I've been reading an interesting series of books lately by an Indiana author named Anna Lee Huber. The stories take place in Scotland in the 1830's and it was fun to recognize certain historic places mentioned in the books One of the early themes in the books is the fact that at that time anatomists who wanted to learn more about the human body would pay for fresh corpses that they could dissect. Grave robbing became a big business and a few enterprising grave robbers decided to cut out a step by simply killing people and delivering their bodies to the surgeons. Happily, most limited themselves to delivering already dead bodies. Needless to say the relatives of those whose bodies were dug up were not too happy about it. The picture above shows one solution. This cage-like structure is a grave safe. It was installed over a freshly buried body and left for several days until the body would have decomposed enough to be useless to the surgeon. So now you know.
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