Body snatchers did not steal watches or rings. They stole the corpse and tossed the burial clothes back into the grave, because under common law a body was not property and taking one was only a misdemeanor, while stealing a shroud was a felony. This episode explains how the UK’s Murder Act of 1752 allowed dissection only of executed murderers while London medical schools may have needed up to 500 bodies a year. Resurrection men dug a small diagonal tunnel to the head of the coffin, snapped the lid, and shipped bodies folded in tea chests. In Scotland, William Burke and William Hare skipped the graveyard and murdered at least 16 people.

The burden fell on the poor: potter’s fields, free Black communities, enslaved people, and Indigenous graves. Records from Transylvania University in Kentucky indicate up to 80 percent of corpses dissected there in the 1830s and 1840s were African American. Anger erupted in New York’s 1788 Doctors’ Riot, and in 1878 the body of John Scott Harrison was found hanging on a rope in a Cincinnati medical college. The episode extends to ghost marriages in China, Australia’s Project Sunshine, and Michael Mastromarino’s tissue scheme that took the bones of broadcaster Alistair Cooke.

• Burking, the suffocation method that left no marks for anatomists to notice
• Harvard’s secret student society of grave robbers known as the Spunkers
• Guangdong officials stealing corpses in 2014 to meet cremation quotas
• Kolkata’s bone trade, which went underground after India banned exports
• PVC pipes sewn into bodies in place of harvested bones before cremation