Dr. John Fleetwood was born in 1917 and attended Blackrock College, Dublin before studying medicine at UCD. He practiced as a doctor all his working life and published two books, The History of Medicine in Ireland (1951) and The Irish Body Snatchers (1988),

In this documentary, Dr. Fleetwood investigates the practice of body-snatching in Ireland.

Since 300 B.C. anatomists have wanted to know how the body worked, what its functions were and most importantly what was really under all that skin on a human being. Although many medical students had to content themselves with textbooks and animal dissections, some intrepid scholars braved the illegality of dissecting of a human body and made significant findings in anatomy and medicine. The growth of medical schools in the 18th and early 19th centuries increased the demand for cadavers for students to practice on. Those who practised body snatching and who made a living from it were termed resurrectionists or resurrection-men. In the early 19th century, it was common for the bodies of criminals who had been executed to be passed on to the medical schools but as the use of capital punishment receded, demand soon outstripped supply.

In Ireland during the 18th and early 19th century, body snatching was as prevalent as anywhere else. The first written record occurs in Faulkners Dublin Journal in May 1732, when a gravedigger in a church in Suffolk Street received a prison sentence for turning a blind eye to resurrectionists and their work. The problems seem to have been mainly concentrated in Dublin where there were a number of medical schools. Cases of bodysnatching in other areas of the country did occur although they were rare. Many of the graveyards had to build watchtowers, which were patrolled by armed defenders.

The two most well known Irish body snatchers were Burke and Hare, two men from Northern Ireland who moved from grave robbing to murder in Scotland between 1827 and 1828 in order to supply fresh corpses to the medical schools. Between them, they murdered 12 people and supplied the corpses to a well-known physician in the medical school in Edinburgh. After they were caught, Hare testified against his friend in order to gain immunity and William Burke was hanged in January 1829. The Burke and Hare murders directly influenced the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832 by the Government. This allowed unclaimed bodies and those which were donated by relatives to be used for the purposes of study. It also required the licensing of anatomists. This law effectively ended the body snatching trade in Great Britain and Ireland.

Compiled By John Scully

Produced by Bill Meek

First Broadcast: November 7th 1994        

An Irish radio documentary from RTÉ Radio 1, Ireland - Documentary on One - the home of Irish radio documentaries