I have been reading Wendy Moore's The Knife Man, a biography of John Hunter, the eighteenth-century surgeon who did more than anyone to drag anatomy out of superstition and into evidence. He also needed a steady supply of corpses, and there was only one place to get them. The book has a passage on what those corpses cost, and the numbers stopped me cold.

An adult body in the mid-1700s sold to surgeons for about a guinea. By the 1780s the price had doubled. Over the next few decades it climbed as high as sixteen. This is not a footnote about petty crime. This is a functioning commodity market, with price discovery, cartels, territorial disputes, and seasonal supply, operating entirely on the dead.

I wanted the primary numbers rather than the paraphrase, so I went and found them. They are better than the paraphrase.

The reason we know the exact figures is that in 1828 Parliament convened a Select Committee on Anatomy to investigate how medical schools were getting their subjects. The whole 150-page report is digitized and searchable. The first witness was Sir Astley Cooper, the most eminent surgeon in England, president of the Royal College of Surgeons the year before. He was asked, plainly, what a body cost.

Later he was pressed on the full trajectory, and gave the committee a clean price history. Two guineas, then four and six, then fourteen, then settling around eight. That is a man reciting three decades of market data from memory, the way you might recall what gas used to cost.

The Public Domain Review puts the eight-guinea figure at roughly six hundred pounds in today's money. The volatility is the part that reads as pure economics. Cooper again, on how unstable the supply was.

Prices do not swing like that in a healthy market. They swing when someone controls the supply. Cooper was asked whether one man had once held a monopoly, and his answer is the sentence I keep coming back to.

He described the operator who ran it. A man of talent and property who, the moment a rival undercut him, would break into the storerooms where competitors kept their subjects and spoil the bodies for dissection. If that failed he would incite a mob, denounce his rivals to the magistrates as grave robbers, and let the law do his enforcement. The Borough magistrates spent their time refereeing. The professor of surgery could not compete with a clever criminal who was also well capitalized, so the criminal set the price. A protection racket, and the product was corpses.

The committee also heard from a working body snatcher, identified in the record only by initials to protect him. His testimony is flat, procedural, and all the more chilling for it. Asked whether the gravediggers and sextons looked the other way, he did not hedge.

Then the throughput. Asked the most he had ever taken at once, he answered twenty-three bodies in four nights. In a good year he cleared a hundred. Cooper had already confirmed the same arrangement from the buyer's side, testifying that the sextons and gravediggers were "always in pay," and that without them a snatcher could manage only the occasional grave. Vertically integrated, from the man with the shovel to the professor with the scalpel.

The gravedigger testimony has a sequel I did not expect. A separate 1842 inquiry into London's overflowing burial grounds, quoted in Roger Luckhurst's excellent essay for the Public Domain Review, collected accounts from the men who dug the pits. One described being ordered to exhume and break down coffins at night, including, he testified, his own father's. Another, at a pauper ground where bodies were stacked eight deep, gave evidence I will simply reproduce and let stand.

The economics that inflated the price of a fresh body and the economics that crammed the poor eight to a grave were the same economics. Scarcity of decent ground, scarcity of legal subjects, and a market that found a price for both.