Grave Dealings

Body Snatching in Philadelphia, 1762-1883

By: Tim Dewysockie

Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby

In the eighteenth century the first American medical school was established in Philadelphia. Following the model of European universities, anatomical lectures were conducted with cadavers. But where did the bodies come from? Dissection was viewed as a fate worse than death, and the only legal source of "stiffs" was executed criminals. But there were not enough. As the medical profession and its need for "anatomical material" grew, a new, macabre practice emerged: body snatching.

Body snatchers secretly obtained bodies from cemeteries and sold them to medical schools for dissection. But how did body snatching work? How did body snatchers and medical schools avoid getting caught, and what happened when they did? How did the era of the body snatchers end? Grave Dealings: Body Snatching In Philadelphia, 1762-1883 digs through archives to unearth the forgotten history of a time of graveyard patrols and anatomy riots, when the dead needed protection from the living. Philadelphia pioneered and became the center of American medical education and practice–and body snatching–in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Grave Dealings explores the social, cultural, practical, and legal aspects of body snatching in America's first capital city and relates it to the continuing ethical struggles that surround the treatment of human remains to this day.

©2025 Tim Dewysockie (P)2025 Tantor Media

Well Researched

This is a very well researched look into the history of body snatching in Philadelphia and other early American cities. It's well balanced in the views of ethics of the body- both scientific and feelings of those of the families of those taken. I never knew how many bodies were needed for dissection in the past and it's crazy how much effort went into supplying doctors.