The activities of the 18th century body-snatchers are among the most lurid and entertaining episodes in the history of medicine and have been cataloged exhuastively by scholars and popularizers of all kinds. Today, however, when the ethics of research on humans has become a critical problem in medical philosophy and when relations between the public and the profession appear to be deteriorating, it is instructive to take another look at this period of medical history, when many current ethical problems first became issues of widespread concern. Both a cause and a product of the frictions that existed between physicians and the public in 18th century England, the resurrection trade may be viewed as a bizarre example of what can happen when a
