Body-Snatchers!

By the 1800's London was an excellent place to study medicine. Young had started his medical training in 1792 when all six available hospitals had no medical school but one, St. Bartholomew's Hospital. There they offered medical lectures at the Hunterian school of anatomy founded by William Hunter in the early 1740's. Usually the students who would attend this school wanted to become surgeons and physicians. Hunter said there was only one way a person could learn how to become one of those professions and that was by opening a dead body and studying the organs and doing "practice" surgery. However since they had no way of preserving a body, a corpse would start to decompose within a week. The school was only able to have a income of six bodies annually from public hangings so people started to become body stealer's. There were two main sources to steal bodies, one, from London's hangings (Tyburn tree, Gibbet, Marble Arch) and two, from London Cemeteries. These body- snatchers would creep into the cemeteries at night and dig up freshly made graves and deliver bodies to their clients during the break of dawn. "On several occasions when thefts were suspected, horrified relatives would frantically dig up grave after grave only to find every body gone"- Moore. This unlawful act was very popular in the late 1790's and in the early 1800's being so popular that it had to finally be controlled by the Anatomy Act of 1832.