Courtroom Ghosts

  Medford Mail Tribune , 29th March 1944 In 1912, politician Arthur Lee announced in Parliament that  "the United Kingdom, and particularly England, is increasingly becoming a clearing-house and depot and dispatch centre of the white slave traffic" His comment related to a Criminal Law Amendment Bill which was being debated, and which was born of widespread fears around issues of sex trafficking. For more on this, I recommend Julia Laite's book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey , her appearance on this episode of the History Extra  podcast and, if you want even more, this brilliant discussion of the book on the History Workshop  podcast.  While the Bill did not pass, Britain was not the only nation experiencing a similar moral panic, which centred around the notion that white women and girls were being kidnapped or coerced into sex work, usually by 'foreign' men. In the United States, Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act in 1910, better known as th...

Most people have heard of Burke and Hare, the two Scottish body-snatchers who turned to murder to increase their profits. I won't recount the entire history of body snatching here, especially as Suzie Lennox at Digging Up 1800 has such a rich amount of material. In essence, body snatching was a response to tight restrictions on anatomical dissection - very few bodies were available for medical students to practice on, and so some individuals made a handsome profit by raiding graves and selling the corpses to medical schools. The illicit trade prompted a number of ingenious methods and contraptions for preventing grave robbers from gaining access, including the 'mortsafes' pictured below, which feature on Digging Up 1800 , along with an explanation of their use. More examples can be found here .  In 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which required the registration of anybody practicing anatomy and allowed the dissection of bodies which were unclaimed after death. ...