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"Body-Snatching" Reconsidered: The Exhumation Of Some Early American Legal History, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

The "heroic age of anatomy" in America was that era, prior to the general enactment of laws legalizing the procurement of cadavers for medical purposes, during which students of medicine (as well as profit-seeking professionals) resorted to the illegal practice of "body-snatching" in order to obtain dissection material for medical studies. This period, which extended form the late seventeenth to well into the nineteenth century, was marked by frequent riots resulting from a deep-rooted public hostility towards grave-robbing and dissection. This hostility was rarely tempered by any understanding of or sympathy for the purposes for which the "resurrectionists," as they …