The turn of the 19th century wasn't such a bad time to live, at least compared to all the time before it. People were progressively living longer lives thanks to major advancements in medical science, which was mostly thanks to a boom in the number of medical colleges; though it probably also didn’t hurt that these hallowed halls of learning had started teaching how the human body actually worked instead of just making up things about the four humors and other such nonsense. Medical students of the era were some of the first to be taught via the use of dissected cadavers, the practice having only become widely acceptable a few decades earlier. For some reason, people have always been a little weird when it comes to dead bodies. However, it wasn’t just the medical students having all the fun, it was also the general public. Many people of the era attended events called dissection theaters, where a trained physician would show anyone with the balls to look all the different parts of the body. One must remember that people didn’t have TV’s back then. However, there was just one little problem. All of this educating and dissecting required a lot of dead bodies, which was a bit of an issue given that most people were rather less than willing to have the bodies of their loved ones cut up. It didn’t help that many churches claimed the practice was against the teachings of the bible, which if you were pretty literal in your belief of resurrection kind of made sense, sort of.
Anyways, by 1820 the city of Edinburgh, Scotland was the center of anatomical study in the world, which I’m sure is a little fun fact that the local tourist bureau surely hyped the shit out of. This of course led to a huge local demand for dead bodies which couldn't really be met by the available supply. According to the laws of the time, the only cadavers that could be used for medical research were those of dead prisoners (either by execution or natural causes), people who committed suicide (since they were going to hell anyways), and orphans (because apparently fuck orphans). What this basically meant was that you had representatives from medical schools going around to prisons and orphanages on a daily basis, asking with barely concealed hope whether or not anybody had died. As with any situation where supply didn't meet demand, and customers were willing to pay out the nose to get what they wanted, people got creative. Okay, maybe not creative, but they did start grave robbing in order to obtain fresh corpses to sell to the medical schools. These purveyors of the dead, called resurrectionists, mostly targeted the poor, since the poor were too broke to do much about it, except for the occasional riot through town. However, even with this ill-gotten supply, there still just weren’t enough cadavers to go around.
It was during this strange point in history that an Edinburgh lodging house owner named William Hare found that one of his lodgers had died without paying his bill. Not being the brightest of fellas, he went to his friend William Burke to ask for advice, who being a man without morals, suggested selling the body to a medical school. The pair did just that, pocketing what amounted to around $1,000 in today's money for their trouble. A few months later, another one of Hare's lodgers grew ill, sparking ideas of a further payout for Burke and Hare. However, not being the most patient of men, the duo instead just straight up murdered the sick lodger and sold his body. Things just kind of got out of hand from there. Due to a lack of sick lodgers, Burke and Hare switched things up a bit by murdering local prostitutes and vagabonds, an estimated 16 to 30 people over the course of a year. However, when concocting this new strategy, the duo failed to realize that medical students loved sleeping with hookers just as much as everybody else. Many of the students began to recognize the faces and bodies that were turning up on their dissection tables. Questions began to be asked, and eventually everything fell apart. As a result, Hare was imprisoned and Burke was hanged. His body was of course given to the medical school to dissect.
The Burke and Hare murders, followed by a couple of copycat killings, convinced the British government that something had to be done to improve the supply of dead bodies. After all, the advancement of medical science depended on it. In 1832, a new law was passed giving medical colleges access to unclaimed corpses, the bodies of those who died in workhouses, and the cadavers of people donated by their loved ones in return for the college paying funeral expenses. So yes, basically the law just gave doctors better access to dead poor people, which remain the main source for medical cadavers to this day. On the plus side, this pretty much completely solved the corpse shortage problem, and put an end to the illegal body trade. It also led to huge leaps forward in medical science as researchers began to more fully understand how the human body worked, resulting in the modern medical care we all now enjoy today.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burke_Murdering_Margery_Campbell.jpg