Between the 17th century and 1832, British surgeons faced a paradox as legal as it was lethal: the law required them to demonstrate surgical skill, yet prohibited them from dissecting corpses to acquire it. No hospital provided bodies; only those condemned to death offered them, in insufficient numbers. Someone had to break the law. It was the men in the sack, better known as body snatchers, who criminally adjusted the supply of bodies to meet the demand. *Body Snatchers*, by James Morres Ball, traces two centuries of this clandestine trade that allowed William Harvey to verify blood circulation, Sir Charles Bell to revolutionize neurology, and Edward Jenner to develop the vaccine, but which also led to the gallows for both grave robbers and surgeons and anatomists due to a criminal syndicate that literally prevented any deceased person in the United Kingdom from resting in peace. Ball, an ophthalmologist and historian, examines how lawmakers in London and Washington shut down this market. The Anatomy Act of 1832 finally allowed legal access to donated bodies, putting an end to the need for exhumation. The book alternates between rigorous scholarship, moral portraits of surgeons that are now epic, and the raw documentation of crimes that shook public opinion. It is a story of medical innovation built on illegality, and of how the law took too long to catch up with reality.