The Body Snatchers
Our true story takes us to
Britain during the 18th and early 19th centuries. At that time a particular
fiendish crime became popular amongst the criminal community. It was the
profitable and weird endeavour of body snatching. It seemed England’s
criminal riff-raff had developed a peculiar taste for the dead. Yes, they
were hungry for rotten flesh, bent on exhuming those who were not yet a few
hours cold. Thus, under the cover of the night, they would search the desolate
places: cemeteries and morgues, accident scenes, and scenes of crimes. They
would search out the begrudged, the unfortunate, the cursed, seek to pick
and steal their corpses. They would find them buried beneath freshly turned
soil, still wet with the tears of mourners. They would find them in the orchards
naked, battered, and robbed of their beauty. They would find them under the
wheels of cargo trains, or lifeless along the ghetto boulevards.
No, these nocturnal beasts were not cannibals, nor practitioners of
black magic? They were not diabolical scientists, nor aliens from distant
stars either? No, they were nothingness then martyrs, heroes for good health
and knowledge . . . How come? Because these pick pockets of the flesh were
helping primitive man and his backward medicine make a step into the future.
And that is why their crimes were so profitable, because medical schools
needed cadavers for use in teaching anatomy. At that time, laws did not permit
the schools to acquire unclaimed bodies from the public morgues.
Frankly, to illegally exhume the dead for the purpose of extending
our knowledge in health and science seems a trivial crime indeed -- dirty
and disrespectful, true, yet a little blasphemy is a small price for the
benefits the human race might later enjoy. No, these crimes were not so
completely bizarre as one might think, after all it is not as if the victims
had been murdered in cold blood, or, at least not yet.
Of course England in those days had no shortage of cadavers, several
thousand were counted yearly, yet soon the supply began to run short. That
was when two notorious body snatchers in Scotland, William Burke and William
Hare, turned to murder in order to augment their supply: ghastly and grim,
true, yet all in the name of science?
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