Emedinews:Insights on MEdicolegal Issues:Disternment means the act of digging up something (especially a corpse) that has been buried.

Disinterment

Disternment means the act of digging up something (especially a corpse) that has been buried.

• Many early groups placed the corpse in the ground and exhumed it at a later date for religious rituals, a practice still undertaken by some traditional societies.
• In fourteenth–century France, it became common procedure to dig up the more or less dried–out bones in the older graves in order to make room for new ones.
• The high death rate from the European plagues coupled with a desire to be buried in already–full church cemeteries led to old bones being exhumed so that new bodies could be placed in the graves.
• In earlier times, on rare occasions prior to embalming, the body was removed from the ground. This happened when burial professionals or the authorities suspected that the person might have been buried alive.
• The French philosopher and death expert Philippe discussed necrophiliacs who disinterred dead bodies for sexual purposes and scientists who dug up corpses to conduct scientific experiments.