Imagine that someone close to you has died and you hold a funeral for them and they were buried. Many family and friends attended the service. Then, in a day or so afterward, you are notified that someone has stolen the body from it's grave. The horror of it all would be too much to handle. And then imagine that after a while, the body shows up in a medical school as it's main exhibit. Well, this happened a century ago to people more times than one can imagine.

During the 1700s and 1800s, medical schools all over Europe and here in America were buying dead bodies from grave robbers to use in their classes. It was actually common practice, mainly in England, for grave robbers to dig up fresh graves at night and pull the dead from their coffins and cart them off to sell to medical colleges around the areas. If you have ever watched the movie, Frankenstein, and a host of other films, yes, that scene of the grave robbers did happen. Many grave robbers were mainly interested in the jewelry and possibly other trinkets buried with the corpse. But most were interested in the corpse itself. That's where the "big money" was.

At the time, there were no laws against grave robbing. Society mainly took it for granted that a dead body was to rest in peace once in the ground. But as the practice of grave robbing became more common, laws were passed to protect the dead.

Grave robbing continued through the early 1900s with no attention given to the law. And in a few cases even today, the act of grave robbing is done. In modern times it is mostly done to old graves to collect bones for devil worship and that sort of acts. New graves are much more difficult to open. There are sealed burial vaults to contend with plus locked caskets. So grave robbing today is actually too hard to make it pay off. No one is buying bodies these days and any trinkets found in the casket is hardly worth the effort to get to them. But grave robbing was more common than one can believe back in the Victorian period and before.