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Body snatchers at work. A painting on the wall of a public house in Penicuik, Scotland. Body snatching is the illicit removal of corpses from graves, morgues, and other burial sites. Body snatching is distinct from the act of grave robbery as grave robbing does not explicitly involve the removal of the corpse, but rather theft from the burial ...
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. [28] The 1828 Select Committee reported that in 1826, 592 bodies were dissected by 701 students. [15]
Edinburgh was a leading European centre of anatomical study in the early 19th century, in a time when the demand for cadavers led to a shortfall in legal supply. Scottish law required that corpses used for medical research should only come from those who had died in prison, suicide victims, or from foundlings and orphans.
A blue plaque at Great Yarmouth Minster was unveiled by the Great Yarmouth Local History and Archaeological Society in 2011 to remember Thomas Vaughan. Dr Paul Davies, committee member of St Nicholas' Church Preservation Trust commented that without the cadavers medicine "wouldn't have progressed so fast" as "until quite late in the 19th Century people were still relying on the medical ...
During the early 19th century, the demand for legally obtained cadavers for the study and teaching of anatomy in British medical schools greatly exceeded the supply. [3] In the 18th century, hundreds had been executed each year, often for quite trivial crimes, but by the 19th century only 55 people were being hanged each year, while as many as 500 were needed. [4]
By day, Cunningham was a wagon driver. At night, however, he was a body snatcher. [7] He was active from 1855 to 1871. [1] Cunningham was described by the physicians who worked with him as an expert in body snatching. [1] To extract a body from its coffin, he would dig a 4 sq ft (0.37 m 2) hole above the head of the coffin, then break it open ...
The 19th century ushered in a new-found medical interest in detailed anatomy thanks to an increase in the importance of surgery. [2] In order to study anatomy, human cadavers were needed and thus ushered in the practice of grave robbing. Before 1832, the Murder Act 1752 stipulated that only the corpses of executed murderers could be used for ...
Andrew Moir (1806–1844) was a 19th-century Scottish anatomist linked to the body-snatching scandal which swept Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th century. Unlike his Edinburgh equivalent, Dr Robert Knox, Moir was said to have actively undertaken body-snatching himself. This is highly unlikely, but the strange stories that surround Moir ...