body snatching theme

Body snatching is the secret removal of corpses from burial sites for the purpose of dissection and anatomy studies. This is featured as a crime.

Notes

The Wikipedia definition is slightly broader. We restrict the usage here to body snatching for the purpose of medical studies, as there are a number of mostly 19th century stories that feature this distinctive social issue.

4 total · 1 major · 2 minor

StoryLevelMotivation
nightgallery2x19a major Mr. Bennett disapproved of Dr. Fletcher's practice of using cadavers obtained by illicit means for his medical demonstrations.
movie: Frankenstein (1931) minor Igor stole a fresh corpse to reanimate.
movie: Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) minor Henry and Victor stole a fresh corpse to reanimate.
ahh3x07 not The story concerned the infamous body snatchers Burke and Hare killing people in order to sell their corpses to the university to be experimented upon by medical students. Burke and Hare were not technically body snatchers even though body snatching was related to what they were doing, and apparently rampant in contemporary Edinburgh.