Talk:Body snatching

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Swineha9, Kosaskih.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 16:02, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Final Disposition?
Strangely, none of the sources that I've checked discuss what happened to the stolen remains after the medical schools were done with them. The article suggests that they certainly didn't end up back in their original graves. Anyone know? This would be a good addition to the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.197.33.253 (talk) 23:29, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Resurrectionist
Merged from Resurrectionist (section). SilkTork 20:29, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Refigeration

 * Before electric power to supply refrigeration, bodies would rapidly decay and become unusable for study.

There was plentiful refrigeration in the Victorian era, ice was brought in with the fishing fleet. The 'gas' refrigerator was invented somewhere around the middle of the century. It's the lack of cadavers, not the state of the corpses that caused the surgeons to turn to body snatchers. A body would typically be given to one of the students to work on, and while I don't have a contemporary account to hand, full dissection takes 2-3 weeks in a modern context. Kbthompson 13:47, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Refrigeration for prolonged periods in the 19th century wasn't an option, or even in the 20th century, for that matter. Bodies were usually preserved in brine solution, and still their usefulness in education deteriorated just as their resemblance to living bodies did. Alcohol and formaldehyde also deteriorate the cadaver, all these methods were used. Cold, and salt/alcohol/formaldehyde solutions only slow down decomposition, while harming tissues (dehydration, i.e. mummification). 91.155.202.202 (talk) 11:59, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

New Zealand Section
None of the examples in the New Zealand section are examples of body snatching. They are only examples of people being buried in a different location than they had desired or that their executor had desired. The bodies were not used for dissection. I think the section should be removed entirely. 216.36.186.2 (talk) 17:36, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Edits 25 November 2010
Added the case of John Scott Harrison. Source for John Scott Harrison (anyone with more familiarity with editing in sources, the book in question is from 1992, and there are some web sources available too, including Wikipedia): http://books.google.com/books?id=IJPwpgQYwzEC&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=John+Scott+Harrison+body+snatching&source=bl&ots=U9S7Z4UdHN&sig=rUvWr76iZEj6ShiFXQBv6G0S68o&hl=en&ei=jjDuTL2rH4uPswb8us2DCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=John%20Scott%20Harrison%20body%20snatching&f=false

I moved Biomedical Tissue Services down to modern day occurences, I think it was also the case of Alistair Cooke to fall victim to BTS, so those two paragraphs should be edited into one.

I'll do a different edit to remove the New Zealand section, which I agree is not about body snatching, just stealing a body. Body snatching is a term generally, and historically used for stealing a human cadaver or parts of a cadaver for medical use.

91.155.202.202 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:34, 25 November 2010 (UTC).

US
The section on the US is as usual grossly disproportionate to its' relative importance. It's about three times longer than the section on the uk, despite having been a much less notorious and publicized practice and of vastly less historical significance. Unfortunately this sort of endemic bias is a sad reality, on Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.163.39.180 (talk) 21:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I have been working on an updated version of mortsafe in my own user space, but I fear the amount of detail I can provide is limited. There is, however, much more to say about body snatching in general, so I may well continue to expand it.  That should alleviate your concerns. Parrot of Doom 02:13, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for Improvement
This article is related to my IAH 209 class project because Mary Roach talks extensively about body snatching in her book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. More specifically, she covers the history of body snatching in chapter 2 of her book, titled Crimes of Anatomy. I agree that the history on the United States is quite expansive relative to other portions of the article written on various parts of the world. Other countries/regions definitely need some attention in quality expansion. This is in some way a bias, because some wikipedians may add information about the US and Europe, while the other sections on non-Eurocentric countries are lacking in detail or examples. Other than that, I think the article is well written in a way that avoids clear bias (other than the US portion) and comes across as neutral. I also think that the introduction section could have some more detail in it. It is short and there is not much information for readers to just get some basic knowledge on the topic. I do think the layout of the page is good, but the section titled "other countries" needs a little bit of work to make it more aesthetically pleasing. There are some sections that are missing citations, such as the entire "In popular culture" section. I think this page has a lot of potential if we can slowly fix it up together! Kosaskih (talk) 17:28, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Hi! Can you give me any advice for improving this article?

1.	Some references do not exist, such as http://www.danallosso.com/Graverobbing.html Also one of the website the author provided in order to give an example of China, which is Asia Times, do not offer the article anymore, which makes it unreliable. It would have been better if the articles were updated to different one which is about the same case, or get rid of the whole information that the author wrote down. 2.	No Information of the person when went in through the link. The Wikipedia articles are empty. The Wikipedia article does not tell anything about the person. The author should have done editing information about the person that he mentioned in his article. 3.	It was able to combine two topics into one since those two go over similar topics. The author divided race and body snatching & public outcry into two section, however, public outcry also talks about race. By mentioning under same topic and rephrasing, readers could have understood the article easier. 4.	No exact evidence or references provided for the case of former president Tassos Papadopoulos’s body being stolen. There should have been a reliable reference to the case so that people can believe the case was real. 5.	The views of United Kingdom and Untied States have been overrepresented. The author already have spent over half of his article explaining about the body snatching in those two countries. However, the author give another explanation of body snatching happened in the United States and United Kingdom. If he wanted to write about the information, it would have been better if he included those into the first part where he talks about the two countries. Unless, it will be helpful to get rid of the information. It might cause a confusion to readers.--Kimjun65 (talk) 03:26, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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"Appropriate" surname
The current identification of John Gorham Coffin as "appropriately named" is grossly unencyclopedic; the only question is whether there is any disposition of the presently irrelevant (not to mention otherwise unencyc.) aside, that would help advance our goals. If not, any who lets at least four and a third weeks pass before just ditching it has my full support for doing so. --Jerzy•t 01:01 & 01:58, 17 June 2018 (UTC)