page_title: Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom
section_title: Method
hierarchical_section_title: Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom / Resurrection / Method
caption_attribution_description: English: The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch by William Austin, 1773
context_page_description: Resurrectionists were body snatchers who were commonly employed by anatomists in the United Kingdom during the 18th and 19th centuries to exhume the bodies of the recently dead. Between 1506 and 1752 only a very few cadavers were available each year for anatomical research. The supply was increased when, in an attempt to intensify the deterrent effect of the death penalty, Parliament passed the Murder Act 1752. By allowing judges to substitute the public display of executed criminals with dissection, the new law significantly increased the number of bodies anatomists could legally access. This proved insufficient to meet the needs of the hospitals and teaching centres that opened during the 18th century. Corpses and their component parts became a commodity, but although the practice of disinterment was hated by the general public, bodies were not legally anyone's property. The resurrectionists therefore operated in a legal grey area.
  Nevertheless, resurrectionists caught plying their trade ran the risk of physical attack. Measures taken to stop them included the use of increased security at graveyards.
context_section_description: Resurrectionists usually found corpses through a network of informers.  Sextons, gravediggers, undertakers, local officials; each connived to take a cut of the proceeds.  Working mostly in small gangs at night with a "dark lanthorn", their modus operandi was to dig a hole—sometimes using a quieter, wooden spade—down to one end of the coffin.  To disguise this activity, the spoil was sometimes thrown onto a piece of canvas at the side of the grave.  A sound-deadening sack was placed over the lid, which was then lifted.  The weight of soil on the remainder of the lid snapped the wood, enabling the robbers to hoist the body out.  The corpse was then stripped of its clothing, tied up, and placed into a sack.  The entire process could be completed within 30 minutes.  Moving the corpse of a pauper was less troublesome, as their bodies were often kept in mass graves, left open to the environment until filled—which often took weeks.
  If caught in the act, body snatchers could find themselves at the mercy of the local population.  A violent confrontation took place in a Dublin churchyard in 1828, when a party of mourners confronted a group of resurrectionists.  The would-be body snatchers withdrew, only to return several hours later with more men.  The mourners had also added to their number, and both groups had brought firearms.  A "volley of bullets, slugs, and swan-shot from the resurrectionists" prompted a "discharge of fire-arms from the defenders".  Close-quarters fighting included the use of pick axes, until the resurrectionists retreated.  In the same city, a man caught removing a corpse from a graveyard in Hollywood was shot and killed in 1832.  In the same year, three men were apprehended while transporting the bodies of two elderly men, near Deptford in London.  As rumours spread that the two corpses were murder victims, a large crowd assembled outside the station house.  When the suspects were brought out to be transported to the local magistrates, the approximately 40-strong force of police officers found it difficult to "prevent their prisoners being sacrificed by the indignant multitude, which was most anxious to inflict such punishment upon them as it thought they deserved."
caption: The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch (1773), by William Austin.  A caricature of John Hunter makes his escape from two watchmen.[34]
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