True Crimes - The Bodysnatchers

The bodysnatching trade flourished from the early 18th to the early 19th century. Digging up newly buried corpses from graveyards satisfied the needs of anatomy schools, and for a while it was almost legal. Parliament brought it to an end when enterprising bodysnatchers decided to cut out the middlemen – doctors, undertakers and gravediggers. First Burke and Hare in Scotland, then Bishop and Head in Spitalfields, and finally the Cook family in Whitechapel, didn't wait for natural death. They suffocated or drowned people picked up of the streets, and sold their corpses to the surgeons.