The Economics of Everyday Things 22. Cadavers - Part 1
Mar 16, 2026
Kaylin Goodwin, VP of marketing at ScienceCare, explains how a for-profit body broker recruits donors and runs operations. Susan Lawrence, historian and professor, traces cadaver use from public dissections to modern donation laws. They discuss grave robbing turned industry, how bodies are sold and used, and the growth of wet labs and for-profit models.
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Grave Robbing Fueled Early Anatomy
- Early anatomy relied on executed criminals and public dissections as punishment and spectacle.
- Susan Lawrence recounts grave robbing and gangs stealing bodies, making dissection a macabre business in the 18th–19th centuries.
Murder for Cadavers in Scotland
- Some suppliers escalated from grave robbing to murder to meet demand for fresh cadavers in Scotland.
- Lawrence describes two men who killed about 16 poor people in 10 months to sell bodies to anatomists.
Policy Shift Made Bodies A Medical Resource
- U.S. states created laws giving medical schools access to unclaimed bodies from institutions to stop grave robbing.
- Economics drove the change: public burials meant the city paid, so institutions supplied bodies for medical training.