Gray’s Anatomy, the bible for generations of medical professionals, is referenced in novels and movies as diverse as The Addams Family, Gabaldon’s Voyager, Star Trek: Voyager, Dan Brown’s Inferno and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The 42^nd edition is still in use today. 

The original text was written in 1859 by doctors Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter as an anatomical guide for their colleagues. The original text was well before the invention of imaging and is striking for its detail on the inner mysteries of the human body. Acknowledging how the first edition could be so detailed is not something we generally consider. I certainly didn’t think about the practicalities in gaining the necessary understanding of the inner workings of the body until I discovered that my four times great grandfather Thomas Finlan was in a Dublin based gang and a resurrectionist to boot. 

Gangs of resurrectionists followed in the footsteps of the original ‘body snatchers’, that is, the teachers and students of anatomy who, according to Ball in his treatise on the practice, were respectable resurrectionists.^[1] Although other parties were actively providing anatomists with exhumed bodies to meet demand, the first grave robbers, from as early as the 1700’s were principally the anatomists, surgeons and students.^[2] It was common for leading surgeons revered even today for their discoveries to have been personally engaged with the practice in their student days. As demand for corpses grew, an increasingly incensed public meant students and anatomists were putting their personally safety at risk. The solution was to turn to hiring gangs of resurrectionists for supply to their teaching schools.

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