Mortsafe in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
A mortsafe is a protective iron grating surrounding and covering a grave,[1] to protect it from disturbance by body-snatchersThose who exhumed the bodies of the recently deceased during the 18th and 19th centuries to provide cadavers to anatomists for their research..
Several major hospitals and medical teaching centres were established in Britain during the 18th century. The medical students attending them had to learn anatomy by attending dissections of human subjects, but with only a very few corpses legally available for dissection, those new institutions suffered from a severe shortages of cadavers.[2]
The body-snatchers addressed that shortage by exhuming recently buried human corpses and selling them to the anatomists.[3]
See also
- Murder Act 1752Act of parliament of England and Wales to increase the horror of being executed for murder by expediting the process and denying the right to a decent burial.