Leech Collector

For most of the nineteenth century, a substantial fraction of European medicine ran on a small black worm pulled out of a pond by a person standing waist-deep in cold water. The medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, was the living instrument of bloodletting — the centuries-old practice of drawing blood to rebalance the body’s “humors” — and demand for it became so enormous that an entire rural trade grew up to supply it. The leech collector, or leech gatherer, was the person at the bottom of that supply chain: usually poor, often a woman, frequently working alone in marshland for a pittance per dozen.

The method was as direct as it was grim. Collectors waded into ponds, ditches, and slow streams in the warm months, exposing their bare legs as bait. Leeches, drawn to the warmth and movement, fastened on and began to feed; the collector let them attach, then pried them loose and dropped them into a damp cloth bag or a water-filled jar. A good gatherer might come home with several dozen worms and legs covered in slow, leaking bites, because a leech secretes an anticoagulant (hirudin) that keeps a wound bleeding long after the animal lets go.

The trade peaked during a period sometimes called the “leech mania,” driven above all by the French physician Francois-Joseph-Victor Broussais, who taught that nearly all disease was inflammation to be drained by leeches. At the height of the craze France imported leeches by the tens of millions in a single year — figures of roughly 33 to 42 million were reported in the early 1830s — and a Manchester infirmary alone is documented using around 50,000 leeches in 1831. Wild populations across Ireland, England, Wales, and the Low Countries were collected toward local extinction, which in turn forced the rise of deliberate leech “farming.”

William Wordsworth had already memorialized the figure in his 1802 poem “Resolution and Independence,” whose aged leech-gatherer wanders the moors as the ponds empty and “his body bent double” by a lifetime of stooping in the water. By the time the craze faded, the gatherer was already a symbol of obsolescence — a person whose entire livelihood depended on a medical theory that was about to be abandoned.

Resurrectionist

In late-Georgian Britain, the anatomy schools that trained the nation’s surgeons had a problem they could not legally solve: they needed dead bodies, and the law allowed them almost none. The only fully lawful source of cadavers for dissection was the corpses of executed murderers, handed over under the Murder Act of 1752 as an added punishment. But executions were comparatively few while medical schools, especially in London and Edinburgh, were expanding fast and needed hundreds of bodies a year for teaching.

Into that gap stepped the resurrectionists — also called “resurrection men” or body snatchers. Working at night in small gangs, they dug up the freshly buried dead and sold them to anatomists. A legal quirk made the trade attractive: a corpse was held to be no one’s property, so stealing a body itself was not a felony but at most a misdemeanour. The shrouds, coffins, and grave goods were property and could not be touched; the naked body could. Gangs learned to lift a corpse cleanly and leave the grave clothes behind precisely to stay on the lighter side of the law.

The public response was fear and fury. Bereaved families and churchyards defended their dead with mortsafes (heavy iron cages over graves), watch-towers, hired guards, iron coffins, and burial clubs that paid for vigilance through the dangerous first weeks of decay. The trade poisoned the ordinary grief of burial with the knowledge that a fresh grave was a target.

Then the trade tipped into murder. In Edinburgh in 1828, William Burke and William Hare bypassed the graveyard entirely and simply killed people to sell, suffocating around sixteen victims for the anatomist Robert Knox. In London in 1831, the “London Burkers” — Bishop, Williams, and Head — murdered to order in the “Italian Boy” case. The horror these crimes produced was the political force that ended the trade by law.