Cadavers and Science. Part 2: From Body Snatchers to the Bodies of Barbacena

It would be a mistake to suppose that the history of the resurrectionists belongs to the British past alone or constitutes an exotic curiosity in the formation of European medicine. Although body snatchers became particularly notorious in England in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the underlying problem that gave rise to them, a growing need for bodies to teach anatomy, appeared in virtually every country that built modern medical institutions. The shortage of cadavers amid the expansion of anatomy constituted a structural problem for Western medicine, and Brazil was part of this history.

That past has recently returned to public debate in Brazil. During the first half of 2026, major universities officially acknowledged their role in using cadavers from the Hospital Colônia de Barbacena for anatomy teaching during the twentieth century. The Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and the Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei publicly acknowledged their involvement and apologized in light of historical evidence that the bodies had been incorporated into university medical training.

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The significance of this episode goes well beyond the question of institutional responsibility. It makes clear that the problem faced by English anatomists in the early nineteenth century did not go away with time. The need for bodies persisted. What changed were the means by which cadavers were obtained and their use legitimized. While Joseph Naples and his companions broke into graves at night to supply London’s medical schools, modern institutions increasingly turned to the bodies of those in particularly vulnerable social positions: people in poverty, psychiatric inpatients, people without known relatives, prisoners, people who had been abandoned, and those whose deaths were unlikely to prompt significant public demands.

In this respect, the history of the Hospital Colônia de Barbacena takes on a significance that extends beyond the history of Brazilian psychiatry. Thousands of people died in the institution during the twentieth century. Many of them had never received a rigorous psychiatric diagnosis. Its patients included people living in poverty, people with alcoholism or epilepsy, orphans, homosexuals, women their families considered troublesome, people who had been abandoned, and people who simply found no place in prevailing arrangements of social life. What later happened to some of their bodies reveals a disturbing historical continuity: the same people marginalized in life became useful in death.

The comparison with the English resurrectionists goes beyond a simple moral analogy. There are profound differences between the historical contexts. Yet both cases reveal a common problem: the making of a category of the dead whose availability to science was considered socially acceptable. In one case, the needs of anatomy led to the clandestine violation of graves. In the other, those needs led to the institutionalized use of bodies from populations considered marginal or lacking effective social protection. The underlying principle, however, is much the same. The production of medical knowledge was often sustained by taking possession of the bodies of those least able to defend their memory.

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HOSPITAL COLÔNIA, EM BARBACENA. in. FRANCO, José; FERREIRA, Luiz Alfredo. A sucursal do inferno. O Cruzeiro, Rio de Janeiro, ano 33, n. 27, p. 4-15, 14 abr. 1961.

This observation has important consequences for the history of suicide. In the nineteenth century, alienists such as Esquirol looked for anatomical lesions in the bodies of those who had died by suicide, hoping to explain voluntary death scientifically. At the same time, forensic physicians claimed the authority to examine, classify, and interpret those bodies. The body of the person who died by suicide gradually entered the same field of observation as those of asylum patients, criminals, people in poverty, and hospital inpatients. Modern medicine both medicalized suicide and incorporated the dead into its apparatuses of knowledge.

Perhaps this is why Joseph Naples’s diary still matters today far beyond the history of crime or anatomy. It allows us to observe the moment when modern medicine began to develop a new relationship with the dead. From the desecrated graves of London in 1811 to the anatomical theaters of the nineteenth century, the asylums studied by Esquirol, and the bodies from Barbacena used by Brazilian medical schools, there is a historical continuity whose full extent remains to be investigated. This is the history of the transformation of the cadaver into an object of knowledge. In it, the promise of producing knowledge often coexisted with forms of violence, exclusion, and desecration that contemporary societies are only beginning to recognize fully.

Beyond investigating the English body snatchers, perhaps we should ask whether similar clandestine networks for procuring bodies existed in Brazil. How did the medical schools of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Porto Alegre, and Minas Gerais supply their anatomical theaters before modern hospitals became established? What role did public cemeteries, the Santas Casas, charity hospitals, and psychiatric institutions play in this process? Was there popular resistance comparable to what occurred in England? Were there reports of graves being violated to supply medical teaching? These questions remain largely open and may constitute one of the unwritten chapters in the history of Brazilian medicine.

Studying the English resurrectionists may thus lead us to a more unsettling question about how medicine learned to open bodies and whose bodies were considered available to be opened.

Prof. Alexandre H. Reis

Sources: UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE MINAS GERAIS. UFMG pede desculpas por uso, no século XX, de cadáveres de Barbacena em suas atividades de ensino. Belo Horizonte, 2026. Disponível em: https://www.medicina.ufmg.br/ufmg-pede-desculpas-por-uso-no-seculo-xx-de-cadaveres-de-barbacena-em-suas-atividades-de-ensino/ Acesso em: 1 jun. 2026.

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SÃO JOÃO DEL-REI. Nota pública sobre a utilização de corpos provenientes do Hospital Colônia de Barbacena. São João del-Rei, 2026. Disponível em: https://ufsj.edu.br Acesso em: 1 jun. 2026.