Grave robbing and body snatching seem like concepts out of a storybook, but both happened in real life.

     Body snatching happens when a body is taken from its grave. Instead of the valuables in the grave being sought after, it is the body itself, according to Britannica. “Since there wasn’t a lot of medical knowledge or supplies, body snatching shouldn’t have been done but it is understandable,” says sophomore  Alyssa Sparacco-Ireland. 

      When teaching doctors in the 18 and 19th centuries required practice, dead bodies were used rather than living patients. However, access to bodies was limited, thus body snatching became popular.

     In England, where most of the body snatching occurred, only the bodies of criminals could be used for medical purposes. Even though body snatching wasn’t technically illegal, grave robbing was. Corpses did not have legal standing because they were not alive. 

         Body snatching was surprisingly profitable, and it thrived off bodies being in such short supply.  According to research, the property inside the grave, like the clothes or jewelry, was not allowed to be taken, and the dissection of the body for medical purposes was also illegal. 

          When the process of body snatching became commonplace in the United States, it was typically overlooked because it was typically poor cemeteries that had their bodies stolen.    Ireland thinks that this was because, “the social class divide was worse, and people cared more about their popularity so robbing the graves of a rich person was seen as much worse than robbing a poor person.” 

     Riots pertaining to the status of the deceased person were not uncommon, and one such incident in New York started a riot. The body of a woman was stolen from Trinity Church in 1788, and it caused a riot, ending with medical professionals and their students being taken to jail for their own safety, says Britannica. 

     Not all body snatching was done on people who were already dead, some people, such as William Burke killed people in order to sell their bodies, he killed 16 people and sold them to Robert Knox, who went unpunished when Burke’s crimes came to light. “If you’re killing people for the sake of teaching it’s more okay than killing just to kill but that doesn’t mean it should be done,” says Ireland.

     Burke’s crimes were widely known, and the term for being killed then dissected was called getting “burked”, as a homage to the killer. The crime was not common, and always brought with it outrage that was not typically seen in normal body snatching cases. The crime was seen all over England, as well as in Cleveland, Ohio and Baltimore, Maryland, according to Britannica. 

     To stop body snatching, governments made dead bodies more readily available, but embalmment becoming commonplace caused the most drastic decrease of body snatching. Nowadays it is possible to donate bodies to science for a variety of purposes.