Pictured: Resurrectionists breaking at least one rule.
We've posted plenty of accounts of grave robbers, body-snatchers, and resurrectionists, but never a guide on how to do it ...not that we would ever encourage or even condone such activities. However, before the rise of postmortem donations, medical schools needed cadavers for anatomy class, and a profession arose to provide those corpses. A list of dos and don't from that profession can be interesting, edifying, or a complete turn off. You decide. Here's a sample.
3. Never Take The Burial Clothes
This is perhaps the most important of all body snatching rules. Fail to follow this one, and you could expect to be punished accordingly. Your crime would quickly escalate from a misdemeanor to a felony.
I’ve written a post highlighting the main punishments that body snatchers received if they were caught and you can read it here, but, by stripping the cadaver of all it’s ‘property’, that is a burial shroud, jewelry if any, plus anything that was removable, you could then only be accused of stealing a dead body.
And a dead body didn’t belong to anyone.
Read the rest of the explanation of that rule plus four other helpful hints for grave robbers at Digging Up 1800. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Hablot Knight Browne)
