The Resurrectionists: When Grave Robbing Became Big Business

In the early 1800s, medical schools desperately needed bodies for anatomy lessons, but the law only allowed them to dissect executed criminals. The solution? A booming black market in fresh corpses. Enter the resurrectionists - professional grave robbers who worked under cover of darkness to supply doctors with bodies, no questions asked.

These body snatchers had it down to a science. They used wooden shovels to avoid noise, dug from the head end to reach bodies faster, and could empty a grave in under an hour. They knew which graveyards had the freshest burials and which families were too poor to afford protective iron cages around coffins. A fresh corpse could earn them the equivalent of several months' wages in a single night.

But two resurrectionis ...