Body snatching is the secret disinterment of corpses from graveyards. A common purpose of body snatching, especially in the 19th century, was to sell the corpses for dissection or anatomy lectures in medical schools. Those who practised body snatching were often called "resurrectionists" or "resurrection-men." A related act is grave robbery, uncovering a tomb or crypt to steal artifacts or personal effects rather than corpses.
Read more about Body Snatching: Body Snatching in The United Kingdom, Body Snatching in The United States of America, Contemporary Body Snatching
Famous quotes containing the word body:
“And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incence exhales from them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)