If you are reading this post, I hope you can celebrate the fact that your profession is not as wretched as the Resurrectionists of Britain, and your post-mortem reputation as wretchedly public as that of William Burke, a Resurrectionist so desperate that he became a murderer for his career.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists wanted corpses: medical students needed to open up cadavers before they turned scalpels to living humans, and anatomical knowledge was relatively rudimentary. Enter Britain’s Murder Act of 1752, which allowed the bodies of criminals who had received the death penalty to be given up for scientific dissection — it increased the number of specimens available a bit, but also further promoted a sense of horror about the fate of these cadavers.
Resurrectionists were body snatchers of graveyards that helped fill the demand, and they could make a lot of money working in groups to disinter corpses before they rotted and sell them to scientists who asked no questions when they got their supply. They worked with a variety of co-conspirators, such as women who could spy unsuspected at hospitals and report about the freshly deceased. Their profession was a robust one: in London alone a government committee investigating the situation estimated there were about 200 of them in 1828.
The prospect of having one’s body dug up for dissection so frightened the rich that many built elaborate methods of prevention, such as the mortsafe featured in the first photo, which was a sort of above-ground cage to prevent grave robbing. Other methods included the installment of “coffin torpedos,” which booby-trapped coffins with lead balls ready to launch at the grave disturbers.
The skeleton you see in the second picture belongs to William Burke, a man executed in 1829 for his participation in the killings of 16 people to sell their bodies for dissection. He took the Resurrectionist job to the next level, playing into the public’s horror about the fate of the dead. Though he did not work alone, Burke died by hanging and his body was appropriately donated to science – Burke’s skeleton still presides at the Edinburgh Medical School.
Source(s): Sam Kean _The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science_, Chapter three, 2021 (Little, Brown and Company). Wikipedia. @theravenrepirt.com, “awesome to the Grim underworld if the Resurrectionists,” Sept 2017, Jenn Jeffers.
