![]() ![]() Although body snatching at the time was not explicitly illegal, as long as one took only the corpse and not any other items present in the coffin, which then became grave robbing, body snatching was dangerous. They usually targeted the poor, since their graves were less likely to be guarded, and Jewish graves, since it is a Jewish custom for people to be buried within twenty-four hours of death, limiting the amount of decomposition that occurred before the body could be taken. ![]() Body snatchers would dig up the graves of the recently deceased and sell the body to medical facilities to be used for research and education. As a result, body snatching became a lucrative business. Due to this restriction, there was an extreme shortage of available cadavers, especially as more students became drawn to the medical profession in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to 1832, in the United Kingdom it was only legal for medical schools and anatomists to perform dissections on the bodies of executed criminals. ![]()
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