In 1831, The Newgate Calendar reported on the trial and execution of John Amy Bird Bell who was sentenced to hang for the murder of a 13-year-old boy. Many hardened criminals were much more affected by the prospect of dissection than the sentence of death itself. For fear of dissection added an extra layer of punishment. This belief was one of the reasons why the authorities had allowed the dissection of criminal corpses in the first place. This was because most people still believed that to rise to eternal life on the Day of Judgment, a Christian needed an intact body. For few people, even the desperately poor would consider selling the bodies of their loved ones to medical schools. To understand the rise of the resurrection men, its necessary to know why, in times of such high mortality, there were so few corpses available for dissection. “Permanent gallows at Tyburn.” From the Collection of The National Archives, UK. However, others turned to murder- and so brought about the Resurrection Men’s fall. Some would even steal the deceased from their deathbeds. Known as the Resurrection Men or Body Snatchers, these eighteenth and nineteenth-century criminal gangs robbed graveyards of the newly deceased, selling them onto anatomist. So, to answer the requirements of the medical profession, a new kind of criminal arose. The scarcity of criminal corpses grew even worse as transportation began to replace the gallows. However, by the eighteenth century, even this measure could not keep pace with the demands of medical science. In 1540, Henry VIII followed suit, granting four executed criminals a year to medical research.įinally, the 1751 Murder Act in Britain made it mandatory for the bodies of murderers to be dissected after death. In 1506, James IV of Scotland tentatively agreed that the Edinburgh Guild of Surgeons and barbers should have one executed felon a year. ![]() However, slowly the authorities came round to the idea and began to make the bodies of executed criminals available for dissection. ![]() Initially, the practice was a social anathema. However, this was an interest that could only be satisfied by the dissection of human corpses. The advent of the Renaissance saw a growing interest in the workings of the human body.
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