resurrectionists

Resurrectionists were people who dug up freshly buried corpses to sell to medical schools for anatomical study, a practice common in 18th- and 19th-century Britain and America when legal sources of cadavers were scarce.

The term derives from resurrection—raising the dead—though these subjects weren't coming back to life.

Burke and Hare notoriously skipped the grave-robbing step by creating their own supply through murder.

The word sometimes appears in extended or figurative uses for anyone who revives something from the past.