9. Body Collectors Had Great Job Security
At its peak in the middle of the 14th Century, the body collectors would have handled around 25 million corpses. However, this period was far from the only time the Black Death visited Eurasia. England alone was hit by plague epidemics six more times in the 14th Century alone. Thousands more died during each of these flare-ups, and England was not the only country to see a resurgence of the plague throughout the years. The Black Death continued to periodically ravage England all the way into the 18th Century before finally ending its widespread scourge.
The Black Death wasn’t the only disease that struck with enough ferocity to necessitate body collectors. The mid-19th Century cholera outbreaks of London saw thousands of people dying very rapidly. Due to the extremely rapid onset of the disease and the short duration of the illness, before death sets in, bodies piled up in a manner that would have been eerily similar to scenes of the plague.
Before the advent of germ theory and the discovery of penicillin in the 19th and 20th Centuries, many diseases had the capability of ravaging populations in isolated or widespread outbreaks that could have required the services of body collectors. Conditions that have been either eradicated or significantly reduced today, like smallpox and measles, would have caused huge spikes in the death rate and called the body collectors back out to their macabre profession.