There was a brief period in the US, UK and Ireland when a dead body could fetch a pretty penny for a person willing to dig it up and sell it to surgeons for dissection. It turns out that there was no shortage of ghoulish types willing to do just that.
Josh and Chuck dive into the surprisingly lucrative world of grave robbing during the 18th and 19th centuries, which they dub "the Golden Age of Grave Robbing." They explore how the growing demand for cadavers in medical schools led to organized criminal gangs stealing bodies from fresh graves across Britain and America, complete with detailed techniques, famous grave robbing crews like London's Borough Gang, and the various ingenious (and not-so-ingenious) methods people used to protect their deceased loved ones. The episode reveals the dark intersection between medical advancement and criminal enterprise that helped shape modern surgery and anatomy.
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