Corpses and Science. Part 1: The Diary of a Grave Robber

In May 2025, the Royal College of Surgeons of England made a complete digitized copy available of one of the most remarkable documents in the history of modern medicine. The so-called Diary of a Resurrectionist was written in 1811 and 1812 by Joseph Naples, a member of a gang that specialized in secretly exhuming bodies for the London anatomy market. At first glance, the document's appeal seems to lie in the picturesque or even macabre character of the activities it describes. It is, after all, the daily record of men who spent their nights breaking into fresh graves to supply bodies to medical schools. Yet stopping there would mean losing sight of what makes the manuscript so historically valuable. Its real interest, which merits a chapter in the second volume of my História do Suicídio (still in progress), is that it lets us observe, on a microscopic scale, one of the most decisive processes in Western modernity: the transformation of the corpse into a privileged object of scientific knowledge.

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(ENGRAVING of a nineteenth-century London cemetery. Digital reproduction used in The Body Snatcher, Part 3. Medium, [n.d.]. Available at https://medium.com/best-short-stories/the-body-snatcher-by-robert-louis-stevenson-part-3-2632a807d423. Accessed 1 June 2026.)

The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of dead bodies. Anatomy had occupied an increasingly central place in European medical training since the Renaissance. It was above all between the late eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth, however, that dissection established itself as an indispensable foundation of surgical education. If knowing the body meant opening it up, understanding its structures meant exposing what centuries of religious respect for the dead had kept hidden. From that point on, obtaining corpses went from a marginal concern to a structural problem for medical institutions.

The paradox was plain. The more firmly anatomy established itself as a necessary condition of medical progress, the less adequate the number of bodies legally available for dissection became. In early nineteenth-century England, executed criminals remained the main authorized source of corpses. Yet the expansion of medical schools and the growth of anatomy teaching had created a demand that far outstripped supply. Here was a characteristic contradiction of modernity. Science needed bodies, yet the legal order and funerary customs prevented access to them.

It was precisely in this gap that the trade of the so-called resurrectionists flourished. The name carried an unintended irony. These men removed the dead from cemeteries and brought them into a new economy of knowledge, leaving resurrection to others. The corpse passed from the care of the family, the religious community, or the memory of the deceased into a chain of circulation involving grave robbers, intermediaries, anatomy teachers, medical students, and hospitals. For the first time on a large scale, the human body acquired a scientific and economic value independent of the person it had been in life.

Joseph Naples's diary gives us a concrete view of this economy of the dead. Its pages record bodies exhumed, prices negotiated, operating expenses, bribes paid to watchmen and gravediggers, the arrests of gang members, and the risks that constantly attended the trade. The document reveals a remarkably rational organization. It shows a genuine supply network that met the continuing demands of medical teaching, well beyond sporadic acts by isolated individuals. Modern anatomy, often presented as a triumph of scientific reason, depended materially on an illicit market sustained by the systematic violation of graves.

The routine character of the work comes through particularly clearly in Naples's own notes. One entry reads simply, “Went to Bunhill Row. Took up one. Received £4 4s.” (“Fomos a Bunhill Row. Exumamos um corpo. Recebemos 4 libras e 4 xelins”). On another occasion he wrote, “Went to St. Pancras. Took up two adults. Received £8 8s.” (“Fomos a St. Pancras. Exumamos dois adultos. Recebemos 8 libras e 8 xelins”). The matter-of-fact recordkeeping is striking precisely because it leaves out any moral or emotional comment. The corpse appears simply as a unit of work, something to transport, a commodity to trade, and a necessity for the day-to-day functioning of anatomy schools.

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BROWNE, Hablot Knight. Resurrectionists. [Place unknown], 1847. One woodcut. Original in a private collection.

It is here that the manuscript reaches beyond the history of medicine and becomes relevant to the history of suicide. Over the nineteenth century, the status of the corpse gradually changed. For centuries, the bodies of people who died by suicide had been subject to religious and legal sanctions designed to extend condemnation beyond death. Christian burial was denied, the body was mutilated, property was confiscated, and the memory of the deceased was publicly disgraced. As mental medicine, psychiatry, and forensic medicine established themselves, however, the corpse took on a new function. Once an object of punishment alone, it became an object of investigation.

It is no accident that several decades after the period Naples describes, alienists such as Étienne Esquirol began carrying out systematic autopsies of people who had died by suicide in the hope of finding the organic lesions responsible for voluntary death, a subject I examine in my course “Preleções sobre suicídio.” The corpse of a person who died by suicide went beyond bearing the marks of moral condemnation to become a medical document. Researchers looked for changes in the brain, lesions of the digestive system, cranial deformities, and any anatomical signs that could provide a scientific explanation for what had been understood for centuries as sin, crime, or moral vice.

In this respect, the diary of the resurrectionists offers a view of the period before the full medicalization of voluntary death. It records a time when bodies were still claimed by different regimes of truth. Religion held them sacred, families claimed them as their own, the justice system could punish them, and medicine was beginning to turn them into a source of knowledge. Joseph Naples's account tells more than the story of grave robbers. It tells the story of how a new way of seeing the human body came into being, a gaze that would find some of its principal laboratories in anatomy theatres, hospitals, asylums, and morgues.

When Jean-Baptiste Jeannel proposed in 1878 that the bodies of people who had died by suicide and were deemed responsible for their actions be compulsorily assigned to anatomy schools, many of his contemporaries thought the idea extreme. Yet it became conceivable only because the process described in the diary had already advanced so far. The corpse had ceased to be simply the vestige of a life and had become raw material for knowledge. A deep historical continuity links the graves opened by London's resurrectionists and the psychiatric autopsies of people who died by suicide. Both show the gradual incorporation of the dead into modern arrangements for producing knowledge.

The story, however, ends neither in England nor in the nineteenth century. If London cemeteries supplied the anatomy theatres of European medicine, the Brazilian experience suggests that similar mechanisms continued to operate in different forms and institutional settings. Recent discussions of the use of corpses from the Hospital Colônia de Barbacena by medical schools in Minas Gerais show that the relationship between medicine, anonymous corpses, and socially vulnerable populations remains an open subject of historical inquiry. In the second part of this essay, we will examine a Brazilian case to understand how the production of anatomical and psychiatric knowledge in our own country also became tied to the circulation of bodies from institutions of exclusion and confinement.

Prof. Alexandre H. Reis Sources

HOGAN, Corinne. Diary of a resurrectionist: The unique record of a frightening trade born out of necessity. Royal College of Surgeons of England, 27 May 2025. Available at https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/diary-of-a-resurrectionist/  Accessed 29 May 2026.

BAILEY, James Blake (ed.). The Diary of a Resurrectionist. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1896. Available at https://archive.org/details/diaryofresurrect00napl Accessed 29 May 2026.

HOGAN, Corinne. Diary of a resurrectionist: The unique record of a frightening trade born out of necessity. Royal College of Surgeons of England. The digitized original manuscript is available at https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/diary-of-a-resurrectionist/  Accessed 29 May 2026.

ESQUIROL, Étienne. Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal. Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1838. Available at

https://openlibrary.org Accessed 30 May 2026.

BELL, Clark. Medico-Legal Studies. Vol. I. New York: Medico-Legal Journal Association, 1889. Available at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Medico-legal_studies_%28Volume_1%29_%28IA_28320490RX1.nlm.nih.gov%29.pdf Accessed 30 May 2026.