The Decline of the Body Snatchers
The murders carried out by Burke and Hare, and the Bishop gang caused widespread disgust and outrage. They were precisely the catalyst the authorities needed to act. In 1829, Henry Warburton put forward a parliamentary bill “for preventing the unlawful disinterment of Human Bodies and for regulating schools of anatomy.”Eminent surgeons such as Charles Bell, the future Professor of Surgery at Edinburgh University and Granville Sharp Pattison, a Glasgow anatomy lecturer, supported the bill. Both men endorsed a change in the law for the supply of corpses but also emphasized the difficulty anatomists had in obtaining bodies legally.
The result of the bill was the 1832 Anatomy Act. The new law was specifically designed to ensure a legal supply of subjects for dissection that were readily available to anatomists. Now, not only were the bodies of executed murderers to pass onto anatomists but also so to were those of the unclaimed poor from hospitals, prisons, and workhouses. Later, however, the law was refined, requiring family permission before any body could be taken and dissected. However, the effect was the same. It was no longer legal to simply hand over any corpse to the medical schools.
The Anatomy Act sounded the death knell for resurrection men around the world. Soon the need for go-betweens in the anatomy trade began to diminish as cadavers passed directly to strictly licensed anatomists from the relevant authorities. The practice of murdering and selling on bodies ceased as there was no longer any market for them. However, while the practice of robbing graves diminished significantly, the death of body snatching as a trade was a slow, drawn-out one. For the final blow to the body, snatchers was some fifty years away.
That final blow was the rise in the practice of embalming of corpses. The rich or eccentric had practiced embalming in England since the eighteenth century. However, by the 1880s, it had become a regular feature of the trade of ordinary undertakers in Britain and America. For embalming had become popular as it was a much more efficient way of preserving corpses than holding them on ice- especially if bodies needed to travel long distances before burial. However, the practice was even more useful to medical schools. For now, there was no need for a regular supply of fresh corpses for anatomical dissection as anatomists could keep a stock of preserved bodies on hand.
Where Do we get our stuff? Here are our sources?
The Rise of the Body Snatchers, History.co.uk
Body Snatching, David Levinson, Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 16, 2017
Burke and Hare, Edinburgh History
The Resurrection Men – Body Snatching in 19th Century Britain, CM Hypno, Owlcation, May 7, 2018