Until 1832, when an Act of Parliament began to regulate the use of bodies for anatomy in Britain, public dissection was regularly-and legally-carried out on the bodies of murderers, and a shortage of cadavers gave rise to the infamous murders committed by Burke and Hare to supply dissection subjects to Dr. Robert Knox, the anatomist. This book tells the scandalous story of how medical men obtained the corpses upon which they worked before the use...