For nearly a century in the 1700s, there was an uneasy truce among medical scientists in Great Britain.

To make any progress, they needed to dissect the human body and study its anatomy.

But societal taboos prevented people from donating their bodies to medical schools.

So given the shortage of bodies for deception, British anatomists, as well as their counterparts in North America,

felt that they had no choice but to rob graves.

Some scientists did the deed themselves, while others enlisted students to help.

Regardless, government officials tended to look the other way at grave robbing, for two main reasons.

First, most government officials were rich and powerful.

Most bodies for deception, meanwhile, came from the pauper classes.

Officials could therefore tolerate grave robbing without the fear of their own loved ones going missing.

Less cynically, authorities also knew that budding doctors and surgeons needed bodies to train on,

and, frankly, to make mistakes on them.

Otherwise, these newbie doctors would be learning anatomy on the fly inside living patients,

making mistakes while elbow deep inside their guts.

Many government officials wanted to legalize dissection for this reason, but popular opinion prevented it.

As a result, the British medical community fell into an uneasy truce when it came to procuring bodies.

Don't ask. Don't tell.

What finally broke the equilibrium was the obsession of one man, John Hunter.

Hunter was coarse and foul mouth, with hair so red you could light a cigar with it.

He was the 10th of 10th children in his Scottish family, and he went into medicine in part because six of his siblings died young from disease.

In 1748, at age 20, Hunter moved to London to become the assistant director for a doctor there.

He had never cut into a body before that, but after the rush of that first incision, he basically never stopped.

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