Diary of a resurrectionist: The unique record of a frightening trade born out of necessity

Recently, grant funding from TownsWeb has allowed the complete digitisation of one of the College Archives’ most fascinating documents: an actual written account of the activity of body snatching in the city of London during the period 1811-12, set out in diary form.

“It is the most revealing account extant of the bodysnatching trade as it operated” Martin Fido, 1988.

Resurrectionists or resurrection men were body snatchers who would steal fresh corpses and sell them to medical schools for dissection. This was a notorious trade that flourished at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries in Britain as a result of a lack of bodies to dissect in these schools. Organised criminal gangs would contrive to steal recently buried bodies, or acquire dead bodies before burial, and then sell them at a premium to anatomy teachers who used them to demonstrate dissection and also give their classes of students a chance to try dissecting themselves, as this was a required part of medical training.

Joseph Naples was the author of the diary. He was born in Deptford in 1774; naval records show him aged 21 in 1795. He served on the HMS Excellent and fought under Nelson and Jervis at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797 (between the British and Spanish navies as part of the War of the First Coalition).

Naples was said to have begun body snatching in the early years of the nineteenth century, inveigled into it by a shadowy figure about whom there is scant information. Several sources mentioning this “recruiter” noted that he was a “Scotsman called White” who was supplying bodies to hospitals in London. Starting as a gravedigger in the Spa Fields burial ground in Clerkenwell, Naples used his position to enable his bodysnatching. After being caught and serving a period in prison, he could no longer work legitimately in graveyards, so bodysnatching became his full-time career.

A typical opening of the diary (from our digitised files).

Written between November 1811 and December 1812, Naples was 37 when the diary started. There are no entries for May, June or July as during these months the anatomical schools were not in session. Accounts suggest that Naples continued in the “profession” of body snatching after 1812 until the Anatomy Act of 1832 made the trade obsolete.

The diary details the activities of the Ben Crouch or Borough gang, which Naples was part of. The gang supplied bodies to anatomists in London, including private anatomy schools and St Thomas's and St Bartholomew's Hospitals, as well as Edinburgh and elsewhere. The entries also describe the risks of the job, such as being caught by dogs or the watch (policemen of the time).

Initial pages of the diary with explanatory letters pasted in (from our digitised files).

Information in the diary clarifies the arrangements of the work of Naples and the rest of his gang, listing bodies taken, where they were sold and how much compensation was received etc. Expenses, which included bribes for certain parties to look the other way, such as custodians or watchmen, are listed. The diary also notes what the group did after their trading had taken place: including trips to the pub and a list of who from the gang had been arrested. Martin Fido itemises the diary period by activity: “Of the 194 nights covered by Naples’ diary, 124 were devoted to the demanding labour of digging up and distributing bodies; 10 were entirely given over to settling-up [paying and being paid]; and moonlight made resurrectionism impossible on 47. Of the remaining fortnight, two nights were given over to boxing matches; one to the theatre; two to following...[a rival gang] and one to settling a dispute in the gang. There was only a total of a week in which the gang were too drunk to work.”

The diary was presented to the Royal College of Surgeons of England by Sir Thomas Longmore. In his early days, Sir Thomas was a dresser to Bransby Cooper and assisted him in writing the 1843 biography of his relative the famous surgeon Sir Astley Cooper (in the past, a “surgical dresser” was a person, often a medical student or apprentice, who supported surgeons by cleaning and bandaging wounds, and generally assisting with surgical procedures). Astley Cooper was connected to the Resurrectionists through his work as an anatomy teacher in the period 1791 to 1825, his trade with them during these years was constantly maintained. The book about Astley Cooper contained some extracts from the diary and this prompted enough requests to publish the work in full that James Blake Bailey, the Librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, brought out his published version in 1896 with an account of the resurrection men in London and a history of the passing of the Anatomy Act.

“Sir Thomas Longmore.” Wood engraving after Jerrard. Public Domain Mark. From the Wellcome Collection.

Astley Paston Cooper. From: Pettigrew, T. J. Medical Portrait Gallery. Biographical memoirs of the most celebrated physicians, surgeons, etc. who have contributed to the advancement of medical science. London : Fisher, Son & Co.; [1838-1840]. Public Domain Mark.

“Bransby Blake Cooper.” Lithograph by J. Bizo. Public Domain Mark. From the Wellcome Collection.

The new digitisation of the text takes this a step further and allows researchers anywhere in the world to see the item close up and cover to cover, with images of the binding and the actual pages of the diary. It also includes letters about the item which are affixed to the inside of the book. In addition Notes on places and descriptions in The Diary of a Resurrectionist by Isabella M. Holmes has also been digitised. These notes are by a graveyard expert about the diary, dated 25 February 1899. When James Blake Bailey published The Diary of a Resurrectionist in 1896, he referred to The London Burial Grounds; by Isabella M. Holmes. The digitised notes are Holmes’s response to Bailey, where she endeavours to identify some of the places mentioned in the diary.

Desperation and indignity

The Library also holds a copy of Bailey’s printed version of the diary, (and the Internet Archive holds a digitised version). Bailey’s work contextualises the diary with many interesting notes and stories. It gives a glimpse into the early nineteenth-century backdrop of medical schools’ desperation to obtain bodies to anatomise for teaching purposes mixed with the feelings of shock, horror and fear from the public, demonstrated in the reporting of cases connected to the trade. It quotes broadsides (news sheets with a sensationalist overtone) giving details of how criminals were punished and also refers to contemporary fictional stories that tap into the growing public disgust and outrage about disturbed graves.

The evolution of anatomy teaching using human remains is a topic too complex to cover in depth here but it had gradually become more normalised in the medical community in this period through an acceptance that dissection was the best way to learn and via the spread of printed texts containing illustrations that had obviously been created using dissected bodies. Bailey characterized the trade of body snatching as having its origins in “the early part of the eighteenth century…A knowledge of anatomy was insisted upon by the Corporation of Surgeons, as each student had to produce a certificate of having attended at least two courses of dissection”.

One sign that the world of medical science had moved towards accepting a form of “compartmentalising” of the anatomised body was the removal of the concept of the soul from anatomy texts. This had happened in the seventeenth century. The anatome corporis humani, published in 1672 by Isbrand van Diemerbroeck, a professor at Utrecht, appears to have been the last textbook of anatomy to discuss the soul within a routine description of human parts. Thereafter, the soul disappeared from the scope of human anatomy books.

“A lecture at the Hunterian anatomy school, Great Windmill Street, London.” Watercolour by R.B. Schnebbelie, 1839. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). From the Wellcome Collection.

This attitude of separation contrasts sharply with public feeling about dissection, in which it was seen as a form of desecration “Great respect for the body of the dead…characterised mankind in nearly all ages...postmortem dissection was looked upon as a great indignity by the relatives of the deceased” (Bailey).

But the problem of supplying bodies to anatomists persisted and worsened over time. The average number of executed criminals in a year, during the period, was 55; of these, 4 were legally allowed, through the Murder Act of 1752, to be used by medical schools and were claimed by the College and distributed to centres of anatomy teaching. However, one estimate of the real number of bodies needed for teaching in anatomy schools sets the figure at over 500. This contributed to the thriving and gruesome trade in the recently deceased. As the demand for cadavers grew, both from the College and from private anatomy schools, the trade in bodysnatching filled the gap between legal supply and demand.

The solving of the problem of bodysnatching came slowly and was debated extensively in the period 1828 to the enactment of The Anatomy Act in 1832. Joseph Naples probably gave evidence during Select Committee hearings on the matter, as one bodysnatcher whose identity was protected in the resulting report refers to quoting figures “according to my book”.

The Act was the result of mounting public concern over the work of resurrectionists, but also anatomists fearing for the future of what they regarded as complete medical training. In the end, the issue came to a head, prompted by several well-publicised trials of body snatchers who had resorted to murder (Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, Bishop, Head and Williams in London). The Anatomy Act addressed this by allowing surgeons and students to dissect unclaimed bodies. While this was effective in ending the bodysnatching trade, it disproportionately penalised the poor, as most of the bodies came from workhouses, prisons or hospitals.

After the 1832 Anatomy Act made him redundant, our diarist Joseph Naples returned to legitimate work as a servant in the Dissecting Room at St Thomas’ Hospital. Contemporary accounts noted his skills in dissecting a head.

Over the years, there have been many research appointments at the College to view the diary and the related notes that help interpret it, leading to fascinating academic research into dissection and public and professional attitudes to anatomical study. Since 2024 the Archives staff has also regularly used the diary in workshop sessions for A level English students which look at the real inspiration for the fictional work Frankenstein: or “The Modern Prometheus” by Mary Shelley, published in 1818. Victor Frankenstein is described by Shelley in chapter 4 of Frankenstein as obtaining the “parts” to fashion his creature or monster from “vaults and charnel-houses”. Later noting “I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame…I kept my workshop of filthy creation…The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation”.

In practice, surgeons and anatomy teachers in England had gangs like the borough resurrectionists to obtain bodies to dissect and were therefore at one remove from the business of bodysnatching themselves. But Shelley was clearly aware of how human remains were used in anatomy teaching and could exploit the horror that people felt about that in her story. Victor’s opportunistic collection of bones and the use of emotionally charged language in describing his experimentation process reinforce that he is simultaneously in two minds about his process, at once scientifically detached and rigorous in his experiments and at the same time horrified and demonstrably conflicted about his work amassing the “materials”.

Digitising the diary and notes allows many more people the chance to view and interpret it and preserves for the future an intriguing item that would deteriorate quickly with anything equivalent to this scale of physical use. It is hoped that through widening access more people will engage with the diary and that this will provoke more research, discussion and understanding about the period in which it was created.

Corinne Hogan, Assistant Librarian