers, Murphy’s men broke into the dissecting rooms "brandishing knives" and mutilated the specimens to intimidate the students.
5. The Surgeons’ Dirty Secret: High-Society Complicity
While the public viewed resurrectionists as the "lowest dregs of degradation," the elite of the medical establishment were their hidden patrons. Sir Astley Cooper, a brilliant surgeon and the first to ligate the common carotid artery, was the primary benefactor of the Borough Gang. Cooper’s arrogance was legendary, and used his immense influence to keep his suppliers out of jail, even paying pensions to the families of gang members while they served their terms. The medical establishment viewed the public's outrage as "ignorant hysterics," yet they were completely dependent on the very criminals they publicly disdained.
6. The "Burking" Refinement: When Grave-Robbing Became Murder
The trade reached its most horrific peak in 1828 with William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh. They realized that waiting for people to die was inefficient. Instead, they moved to "acquiring the bodies of paupers before they were dead." They committed 16 murders by plying victims with liquor and suffocating them, a method that left the specimens "so fresh" and free of violence. The duo sold their victims to the private school of surgeon Robert Knox. When the crimes were discovered, public fury was directed "impartially against the murderers and the surgeons." While Burke was hanged and publicly dissected, Knox faced the enduring question of "criminal negligence": How could a trained anatomist not notice that his fresh "subjects" (including a well-known local simpleton, "Daft Jamie") had died with no apparent cause? This ultimate scandal finally forced the government to pass the Anatomy Act of 1832, which regularized the trade and ended the era of the resurrection men.
The Oldest Conflict in Research
The history of the body snatchers illustrates an ethical conflict as old as research itself: the friction between a scientific "thirst for knowledge" and the sensibilities of the public. While the specific horrors of the Borough Gang have faded, the underlying tension remains. We must ask ourselves: as we pursue the "greater good" in modern medicine, do our current research practices still carry echoes of these historical frictions, where the pursuit of knowledge occasionally clashes with the values of the individuals it is meant to serve?
References:
Frank JB. Body snatching: a grave medical problem. Yale J Biol Med. 1976 Sep;49(4):399-410. PMID: 793205; PMCID: PMC2595508.
