Introduction:
London’s medical history has an uncomfortable question at its heart: where did the bodies come from?
For eighteenth-century anatomy teachers, the human body was essential to understanding how to treat the living. For the families of the recently deceased, it remained something to protect. Between those two perspectives grew a trade connecting London’s burial grounds, private anatomy schools and celebrated medical practitioners.
William and John Hunter stand at the centre of this story. Their achievements helped transform anatomical teaching and surgical practice, but their careers also raise difficult questions about access, power and consent.
Two episodes of the London History Podcast explore these connected histories. In Episode 72, Drs William and John Hunter, I’m joined by City of London guide Ian McDiarmid to discuss the brothers’ London lives. Our new Episode 166, London’s Resurrection Men: The Business of Body Snatching, follows the supply chain behind the dissecting room; from burial grounds and insider information to medical customers and the reforms of 1832.
Articles and archival material from the Royal College of Surgeons of England provide a revealing companion to both episodes. They also show why the treatment of people whose remains entered medical collections remains a subject of debate today.
From watching a dissection to performing one
Anatomical teaching was changing during the eighteenth century.
The Royal College of Surgeons’ article, “Dissection and the resurrectionists in the archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England”, describes an earlier arrangement in which a demonstrator dissected a body while a master read from a medical textbook. Students watched as structures were identified.
Increasingly, however, students began performing dissections themselves. That offered practical experience, but it also increased demand for bodies. A single demonstration could serve an audience; hands-on instruction required a larger supply.
This helps explain the attraction of private anatomy schools. They offered something students could not obtain through reading alone: direct experience of the human body.
It also explains why obtaining bodies was not a minor administrative concern. The supply helped determine what a school could teach.
William and John Hunter: anatomical knowledge in demand
William Hunter developed a successful career as an anatomist, teacher and obstetrician. In Episode 72, Ian explains how his detailed courses attracted students seeking thorough practical instruction.
The courses ran through the cooler months, when bodies remained suitable for dissection for longer. Before modern refrigeration, the teaching calendar was constrained by decomposition as well as student demand.
William brought his younger brother John into his work to help prepare specimens and teach. John’s skill in anatomical preparation became an important foundation for his later career as a surgeon and investigator.
The brothers’ success depended on expertise, ambition and the ability to provide practical teaching. But that last advantage leads us back to the difficult question.
How were the bodies obtained?
In our Hunter brothers episode, we explore that question alongside their achievements. Their importance to medical history does not make the circumstances of anatomical supply less relevant. It makes understanding those circumstances essential.
Episode 166: the business behind body snatching
Our new episode approaches this history from the other end of the transaction.
London’s Resurrection Men: The Business of Body Snatching begins not with a celebrated anatomist, but with someone who had been buried—and the possibility that their body might be taken and sold.
The lawful supply of bodies could not satisfy the growing demand for anatomical teaching. An underground trade developed in which recently buried people were removed from graves and sold to anatomists. Those involved became known as resurrectionists, or resurrection men.
The name sounds almost miraculous. The reality was commercial.
Episode 166 explores the workings of that business:
- Insider knowledge and access to burial grounds.
- Bribery and cooperation from people working around the dead.
- Transport, distribution and negotiations with medical customers.
- The precautions families took to protect newly buried relatives.
- The London Burkers and the murderous possibilities of a market in fresh bodies.
- The Anatomy Act of 1832 and the unequal consequences of reform.
The episode looks beyond the familiar image of a solitary grave robber. This was a network, sustained by customers who needed what its suppliers could deliver.
A resurrectionist’s diary in the College archives
One of the most compelling objects featured in the Royal College of Surgeons’ article is a diary dating from 1811–1812.
Generally attributed to Joseph Naples, it records the activities of a resurrectionist supplying London anatomists. The manuscript survives in the College’s archives.[
This diary is a central source for Episode 166. It brings us close to the routines of the trade: bodies obtained and delivered, money received, expenses, arrests and unsuccessful working nights.
The College’s separate account of the diary describes Naples’s work at Spa Fields burial ground, his involvement with the Borough Gang and the medical institutions they supplied. It also explains how weather and the teaching calendar affected the gang’s activity.
These practical concerns make the record particularly unsettling. What horrified families could become another working transaction for a supplier.
The chronology matters, however. The diary belongs to a later period than the Hunter brothers’ teaching partnership. It illuminates the continuing system of anatomical supply rather than documenting every arrangement made by William or John personally.
Read the Royal College of Surgeons’ archival article to see how the diary sits alongside other surviving evidence.
Respectable addresses and less conspicuous entrances
One of the most evocative parts of our Hunter brothers conversation concerns their premises.
Ian discusses buildings that combined a public-facing address with access from a street behind. John Hunter’s Leicester Square property connected with premises facing Castle Street, now Charing Cross Road.
It is a detail that encourages us to look differently at London’s streets.
A distinguished address could accommodate consultations, teaching, specimen preparation and deliveries. Those activities belonged to the same working environment, even if visitors encountered different parts of it.
The architecture is not proof of what happened at every doorway. It does, however, help us imagine how a medical household could combine public reputation with practical work kept largely out of sight.
Episode 166 develops that connection between respectability and supply. Its question is not simply who took bodies, but who bought them—and how far a customer could distance himself from the circumstances of procurement.
John Hunter’s collection and William Clift’s records
The connection between the Hunters and the Royal College of Surgeons extends beyond teaching.
John Hunter assembled a collection of more than 14,000 specimens and dissections. Parliament transferred the collection to the College on the condition that a museum be established to house it.
William Clift, Hunter’s former assistant, became the first curator of the Hunterian Museum.
Clift’s surviving papers reveal another aspect of medical London. His duties included dissecting the bodies of executed criminals received by the College. He recorded dissections and produced sketches of people whose bodies came into his care.
Among those records are John Bellingham, executed for the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams, the London body-trade murderers.
Here, the subjects of our two podcast episodes meet particularly clearly: Hunter’s collection, the institution that inherited it, and the aftermath of crimes committed to supply anatomical bodies.
Medical collections did not emerge in isolation. They were shaped by the laws, professional ambitions and inequalities of the society around them.
The London Burkers: when demand encouraged murder
Episode 166 examines the London Burkers case of 1831.
A boy’s body offered to King’s College aroused the suspicions of anatomy demonstrator Richard Partridge. His decision to delay payment and involve the police helped expose a crime that went far beyond grave robbery.
The case illustrates the terrifying possibilities of the market. If a fresh body could command a price, someone might decide not to wait for a person to die.
But careful distinctions are essential. Body snatching and murder were different crimes; not every resurrectionist was a killer.
The victim’s identity also requires caution. Although the case became known as the Italian Boy murder, and the child was widely identified as Carlo Ferrari, historian Sarah Wise’s research challenges the certainty of that identification. Episode 166 preserves that uncertainty rather than presenting an unconfirmed name as established fact.
This is one of the challenges of telling darker histories responsibly. A memorable version of a story can become familiar through repetition without every detail being secure.
The Anatomy Act: reform without equality
The Royal College of Surgeons’ article follows the story through public concern about resurrectionists and the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832.
The Act provided a regulated route through which bodies could be made available for examination. In practice, people who died in institutions such as workhouses, hospitals and prisons became an important source for anatomy teaching.
This weakened the market for stolen bodies. It did not remove the imbalance of power.
The legislation included provisions concerning authority to permit examination, objections, certification and burial. Its forty-eight-hour rule concerned the earliest permitted removal of a body from the place of death—not a blanket permission to take anyone whose remains had not been collected within that time.
Episode 166 follows the problem beyond the graveyard, including the later Newington workhouse scandal. Historian Helen MacDonald’s research examines institutional arrangements and legal disputes surrounding the procurement of bodies, including the case involving workhouse master Alfred Feist and undertaker Robert Hogg.
The question therefore extends beyond whether a body was obtained lawfully.
Whose authority counted? Whose wishes were heard? And what choices were available to a family that could not afford a funeral?
“Unclaimed” should never automatically be understood as “unloved”.
Charles Byrne: who decides what happens to a body?
The questions explored in our two episodes did not end with the disappearance of the resurrection men.
Charles Byrne’s story brings them into the present.
Byrne, who earned a living exhibiting himself as the “Irish Giant”, died in 1783. According to the Royal College of Surgeons, he lived with acromegaly and gigantism caused by a benign pituitary tumour and grew to approximately 7 feet 7 inches tall.
Accounts of his final wishes describe a desire for burial at sea to prevent anatomists obtaining his body. The College acknowledges that these accounts are well documented, while noting that no written evidence of his wishes survives.
That distinction matters: the reported wishes should be taken seriously without being presented as a surviving written instruction.
Before Byrne could be buried, John Hunter intervened. The College’s statement reports that Hunter paid Byrne’s friends £500 for his body. Three years later, Byrne’s skeleton was displayed in Hunter’s Leicester Square museum.
We discuss Byrne in Episode 72, Drs William and John Hunter. His story turns the broader question of anatomical supply into something personal: what happens when a collector’s determination to acquire a body conflicts with the wishes attributed to the person whose body it was?
Removed from display, but retained for research
In its statement on the skeleton of Charles Byrne, published on 11 January 2023, the Board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection announced that Byrne’s skeleton would not be displayed in the redeveloped Hunterian Museum.
Removal from public display did not, however, mean release for burial. The trustees decided to retain the skeleton as part of the collection and make it available for bona fide research into acromegaly and gigantism.
The statement also identifies a distinction in responsibility. Decisions about the Hunterian Collection rest with its Board of Trustees, rather than directly with the Royal College of Surgeons. The trustees’ decision was approved by the College’s Council.
Medical value does not make the ethical question disappear
The College explains that Byrne’s remains have contributed to medical research. Early twenty-first-century DNA analysis linked Byrne and a living person with pituitary acromegaly through a common ancestor. The trustees cite the possibility of further scientific understanding as a reason for retaining his skeleton.
That medical value is part of the story. It does not settle every question about how the remains were acquired or what should happen to them now.
The statement itself acknowledges that John Hunter and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomists acquired specimens in ways that would not be considered ethical today.
Byrne’s case was not a routine grave robbery and should not be described as one. It raises a related question: could someone’s scientific importance become a reason to override their wishes?
Read alongside the College’s archival account of dissection and resurrectionists, the statement asks us to distinguish between possession and permission, preservation and public display, and the benefits of research and the wishes of the person whose remains make it possible.
Listen to both London History Podcast episodes
These two episodes offer complementary perspectives on London’s medical past.
Episode 72: Drs William and John Hunter
Ian McDiarmid joins me to explore the brothers’ careers, anatomical teaching, collections and London connections—and the difficult questions surrounding the bodies they studied.
Episode 166: London’s Resurrection Men — The Business of Body Snatching
Our new Halloween special investigates the suppliers, customers and systems behind the trade, from Joseph Naples’s diary to the London Burkers and the consequences of the Anatomy Act.
Listen to Episode 166, London’s Resurrection Men: The Business of Body Snatching, in the London History Podcast feed.
Content note: Episode 166 discusses death, grave robbery, dissection and murder, including the murder of a child. Descriptions are restrained.
Read the Royal College of Surgeons’ articles
For the archival evidence and the institution’s perspective on Charles Byrne, explore:
- Dissection and the resurrectionists in the archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England — anatomical teaching, the resurrectionist’s diary, Hunter’s collection and William Clift’s records.
- Statement on the skeleton of Charles Byrne from the Board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection — the history of Byrne’s remains, their scientific significance and the decision to remove his skeleton from display while retaining it for research.
London’s medical history belongs not only to the doctors whose names we remember. It also belongs to the people whose names disappeared when their bodies became teaching material.
