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. ...