1. Body snatching

2. By the end of todays lesson we have covered:
Why bodies were so important to Doctors in History.
What were Resurrectionists and how they got hold of bodies.
About Crime and Punishment for Snatchers!
Ask students how they might go about becoming a doctor.
What sorts of subjects do doctors have to learn? (someone should mention anatomy which will lead into next slide)

3. How do you become a doctor?
Ask students how they might go about becoming a doctor.
What sorts of subjects do doctors have to learn? (someone should mention anatomy which will lead into next slide)

4. Anatomy became an important part of medical study from the 1750s.
Describe briefly about the history of anatomy
Anatomy tuition became an important part of medical education from the 16th and 17th century. Italy led Europe in anatomical teaching, technique and patronage. British anatomists often travelled there to study.
Why do you think medical students would want to look at corpses?
The use of the corpse as teaching and experimental material bears a close relationship to the use of the live body. For the study of anatomy and of surgery, it is necessary for the practitioner to develop – even to cultivate- clinical detachment while work is in progress. In the case of the dead body, this may be accomplished with comparative ease in so far as once dead, the human body – whatever the popular culture of the era – may be much more readily objectified than the screaming writhing body of a living patient. This ease of objectification provides an underlying reason why in the 1830s, anatomy, and particularly dissection, was promoted as constituting the basis for all scientific knowledge of the human body and why even today, for many students, a corpse is the initial object of study.

5. Teachers in medical schools needed to provide corpses (cadavers) so their students could study anatomy
Teachers in medical schools needed to provide corpses (cadavers) so their students could study anatomy

6. Where did the corpses come from?
Ask students where they think the corpses came from

7. Where did the corpses come from?
Where did the corpses come from? Bodies of criminals who had been murdered initially.
By the sixteenth century royal enactments, dissection became recognised in law as a punishment, an aggravation to execution, a fate worse than death. The dissections so enacted were nominated public dissections. Part of the punishment was the very publicity involved in the delivery from hangman to surgeons at the gallows and later in the public exhibition of the body itself. Dissection was viewed as an extra punishment for Britain’s worst criminals.
Drawings of criminals being executed

8. More corpses were needed for dissection.
Corpses began to become valuable.
Grave robbing became popular!
But – there wasn’t a great enough supply of criminals
Corpses became valuable. As a result people turned to bodysnatching.

9. Body snatchers!
However, bodies of criminals only represented a small number of bodies. Considering the huge increase in numbers of medical students at institutions in the United Kingdom in the early nineteenth century, there became only one way of obtaining bodies for dissection, through stealing them from churchyards, and students themselves began to engage in this practice.
A tradition of grave-robbing developed among medical students in addition to the emergence of a new career, “the resurrection man”.
Some individuals began to make a living out of stealing freshly buried corpses from graveyards.

10. Stealing Bodies
Ask students how they think the bodies were removed from graveyards?
Bodies were generally removed in a covered cart but on some occasions, students took bodies by foot to the dissecting room. They would put a suit of old clothes on the body and, with a student on each side supporting it, made the corpse stagger along like a drunken man

11. Exercise 1
Reminiscences of a medical student. Read this account written by a Dublin medical and answer the following questions
Give students mins to complete this exercise?
Perhaps assign questions if you like?

12. Questions How did the students find out which graves to rob?
What happened to terrify the student as he opened the grave of a recently buried woman?
How did the students get the bodies back to the laboratory?
How did they get the body out of the coffin?
Was the student concerned about the morals of what he was doing?

13. The business of bodies More unusual bodies were more valuable. Why?
The value of bodies
Bodies soon became more difficult to obtain and this, combined with the increased demand meant that much larger prices were soon demanded for them.
According to one article in the Morning Chronicle, by 1826, the prices of bodies had doubled within the previous few years and bodies in London were now forty times the price they cost in Paris. At this point, bodies in Dublin were seven shillings. Six years later, in 1832, prior to the introduction of the Anatomy Act, it was reported that three bodies were exported from Dublin to England for the price of £38. With the increased demand, resurrection men became more adventurous, stealing graves of the rich and bribing grave-diggers and undertakers to give them information of impending funerals.
Price of bodies depended on height. Smaller bodies (e.g. children) were not as expensive.
More unusual bodies more valuable – why?
The Irish Giant
Charles Byrne was born in Ireland. Measuring over 8 feet tall as a young man, he began promoting himself as a ‘freak’ curiosity at country fairs and village greens. Having toured Scotland and northern England, he arrived in London in 1782, where he was an immediate success, attracting numerous visitors from all classes and charging 2s 6d (12½p) for admittance.
After his initial success, Byrne was replaced by other novelties, and having lost most of his investments, lived in increasing poverty. He died on 1 June 1783, at the age of 22, his death partly attributed to excessive drinking. Although no evidence in the form of a will has been found, newspaper reports at the time stressed Byrne’s horror at the thought of his body falling into the hands of one of the many anatomists who were keen to acquire it. He arranged with friends to seal his body in a lead coffin, for burial at sea.
But, while his casket was buried at sea, Byrne’s body was not in it. The undertaker had been bribed and the body removed from the coffin. Competition among anatomists to obtain the body was widely reported in the press, driving up the price. John Hunter obtained the body for a sum rumoured to be over £500. To avoid detection, he hurriedly chopped the body into pieces, and boiled it down into the bones. Only after four years did Hunter admit to having the skeleton of Charles Byrne. In Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait of Hunter, the legs of a giant skeleton, thought to be Byrne’s, can be seen in the background. Byrne’s skeleton can still be found today on display at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Charles Byrne, ‘The Irish Giant’

14. Crime and Punishment
Punishing the Resurectionists

15. Stop the body snatchers!
Exercise 2
Stop the body snatchers!
Explain about exercise. It is Your great-granny has just died and is to be buried in the local graveyard. How do you prevent the body-snatchers stealing her corpse and using it for dissection? Give students minutes to complete.

16. Stop the body snatchers!
Following the exercise, explain each of the potential answers and ask students which they thought would be most effective and why.
These were all real techniques (bar the sign) used to prevent bodysnatching in the 19th century.
Place a guard by the graveside: Expensive and sometimes guards could be bribed
Install a coffin torpedo: a greatly modified firearm that shot lead balls when triggered by the opening of the coffin lid or a landmine-like device that sat atop the coffin and would detonate if the grave was disturbed.
Invest in a Mortsafe: A heavy, wrought iron cage placed over gravesites to prevent theft of corpses. It would be placed over the grave for a few weeks until the robbers lost interest, and then moved to a new grave. Can still be seen in many Scottish graveyards.
Let the body rot for a while before burying it: probably most economical of the options – bodies were worthless if they weren’t fresh. Sometimes bodies were left to rot in “morthouses” for a few days before being buried.
Put a sign on the grave saying “Don’t steal my great-granny”: not effective

17. Lets Tell a Terrible Tale Of Murder Burke and Hare
William Burke and William Hare were two Irish immigrants who murdered 17 victims in Edinburgh over the years 1827 and 1829. 
As elsewhere, corpses were in short supply in Edinburgh where there was an important medical school. This led to a doctor at Edinburgh College – Robert Knox paying for illegally exhumed corpses, and body snatching flourished. 
Burke and Hare owned a lodging house in Edinburgh and began murdering guests and selling the corpses to Knox. They first preyed upon tenants of the boarding house before moving on to prostitutes and strangers on the streets of Edinburgh. They developed a trademark method of suffocation which would later become known as ‘Burking’.
The crimes were eventually detected when a body was found under the bed of William Burke.
The murder of Margery Campbell 31/10/1828

18. Hello Mr Burke
William Hare was granted immunity in return for testifying against Burke, who was found guilty and executed in Edinburgh by hanging on January 28th 1829.
What do you think happened to his body?
He was then publicly dissected at Edinburgh Medical College and his skeleton remains on display at the college museum. Perhaps more gruesomely, a book was made from his skin, and can be viewed to this day in the police museum on The Royal Mile in Edinburgh.
Hare fled to England and the last reported sighting of him was some years later in Carlisle. Dr Robert Knox was never prosecuted as it could not be proven that he knew the corpses he bought were murder victims but his career was massively damaged by his relationship with the murderers.

19. The Anatomy Act, 1832 Today? After Burke and Hare….
The Anatomy Act: The main outcome of the practice of bodysnatching was the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, which, over the protests of a public distrustful of anatomists, awarded the medical profession rights to ‘unclaimed bodies’ – in effect, paupers without family dying in workhouses and hospitals.
Today – people donate their bodies to science

20. Thanks for being brilliant
The Anatomy Act: The main outcome of the practice of bodysnatching was the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, which, over the protests of a public distrustful of anatomists, awarded the medical profession rights to ‘unclaimed bodies’ – in effect, paupers without family dying in workhouses and hospitals.
Today – people donate their bodies to science