1819 Times 14 Sept. 3/5 The sexton..would be deprived of his emoluments derived from a connivance at the practice of body snatching.

1863 Reader 22 Aug. 195/2 At that time (1827–28)..‘body-snatching’ became a trade.

1906 Westm. Gaz. 22 Sept. 7/1 Undertakers..complain that people..die in the infirmaries and are buried by rivals... It amounts to body-snatching pure and simple.

1941 B. J. Stern Society & Med. Progress ix. 180 The result of the lack of cadavers provided by law led to the practice of grave robbing, commonly called body snatching or ‘resurrectionism’.

2001 Ecologist May 31/1 Human samples are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of bodysnatching, they will be really serving their country.

1840 Sporting Rev. Mar. 175 That brutal act of body-snatching has long been a stain on British jurisprudence.

1962 Times 7 Nov. 7/5 He said the procedure was administratively inefficient and ‘the body-snatching between colleges is offensive and time wasting’.

1967 Baseball Digest July 6/2 It really isn't fair to use that term [sc. kidnapping] because an essential element of body-snatching is missing—no one is demanding ransom money.

1997 Guardian 28 Nov. 34/5 The Men in Black will be keeping an eye on him for signs of alien body-snatching.

1795 E. Farley Imprisonm. for Debt (ed. 2) 41 I now come to the perjuring, iniquitous, illegal, body snatching, plundering, murdering, practice of imprisonment for debt; for law it never was, nor ever can be.

1844 M. H. Barker Old Sailor's Jolly Boat 66 I'm bless'd if we don't show 'em how to pipe the bags up and no mistake—the body-snatching willans.

1904 E. Jepson Admirable Tinker 234 The three kidnappers stared at her. ‘You nasty, body-snatching scum!’ said Selina.

1991 N.Y. Mag. 21 Oct. 94/3 The reluctantly Jewish Bobby becomes a militant Zionist with a haste befitting a fifties horror film about body-snatching pods.

2006 Wall St. Jrnl. 31 Mar. w2 It's a campy horror flick about body-snatching alien slugs.

1847 D. Quillinan Jrnl. Resid. Portugal II. 157 A host of undeniable witnesses..denounce the memory of the body-snatching Bishop and of all successive Bishops of Orense who have sanctioned and profited by the theft.

1879 Tinsley's Mag. Sept. 226/2 The swarthy yarn-spinner..tells of the moonlight bivouacs of body-snatching ghouls amid the tombs.

1910 C. Markham Incas of Peru xvii. 275 When he went to take leave of the Corregidor, Polo de Ondegardo, that body-snatching official showed him the mummies of three Incas and two Ccoyas.

2007 Jrnl. Mil. Hist. 71 1235 He helped suppress a riot provoked by body-snatching medical students from the University of Edinburgh.