The Resurrection Men: How Body Snatchers Built the Foundation of Modern Surgery
In the gaslit churchyards of 18th- and 19th-century Britain, there worked a profession that doesn't make it onto many career-day posters: the resurrection men. Grave robbers, body snatchers, "sack-'em-up men" — whatever you called them, their job was to dig up the very freshly buried and sell them, by night, to the anatomy schools.
It's a properly macabre story. It's also, uncomfortably, one of the reasons I can do my job safely. Bear with me.
The birth of an unholy trade
The whole grisly economy grew out of a simple mismatch between supply and demand. As surgery and medicine became serious, evidence-based disciplines, anatomy moved to the centre of medical training — and you cannot learn anatomy from a textbook alone. What medical school at the time realised was that you need bodies. A great many of them.
The law, however, was not co-operating. The Murder Act of 1751 (which came into force in 1752) decreed that the only corpses legally available for dissection were those of executed murderers — the gallows doubling as a grim deterrent and a teaching supply. It was meant to be a horror added to the horror of hanging: not just death, but the indignity of the anatomist's scalpel afterwards.
The trouble was medical science was expanding far faster than Britain was executing murderers. Edinburgh and London were training hundreds of students a year; the noose simply couldn't keep up. Into that gap stepped an enterprising and unscrupulous new profession.
The economics of death
Body snatching paid extraordinarily well. A single fresh corpse could fetch the equivalent of several months of a labourer's wages, which made braving the moral and physical hazards of a midnight churchyard a tempting choice. A competent crew could have a body out of the ground and into a hessian sack in well under an hour, and a good night's work might yield five or six.
The technique was more craft than you'd think. The snatchers dug down at the head end only, cracked open the coffin lid with a lever, looped a rope under the arms and hauled the body out — leaving the shroud and any jewellery behind, because taking property was theft (and a serious crime), whereas a corpse, marvellously, belonged legally to no one. It was a nice little loophole.
London's most notorious outfit was the Borough Gang, led by the fearsome Ben Crouch, who supplied the great anatomist Astley Cooper at Guy's and St Thomas'. We know their trade in unusual detail because one member, Joseph Naples, kept a business diary — the surviving Diary of a Resurrectionist, now held by the Royal College of Surgeons — logging bodies lifted, prices haggled and rival gangs feuded with, all in the flat tone of a man recording stock deliveries. Which, to be fair, is exactly what they were to him.
When snatching became murder: Burke and Hare
Here is where the story tips from ghoulish into genuinely monstrous.
Wellington and Peel in the roles of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare suffocating Mrs Docherty for sale to Dr. Knox; representing the extinguishing by Wellington and Peel of the Constitution of 1688 by Catholic Emancipation. Coloured etching by W. Heath, 1829.
In Edinburgh in 1828, two Irishmen — William Burke and William Hare — worked out that the middle step of grave-robbing was tiresome, and that there was a faster route to a saleable body. Rather than go through all the trouble of exhuming the dead, they made their own corpses
It began, as these things do, with opportunism. A lodger in Hare's boarding house died owing rent, and the pair sold his body to Dr Robert Knox, Edinburgh's star anatomist, to recoup the debt. Knox paid handsomely and asked no awkward questions — £8 in summer, up to £10 in winter, when bodies kept longer and demand ran higher. That silence was all the encouragement they needed. Over the following ten months, Burke and Hare murdered sixteen people — luring the poor, the drunk and the unmissed, and smothering them in a way that left no obvious marks and a perfectly fresh corpse.
Their second-to-last victim was James Wilson, known to all of Edinburgh as "Daft Jamie" — an inoffensive young man with a limp and a learning disability who begged in the streets and was recognised everywhere. When his body appeared in Knox's dissecting room, several students knew his face at once. It should have been the end. But Knox flatly denied the corpse was anyone's acquaintance and — tellingly — dissected Jamie out of turn, removing the recognisable head and feet first. Suspicion flared, but nothing was done at the time.
What actually undid them was Halloween. On 31 October 1828, they murdered their final victim, an Irishwoman named Mary Docherty. Two fellow lodgers, Ann and James Gray, grew suspicious, went poking about, and found her body hidden under the straw of a bed. They refused a bribe to keep quiet and went to the police. The scheme unravelled from there.
Hare turned King's evidence to save his own neck, testified against his partner, and walked free — last seen being escorted, in disguise, towards the English border, after which he vanishes from the record entirely. Burke was not so lucky. He was hanged on 28 January 1829 before a crowd of tens of thousands and then — with a poetry the mob relished — publicly dissected. His skeleton still stands in the Anatomical Museum of the Edinburgh Medical School; a pocketbook said to be bound in his own tanned skin, and his death mask, sit in Surgeons' Hall Museum a short walk away. The murders even gave English a new verb: to "burke" — to smother, and, more broadly, to quietly suppress.
Knox, the buyer who asked no questions, was never charged. A contemporary rhyme summed up the public's rough verdict: "Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the boy that buys the beef."
Edinburgh's horror was quickly imitated. In London a few years later, John Bishop and Thomas Williams — the so-called London Burkers — did the same thing, drugging and drowning their victims. Bishop eventually admitted to handling somewhere between 500 and 1,000 bodies across a dozen years, sold to King's College, St Thomas' and St Bartholomew's. Fittingly, they were caught when they tried to sell the too-fresh body of a boy to King's, and the anatomists there — finally — called the police instead of reaching for their wallets.
The law catches up: the Anatomy Act of 1832
Public revulsion at Burke and Hare, and at the body-snatching epidemic generally, finally forced Parliament's hand. The Anatomy Act of 1832 gave licensed doctors, anatomy teachers and bona fide students legal access to bodies for dissection. But where did these new bodies come from?
The Act's "legal supply" was, in practice, the unclaimed dead — overwhelmingly the poor, who died in workhouses and hospitals with no family able to pay for a funeral or to object. It abolished one injustice and replaced it with another: for the destitute, the fear of ending up on the slab simply moved from the graveyard to the poorhouse.
From dark trade to modern surgery
Surgeons have to understand anatomy intimately, and they have to be able to rehearse on the dead before they ever touch the living — a principle that hasn't changed one bit. Edinburgh's fearsome reputation as a centre of surgery was built, in no small part, on the sheer volume of bodies the snatchers funnelled into its dissecting rooms.
The knowledge compounded. In 1858, Henry Gray published Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical — the book we still call Gray's Anatomy — as a practical guide for students bent over a cadaver, telling them exactly what they were looking at. Nearly two centuries on, it remains a cornerstone of medical education. Much of the meticulous mapping behind it was done on bodies that arrived by routes no one wrote home about.
The bottom line
The resurrection men are a reminder that medical progress rarely arrives clean. The knowledge that lets me keep a needle out of an artery, that lets a surgeon rehearse before they cut, was built in a morally murky place by people I would not have wanted to meet on a dark night.
So this Halloween, when you're enjoying something ghoulish, spare a thought for the sack-'em-up men and, more importantly, for the anonymous dead who ended up on the anatomist's table without ever agreeing to it. They are, in a very literal sense, the foundation the whole edifice stands on — one stolen body at a time.
References
Murder Act 1751 (25 Geo. 2 c. 37) — the statute restricting legal dissection to executed murderers. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Act_1751
Royal College of Surgeons of England. The Diary of a Resurrectionist (Joseph Naples) and the Borough Gang [Internet]. Available from: https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/diary-of-a-resurrectionist/
Ben Crouch and the Borough Gang — London's resurrectionists [Internet]. Available from: https://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/resurrectionists/thegang.html
Burke and Hare murders — victims, Robert Knox's payments, "Daft Jamie" (James Wilson), the Docherty discovery, Burke's execution and remains, and the verb "to burke" [Internet]. Wikipedia. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders
Royal Society of Edinburgh. When science met scandal: Dr Robert Knox and the Burke and Hare murders [Internet]. Available from: https://rse.org.uk/resource/dr-robert-knox-burke-and-hare-murders/
Mercat Tours. The Halloween crime of Burke & Hare — the murder of Mary Docherty, 31 October 1828 [Internet]. Available from: https://www.mercattours.com/blog-post/the-crimes-of-burke-hare
London Burkers (John Bishop, Thomas Williams) — the Edinburgh murders imitated in London [Internet]. Wikipedia. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Burkers
Anatomy Act 1832 — legal reform of the supply of cadavers for dissection [Internet]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_Act_1832
Gray H. Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical (Gray's Anatomy), London; 1858 — history and enduring role in medical education. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray%27s_Anatomy
Historic UK. Burke and Hare, grave robbers and murderers [Internet]. Available from: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Burke-Hare-infamous-murderers-graverobbers/
A century ago, "radiant" wasn't a metaphor. Radium was in face creams, tonics and toothpaste, sold as the secret to glowing, youthful skin — while, in factories nearby, young women who painted it onto watch dials were quietly dying of it. This is the story of the glow, the girls, and the reckoning that changed how we protect people from the things we sell them.