Resurrectionists, or BODY-SNATCHERS, the names popularly given to those who made it their business to dig corpses out of their graves and sell them as 'subjects' to lecturers on anatomy. Gradual progress in the science of anatomy led to its more thorough study by greatly increased numbers of medical students; and from about the middle of the 18th century professors of anatomy found that the supply of subjects, heretofore mainly obtained from the bodies of executed criminals, was altogether inadequate to meet the wants of the surgical and medical schools. The resurrectionists invented a new profession to supply the lack, and in the first quarter of the 19th century drove a most flourishing trade—the graveyards in the outlying parts of London being especially the happy hunting-grounds of the confraternity. As the business became organised, grave-diggers and sextons were bribed to leave graveyards unlocked and keep out of the way when a body was being raised. A very short time, usually at dead of night, sufficed; an expert pair of resurrectionists being able in about forty-five minutes to prise up the coffin out of a newly-made grave by means of a peculiar crowbar for the purpose, to burst in the lid, and remove the corpse. Corpses resurrected after this fashion seem to have been worth £8 or £10—offering large profits and quick returns to this precarious and risky trade. The body-snatchers carefully replaced the clothing in the coffin; the stealing of the naked corpse being by the law of England a misdemeanour only, whereas the removal of the clothes was of course a felony, punishable by transportation. So notorious did the practice of resurrectionism become that in many parts of the country painful precautions against it were regularly taken. Heavy gratings were securely fixed over new-made graves, spring-guns were set, and often the relatives of deceased persons sat armed by their graves night after night until it was assumed that the corpses would be no longer serviceable to 'the doctors'—a custom that survived in some places till far on in the century. Guard-houses or towers were sometimes built for the accommodation of the watchers. To the popular horror of this degraded calling, recruited from the worst classes, was added a strong suspicion that resurrectionists would on occasion manufacture corpses—a suspicion confirmed in the notorious case of Burke and Hare (see BURKE, WILLIAM). The passing of the Anatomy Acts of 1832 and 1871 rendered the lucrative trade of the resurrectionist superfluous; but in out-of-the-way places there are still traces of the old terror of body-snatchers supposed to drive out silently at nights in gigs with india-rubber tires, the horses being also shod with india-rubber, and the occupants of the gig provided with pitch-plasters to clap on the mouths of any likely victims. Single instances of a special kind of resurrectionism have occurred more recently; it is practised expressly with the hope of obtaining a reward from the relatives of the person whose body is stolen. Thus, the American millionaire, A. T. Stewart, died in April 1876, and was embalmed and duly buried in a triple coffin in the family vault in a New York graveyard; two and a half years afterwards the body was removed, and a reward of 25,000 was offered by advertisement for its restoration. The body-snatchers, represented by a regular practising lawyer, demanded 200,000, then 100,000, and after three years restored the body on payment of 20,000. The body of the Earl of Crawford, who died at Florence in December 1880, was removed from the mausoleum at Dunecht, near Aberdeen, a year afterwards; the body was found in a wood close by in July 1882, and the malefactor condemned to five years' penal servitude.
See Lonsdale's Life of Dr R. Knox (1870); Mrs H. B. Rodger, The Aberdeen Doctors (1893); and J. Blake Bailey, The Diary of a Resurrectionist (1896).