Burke and Hare Read online

  ANATOMY

  AND

  PHYSIOLOGY.

  * * *

  DR KNOX, ER.S.E. (Successor to DR BARCLAY, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and Conservator of its Museum) will commence his ANNUAL COURSE of LECTURES ON THE ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY of the Human Body, on Tuesday, the 4th November, at Eleven A.M. His evening COURSE of LECTURES, on the same Subject, will commence on the 11th November, at Six P.M.

  Each of these Courses will as usual comprise a full Demonstration on fresh Anatomical Subjects, of the Structure of the Human Body, and a History of the Uses of its various Parts; and the Organs and Structures generally, will be described with a constant reference to Practical Medicine and Surgery.

  FEE for the First Course, £3, 5s.; Second Course, £2, 4s.; Perpetual, £5, 9s.

  N.B. – These Courses of Lectures qualify for Examination before the various Colleges and Boards.

  * * *

  PRACTICAL ANATOMY

  AND

  OPERATIVE SURGERY.

  * * *

  DR KNOX’S ROOMS FOR PRACTICAL ANATOMY AND OPERATIVE SURGERY, will open on Monday, the 6th of October, and continue open until the End of July 1829.

  Two DEMONSTRATIONS will be delivered daily to the Gentlemen attending the Rooms for PRACTICAL ANATOMY. These Demonstrations will be arranged so as to comprise complete Courses of the DESCRIPTIVE ANATOMY of the Human Body, with its application to PATHOLOGY and OPERATIVE SURGERY. The Dissections and Operations to be under the immediate superintendance of DR KNOX. Arrangements have been made to secure as usual an ample supply of Anatomical Subjects.

  FEE for the First Course, £3, 5s.; Second Course, £2, 4s.; Perpetual, £5, 9s.

  N.B. – An Additional Fee of Three Guineas includes Subjects.

  Certificates of Attendance on these Courses qualify for Examination before the Royal Colleges of Surgeons, the Army and Navy Medical Boards, &c.

  EDINBURGH, 10. SURGEONS’ SQUARE,,

  25th September 1828

  BURKE AND HARE

  THE YEAR OF THE GHOULS

  BRIAN BAILEY

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781780573755

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  Copyright © Brian Bailey, 2002

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain 2002 by

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  ISBN 1 84018 575 9

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without the permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  Copyright permissions cleared by author. The author has tried to trace all copyright details but where this has not been possible and amendments are required, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1. Shambles

  2. Union

  3. Contract

  4. Practice

  5. Jamie

  6. Climax

  7. Trial

  8. Burke

  9. Hare

  10. Echo

  11. Knox

  12. Aftermath

  Appendices

  Select Bibliography

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  * * *

  My grateful thanks are due to Pam McNicol of the Edinburgh City Archives and to Andrew Bethune of the Edinburgh Room, Edinburgh Central Library, for their help in answering particular queries.

  Marcia Hackney of Newark Library, Nottinghamshire, helped me immensely by obtaining several obscure publications and tracing the whereabouts of others.

  I am also indebted to Dr Ruth Richardson for allowing me to make use of an important revelation in her Death, Dissection and the Destitute.

  My wife’s help and support have, as always, been invaluable throughout the course of my research and writing.

  * * *

  PREFACE

  * * *

  ‘It is impossible to shut one’s eyes to the fact that this husband [Burke] was a professional resurrectionist.’

  Henry Cockburn, defending counsel at the trial of Helen

  McDougal, 1828.

  ‘Burke, William (1792–1829). Irish criminal. Failure in a variety of trades led to his adoption of body-snatching as a livelihood.’

  Everyman’s Encyclopaedia, J.M. Dent, 1950 edn.

  Man in public house: ‘You’ve ’eard of Burke an’ ‘Are, ain’t you, Nobby?’

  Second man: ‘No. Comics, was they?’

  First man: ‘Comics, ’e sez! Did y’ear ’im? ’E sez was Burke an’ ’Are comics? Oh yes, they was bleedin’ comics all right! Dug up dead bodies, didn’t they!’

  Conversation overheard by author, c. 1962.

  ‘Soon Burke and Hare began digging up corpses from cemeteries and selling them to medical schools for dissection.’

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn., 1984.

  ‘Burke, William (1792–1829). Irish murderer. A notorious body-snatcher operating in Edinburgh . . .’

  Oxford English Reference Dictionary,

  Oxford University Press, 1996 edn.

  Well, that all appears not only unanimous but very conclusive, does it not? Who could doubt such authoritative assertions? Indeed, the tone of the man overheard in the pub implied that, surely, everybody knows that, and I heard a respected TV commentator, only recently, refer to ‘Burke and Hare, the famous body-snatchers’.

  The fact is, however, that all these random authorities, and many others like them, are wrong! There is not a single shred of evidence to support the idea that either Burke or Hare ever had anything to do with stealing corpses from the grave, or anywhere else. Indeed, in prison after his trial Burke denied that he was a body-snatcher so emphatically as to suggest that he would have been thoroughly ashamed to stoop to such skulduggery. He declared that ‘neither he nor Hare, so far as he knows’, ever supplied subjects for dissection ‘by raising dead bodies from the grave’. During the year 1828, however, when they were committing their appalling crimes, they were quite happy for people to think they were body-snatchers.

  The almost universal belief that Burke and Hare were body-snatchers is far from being the only misunderstanding about them. The truth is that there is very little established fact at all about the pair and their activities. A great deal of what we think we know about them is based solely on Burke’s confessions – hardly the most reliable evidence. Virtually all we know with absolute certainty is that a suspicious death was reported by a lodger in William Burke’s house; that the body was traced to the premises of the anatomist Dr Robert Knox; that Burke was convicted of this one murder, largely on the equally unreliable evidence of his erstwhile partner in crime, William Hare; and that Burke made statements before his execution, confessing to fifteen other murders.

  Burke and Hare were in the record
books for over a century and a half as Britain’s most prolific murderers, and they still remain one of the most prolific serial-killing partnerships in any country at any time. One recent writer, Owen Dudley Edwards, has referred to them repeatedly as ‘mass murderers’, but the calculated killing of numerous individually selected victims, one by one, needs to be distinguished in terms from the very different and indiscriminate act of mass murder by a terrorist planting a bomb or a maniac going berserk with a firearm and killing many people at the same time. Nevertheless, the crimes of Burke and Hare far outnumbered those of the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’, sixty years later, and they have been displaced from the records in terms of numbers only by the Manchester GP Harold Shipman, whose crimes perpetuated the chillingly long and close links between murder and the medical profession.

  It seems surprising that the infamous Burke and Hare affair has not generated anything like the degree of interest and investigation that has been shown in recent years in Jack the Ripper. For, although there is not the perennially enticing mystery of ‘who done it’, the case is gruesome enough and still shrouded in much other mystery, with official silence, missing documents and several questions of identity to keep the armchair sleuth occupied for a long time.

  My purpose in this book is to present a comprehensive review of both the case itself and previous commentaries on it – to examine new evidence and correct the self-perpetuating errors about this most famous and gruesome case in Scotland’s history of crime; to strip the case down to its bare bones, so to speak, and examine the minute anatomy of the Burke and Hare murders, which, God knows, are almost beyond belief. But we need to begin by examining the social conditions which made their crimes possible, for there was never a better illustration of the famous maxim that ‘every society gets the criminals it deserves’.

  Brian Bailey

  June 2002

  * * *

  1. SHAMBLES

  * * *

  Late Georgian Britain was tormented by an unpalatable choice of evils. Behind society’s elegant façade of high fashion, neo-classical architecture and cultural refinement (it was the age of Gainsborough and Sheridan, Sarah Siddons and Jane Austen, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott) lay a festering social canker, like a half-buried and unexploded bomb. The dilemma for the authorities was how best to deal with it. Taking decisive action to excise the malignant growth would involve great offence to the majority of the population, with potentially dangerous consequences, bearing in mind recent events across the Channel. But equally, doing nothing and allowing things to go on as they were would inevitably lead to a breakdown of law and order, which were already in a parlous state. The roots of the problem lay in the past, as long ago as the Renaissance and the advent of medicine as a modern science. But the progress of the disease had been accelerated by two more recent events, the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

  The growth of industry was accompanied by mass movements of workers from rural to urban centres and by rapid increases in population. In the course of the eighteenth century the population of Britain almost doubled, resulting in urban overcrowding, poverty, insanitary conditions, ill health and industrial injuries. Infant mortality was appallingly high. Tuberculosis, typhus and smallpox were major killers. Hernias and other occupational hazards were common among the working population. One of the urgent needs of a civilised nation was for more doctors and surgeons. Skilled medical attention could no longer be regarded as a prerogative of the upper classes, partly because the rich depended on having fit and healthy working people to create and maintain their wealth. The Napoleonic wars created an even greater demand for doctors and surgeons to deal with wounded soldiers on the battlefields of Europe.

  Surgeons had to be trained by qualified teachers of anatomy and surgery. The study of anatomy was by this time recognised as a vital part of the training of skilled medical men. There was no shortage of young men wanting to become surgeons. Students from home and abroad were flocking to British medical schools, which had taken over the lead from pioneering continental universities such as Padua in Italy and Leiden in the Netherlands. The medical school at Edinburgh had become established as the leading school in Britain and one of the finest in Europe. Alexander Monteith, who had founded the Edinburgh school at the end of the seventeenth century, had promised the town council that he could make ‘better improvements in anatomy in a short time than have been made by Leyden in thirty years’. And Alexander Monro, who played a major role in establishing Edinburgh’s reputation, had himself studied at Leiden.

  The surgeons of Edinburgh had been granted ‘ane condampnit man’ every year since 1505, when the town council had first granted a charter to the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers. The medical school’s increasing fame and popularity led it to petition the council to grant the right to dissect – in addition to executed criminals – unclaimed corpses, suicides and foundlings who died in infancy. But the city fathers were reluctant to increase the supply by grants which would cause enormous public outrage and civil disorder. When the corpse of a gypsy, executed for murder, vanished from its grave in Greyfriars churchyard in 1678, local people were convinced that it had been stolen ‘to make an anatomical dissection of’, and a contemporary commented that it was ‘criminal to take at their own hande, since the magistrates would not have refused it, and I hear the chirurgeons afferme, the town of Edinburgh is obliged to give them a malefactor’s body once a year for that effect’.

  The Professor of Medicine at Aberdeen in 1636, William Gordon, had petitioned the Privy Council not only for the bodies of executed criminals, but for those of the poor who died in hospitals, and the local authorities were directed, with startlingly blunt class distinction, to deliver to him

  . . . twa bodies of men, being notable malefactors, executte in thair bounds, especiallie being rebells and outlawis; and failzeing of them, the bodies of the poorer sort, dieing in hospitalls; or abortive bairns, foundlings; or of those of no qualitie, who hes died of thare diseases, and hes few friends or acquaintance that can tak exception.1

  The requirement for corpses could certainly not be met legally from the gallows alone. Some later anatomy teachers were apt to suggest that no person ought to be let loose on the unsuspecting public as a qualified surgeon before he had dissected at least three corpses. In practice, the dearth of available bodies necessitated a number of students gathering round a dissecting table to share the same cadaver. The supply in Edinburgh, as at other medical schools in Scotland and England, became increasingly inadequate for the efficient teaching of growing numbers of medical students. The doctors’ dilemma was an urgent matter which the medical profession in general and teachers of anatomy in particular continually pressed the government to resolve, but the government remained stubbornly unresponsive, largely because of pressure from the Church; the law in Christian Europe had for centuries permitted only the bodies of executed criminals to be used for lectures on anatomy.

  In Scotland, religious opposition to dissection had grown soonest and loudest. Calvinist doctrines had ensured that Scottish education and culture leaned towards the practical sciences rather than the arts, and kept national creativity outside religious debate. That is, until the reality of body-snatching entered the public consciousness and upset the status quo with a vengeance, causing widespread riots, especially in the university towns of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, where there were medical schools. Anatomists were perceived as men who were depriving the poor of their chance of an afterlife, for it was always the poor who were laid out on their cold tables. The mass of the people believed absolutely in the material resurrection of the flesh on Judgement Day, and did not the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer confirm them in this faith? ‘. . . we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto this glorious body . . .’ Mutilation of
the corpse would surely preclude this consummation. How could it come to pass if their corporeal beings were to reach their ignominious terminal by being rent asunder on marble slabs? Grave-robbery was no more than a misdemeanour in English law, but in Scotland it was a heinous offence.

  Sir Walter Scott was aware of this problem as well as the danger of appearing to punish the poor for their poverty. He wrote to Maria Edgeworth in February 1829, after the Burke and Hare revelations:

  Certainly I thought, like you, that the public alarm was but an exaggeration of vulgar rumour; but the tragedy is too true, and I look in vain for a remedy of the evils, though it [is] easy to see [where] this black and unnatural business has found its accursed origin. The principal source certainly lies in the feelings of attachment which the Scotch have for their deceased friends. They are curious in the choice of their place of sepulchre – and a common shepherd is often, at whatever ruinous expense to his family, transported many miles to some favourite place of burial which has been occupied by his fathers. It follows, of course, that any interference with their remains is considered with most utter horror and indignation. To such of their superiors as they love from clanship or habits of dependence, they attach the same feeling of attachment. I experienced it when I had a great domestic loss; for I learned afterwards that the cemetery was guarded, out of good will, by the servants and dependents who had been attached to her during life; and were I to be laid beside my lost companion just now, I have no doubt it would be long before my humble friends would discontinue the same watch over my remains, and that it would incur mortal risk to approach them with the purpose of violation. This is a kind and virtuous principle, which every one so far partakes, that, although an unprejudiced person would have no objection to the idea of his own remains undergoing dissection, if their being exposed to scientific research could be of the least service to humanity, yet we all shudder at the notion of any one who had been dear to us, especially a wife or sister, being subjected to a scalpel among a gazing and unfeeling crowd of students. One would fight and die to prevent it. This current of feeling is encouraged by the law which, as distinguishing murderers and other atrocious criminals, orders that their bodies shall be given for public dissection. This makes it almost impossible to assign publickly the bodies of those who die in the hospitals to the same fate; for it would be inflicting on poverty the penalty which, wisely or unwisely, the law of the country has denounced against guilt of the highest degree; and it would assuredly deprive all who have a remaining spark of feeling or shame, of the benefit of those institutions of charity of which they are the best objects. This natural prejudice seems too deeply rooted to be eradicated. If not very liberal, it is surely natural, and so deeply-seated that many of the best feelings must be destroyed ere it can be eradicated. What then remains? The only chance I see is to permit importation from other countries. If a subject can be had in Paris for ten or twenty francs, it will surely pay the importer who brings it to Scotland, and if the medical men find it convenient to use more oeconomy they will teach anatomy for all surgical purposes equally well, though they may not make such advances in physiology. Something must be done, for there is an end of the Cantabit vacuus, the last prerogative of beggary, which entitled him to laugh at the risk of robbery. The veriest wretch in the highway may be better booty than a person of consideration, since the last may have but a few shillings in his pocket, and the beggar, being once dead, is worth £10 to his murderer.2