1-157-179 - Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images

Resurrectionists or body snatchers raiding a cemetery to provide a cadaver for dissection, 1887. The phenomenon of body snatching became increasingly prevalent in the late 18th and early 19th century. Demand from doctors for cadavers for dissection outstripped supply, and as a result, body snatchers began stealing corpses which they would supply to doctors for money. Two notorious Edinburgh criminals, William Burke and William Hare, took the process a stage further, murdering tramps and then supplying their bodies to anatomists. From The Chronicles of Crime by Camden Pelham. (London, 1887).