![]() 1 In Canada, bodysnatching was practised by both English- and French-speaking medical students, although with slightly different motivations. In doing so, they continued a longstanding tradition of their European counterparts for example, in early 18th-century Edinburgh, students at the Royal College of Surgeons were required to sign an agreement not to engage in grave robbing. The robbers were usually medical students, who stole bodies for their own study or sold them to anatomy instructors. But the lack of legally available cadavers drove professors and students to obtain their raw material by clandestine means. By 1850 there were 42 medical schools in the United States and Canada, and with them had arisen a need for anatomical specimens. Canada's first medical school was established in Montreal considerably later, in 1822, but the days of “the resurrection men” were far from over. ![]() The nefarious practice of bodysnatching is probably as old as the study of anatomy, but on this continent it was roughly coeval with the founding in 1756 of the first American medical school, in Philadelphia. ![]()
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