Oct 8, 2026 · 45 min · 23 segments
We explore the dark and unsettling world of 19th century grave robbing, body snatching, and the notorious practice of "Burking" — murder committed for the purpose of selling victims' bodies to medical…
Asia TabbHost
Well, I'm ready to enjoy this topic that we have today because it's so eerie and weird, and just plain out strange.
This was actually a very significant phenomena, and it wasn't just in the United States.
It actually happened also in Britain, and then spread to the United States.
And at the root cause, it's this increase in demand for cadavers by medical schools.
Surgery, for the first time, is becoming more and more of a possibility to actually help people, but there's no legal means to get cadavers.
It's a taboo to be dissected as a cadaver, and that stems from a British law passed in eight- 1752 called the Murder Act, and it made that if you were a executed criminal, then you could be publicly, or be permitted to be dissected by a medical program.
So it creates an addition to already preexisting, um, religious and just sentimental ideas about death, a kind of desire to not be associated with criminals, who would be, like, almost shamed after death because they would've been, um, dissected by these medical school students.
And it-- Just a statistic that can kind of highlight this, in, um, the United States in 1800, there were, um, four medical schools, and in 1900, only 100 years later, there were 160 medical schools.
So for example, in our state of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Medical School was like, medical community was the, one of the biggest in the United States.
There were something like 1,000 medical students in the 1850s, so they all wanted dissection cadavers, and there were, like, less than 50 cadavers.
And there grew to be this incredible fear around this, like, your, maybe your loved one's corpse would be burglarized for body parts and sent and shipped off to medical schools.
Well, I'm ready to enjoy this topic that we have today because it's so eerie and weird, and just plain out strange.
This was actually a very significant phenomena, and it wasn't just in the United States.
It actually happened also in Britain, and then spread to the United States.
And at the root cause, it's this increase in demand for cadavers by medical schools.
Surgery, for the first time, is becoming more and more of a possibility to actually help people, but there's no legal means to get cadavers.
It's a taboo to be dissected as a cadaver, and that stems from a British law passed in eight- 1752 called the Murder Act, and it made that if you were a executed criminal, then you could be publicly, or be permitted to be dissected by a medical program.
So it creates an addition to already preexisting, um, religious and just sentimental ideas about death, a kind of desire to not be associated with criminals, who would be, like, almost shamed after death because they would've been, um, dissected by these medical school students.
And it-- Just a statistic that can kind of highlight this, in, um, the United States in 1800, there were, um, four medical schools, and in 1900, only 100 years later, there were 160 medical schools.
So for example, in our state of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Medical School was like, medical community was the, one of the biggest in the United States.
There were something like 1,000 medical students in the 1850s, so they all wanted dissection cadavers, and there were, like, less than 50 cadavers.
And there grew to be this incredible fear around this, like, your, maybe your loved one's corpse would be burglarized for body parts and sent and shipped off to medical schools.
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