In the late 1700s and early 1800s, medical schools across Britain and parts of Europe faced a serious problem. Anatomy students needed human bodies to study, but the law allowed very few to be used.

In Britain, the only legal cadavers typically came from executed criminals. As medical schools expanded, that supply quickly proved far too small.

A black market emerged.

Professional grave robbers, known as “resurrectionists,” began digging up recently buried bodies and selling them to anatomy schools. Fresh corpses could fetch a price equal to several months’ wages.

Grave robbers worked quickly. They often dug only at the head of a coffin, broke the lid, and pulled the body out with ropes. Clothing was usually left behind, because stealing clothes counted as theft under the law, while stealing a body technically did not.

Families soon fought back.

Across Britain, some cemeteries installed heavy iron cages called mortsafes over new graves. Others built watchtowers where guards kept vigil overnight, protecting the recently buried until decomposition made the bodies useless to anatomy traders.

Public outrage reached a peak after the notorious 1828 murders committed by William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh. Instead of robbing graves, they killed people and sold the bodies to an anatomist.

The scandal helped push Parliament to pass the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed medical schools to study unclaimed bodies from hospitals and workhouses. Once a legal supply existed, grave robbing for anatomy largely disappeared.

For a brief and unsettling period in history, however, the race between medical science and the law turned cemeteries into guarded places.