John Hughes' Patent

Tomorrow I am to give a talk on the Scottish resurrection men to a local group and I have spent the morning polishing up my Powerpoint presentation.
 In the 19th century the demand by anatomists for human bodies far exceeded the lawful supply. In Scotland, and elsewhere, the shortfall was made good by grave-robbing. The wide-scale theft of bodies by men known as bodysnatchers or resurrection men led to mass revulsion and panic and a variety of methods were used to prevent it happening. 
One approach was to bury the dead in coffins made of iron, so-called "safety coffins", which were designed to prevent the body being extracted.  
In 1823, John Hughes was awarded a patent that used iron straps and special fastenings to firmly anchor a corpse into a reinforced iron coffin even were it to be broken open. The patent drawing is my blip for today.