Burke and Hare Page 2

  The medical schools, however, could scarcely hope to maintain their popularity with students if they could not produce the raw materials for demonstration of anatomy and practice in surgery. So what could not be done within the law soon found a way of continuing outside it. Medical students, and sometimes their teachers, took it upon themselves to obtain fresh ‘subjects’ by fair means or foul. Men of distinction in the profession of surgery, such as John Hunter and Robert Liston, are known to have raised corpses from graves in pursuit of their science. Body-snatching became a peculiarly British practice. Other civilised countries in Europe were groping their way towards satisfactory solutions to the problem of training surgeons, and their medical schools were not hampered by unresponsive governments. In Germany, anatomists were permitted to receive the bodies of suicides and prostitutes as well as executed criminals. In the Netherlands, Austria and Italy, governments made proper provision by allowing bodies unclaimed by friends or relatives to be used. Portugal had a very high rate of infant mortality, and anatomists could obtain an ample supply of bodies quite legally. Resurrection men were unheard of in these countries. As for France, bodies were so readily available that the dissecting rooms of Paris’s La Pitié Hôpital had around a dozen a day, and those who wanted to sell corpses to the medical schools could get no more than five francs. For a time ‘Madame Guillotine’ had produced a plentiful supply – upper-class ones, too – supplemented by unclaimed corpses, the dead washed up by the Seine, and those found dead in the streets. The English surgeon John Green Crosse described three dissecting-rooms at La Pitié in 1815. There were ninety tables in all, and there were twenty-three cadavers in one room alone, between about eighty students.

  In Britain, however, doctors and medical students increased a growing sense of fear and outrage among the public at large. In their anxiety to dig up corpses and get away without being caught, the amateur body-snatchers’ methods were crude and offensive. Having extracted a corpse from its coffin, they would leave the evidence of their nocturnal activity scattered around the open grave to be discovered by the light of day. Stealing a corpse from its grave was no more than a misdemeanour at first, because the law deemed a dead body to be no one’s property. But stealing clothes or a coffin was a felony. So body-snatchers customarily took the corpse out of the coffin and stripped it naked before removing it from the churchyard, so as to be convicted, if caught, only of the lesser offence. Piles of earth, broken coffin lids, and shrouds or burial clothes would be seen at once by anyone entering the churchyard at daybreak and the alarm would be raised.

  Riots and threats against anatomists became common as such outrages occurred with increasing frequency. Dr Monro’s windows were broken by a mob in Edinburgh. The College of Surgeons, anxious to protect its reputation, protested against violation of churchyards and had a clause inserted in the indenture of apprentices forbidding them to rob graves. Nevertheless, since the study of anatomy was their raison d’être in Edinburgh, obtaining corpses took priority over strict observance of the rules. In March 1742, when the corpse of a man, Alexander Baxter, who had been buried in the West Kirkyard, was found lying in an empty house adjoining the premises of a surgeon, Martin Eccles, a mob gathered quickly and caused much damage to Eccles’s house and other surgeons’ premises. The crowd seized the Portsburgh drum and went beating to arms ‘down the Cowgate to the foot of Niddery’s wynd, till the drum was taken away from them by a party of the city-guard’. The magistrates, ‘attended by the officers of the train’d bands, constables, &c atacked and dispersed the mob; and most of them having run out at the Netherbow, that and the other gates of the city were shut, by which they were in a great measure quelled’.3 In order to maintain public order, Eccles and some of his students were arrested and charged with grave-robbing, but the charges were dropped in due course for lack of proof. The frustrated mob grasped at a rumour a few days later that one of the West Kirk beadles, George Haldane, was involved in body-snatching. The mob burnt his house down during a riot which lasted all night and the whole of the following day.4

  A few weeks afterwards, the city guard at Potterow Port stopped a man who was carrying a sack and found in it the body of a child, identified later as Gaston Johnson, who had been buried at Pentland kirkyard a week before. The man, a gardener named John Samuel, was publicly whipped through the streets and banished from Scotland for seven years.5

  The anatomists’ need for bodies also created a motive for murder. The precedent, as far as we know, was set by two women, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, and the scene of their crime was none other than Edinburgh. Torrence was a needlewoman who lived in a tenement below Waldie and her husband, John Fair, a stabler’s servant. Waldie (women at that time continued to be known by their maiden names after marriage) was a housewife and sick-nurse. She had been sitting up with a child whom she confidently expected to die of his illness, and had promised some local surgeon’s apprentices that she would ‘at coffining, slip something else into the coffin, and secrete the body; but said afterwards, that they were disappointed in this, the parent refusing to consent’.6

  Some time later, Janet Johnston, wife of a sedan-chair porter, John Dallas, called on Helen Torrence to collect a shirt Torrence had made for Johnston’s son. Waldie was with Torrence drinking ale, and Johnston needed little persuasion to join them. When Johnston was well settled in with her pint pot, Waldie said she was unwell and went upstairs to her own place, but then stole out, went to the Dallas’s house in Stonielaw’s Close, and kidnapped their young son John, whom his mother had left alone. By the time Waldie got him back to her apartment, the boy was dead. Meanwhile, Janet Johnston had left, and Torrence and Waldie got the medical students to come and fetch the body they had promised. The students offered them two shillings for it, but the women got them up to an additional ten pence. Torrence carried the dead child through the streets to their premises and was paid another six pence for this service.

  The crime was discovered when young John Dallas’s corpse was found dumped in the street with all-too-obvious signs of its having been in the surgeons’ hands. Torrence and Waldie were brought to trial and blamed each other for the crime. Waldie claimed that the boy must have been accidentally smothered while concealed under her coats. When their defence was rejected and both were convicted of murder, Torrence claimed that she was pregnant, but this was soon disproved, and the women were hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket on 18 March 1752. It was less than a year after a new Act decreeing that all executed murderers were to be either publicly dissected or hung in chains. The preamble to the Act for Preventing the horrid Crime of Murder (25 Geo. II) asserted that ‘It is become necessary that some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy be added to the Punishment.’

  Meanwhile, the demand for bodies so far outstripped the capabilities of medical students to keep pace with it that an import trade started from Ireland and France, where corpses were cheap and plentiful. They could be bought from Irish body-snatchers for ten shillings each in the early days of the trade. Cargoes of bodies were landed at Britain’s leading ports, disguised in crates marked ‘fish’ or ‘apples’ or ‘glue’. Provided that their sea-crossing was brief and their distribution to the medical schools prompt and efficient, they reached their destinations undetected and still fresh enough to be of use.

  Many cases are recorded, however, of imported corpses being discovered by their stench of putrefaction, when ships had been delayed by bad weather from entering port, or bodies had rotted during over-long voyages. Glasgow was the main clearing-house for bodies imported from Ireland, and on one occasion a dreadful stench from a shed at the Broomielaw led to the discovery of putrefying corpses which had been addressed to a merchant in Jamaica Street by Irish medical students, and documented as a cargo of cotton and linen rags.

  A box brought to the King’s Arms at Lancaster on the coach from Liverpool, in October 1826, was opened because passengers had complained of the smell. Addressed to ‘Archibald Young, Esq., 59 South Br
idge-street, Edinburgh’, it was found to contain the putrid corpses of a middle-aged woman and an infant boy. The box, which measured 22 x 15 x 12 in, could be traced back only as far as Manchester, but it had undoubtedly come from Ireland. The coroner’s verdict was ‘Found in a box, Lancaster’.7

  An opportunity had clearly presented itself to the underworld of Britain for opportunists to move in and supply teachers of anatomy with subjects for dissection, relieving medical students of the burden of responsibility for quarrying their own raw materials. At first, men with an eye for the main chance carried out this work as casual labourers, raising corpses when chances occurred and, as itinerant salesmen, disposing of them wherever they could. But as the demand for subjects continued to increase, a corps of specialists in body-snatching grew and turned the robbing of graves into a profession, encouraged – and sometimes actually employed – by the leading teachers of anatomy, who were out of business themselves if they had no corpses. Professional body-snatchers were engaged in what has been called ‘the foulest trade in human history’.

  Grave-robbery was not, of course, a new invention of Georgian Britain. It occurred in ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, and has, some claim, to be regarded as one of the oldest offences against humanity. Necrolatry played some part in the European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Witches were believed to exhume the corpses of children and executed criminals to use parts as ingredients in magic potions. Readers hardly need reminding of the delectable ingredients of the witches’ brew in Macbeth. And werewolves, according to the Jacobean dramatist John Webster, ‘steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night, and dig dead bodies up’.8 The great Vesalius himself had obtained his first skeleton by stealing the body of a hanged man from outside the city walls of Louvain, and was subsequently sentenced to death for body-snatching by the Inquisition, though the sentence was commuted.

  But body-snatching had never before been a commercial business, driven by market forces, and it dawned only slowly on the British public as a whole that isolated incidents, here and there, were but the tip of an iceberg. Few people at the turn of the nineteenth century suspected that doctors were in league with body-snatchers on a scale that was a disgrace to a supposedly civilised country.

  Private individuals, meanwhile, were taking extreme measures to protect their newly buried loved ones from the resurrection men. They sometimes hired guards to watch new graves throughout the night. Spring-guns were occasionally set near graves. In Edinburgh, a man had a crude land-mine buried in his daughter’s grave. Another common and effective method of protection was to have a huge stone slab lowered onto the lid of the coffin. This could be left until the corpse was out of danger of exhumation, being no longer fresh enough for the doctors’ purposes, then lifted and made available for the next bereaved family that required it.

  The specialist suppliers – variously known as body-snatchers, resurrection men, grabs and sack-’em-up men – soon developed a degree of finesse in their work that was beyond the amateurs, who only wanted fresh corpses as easily as they could get them and had no interest in protecting a trade. Professional body-snatchers did not leave open graves and shattered coffins to provoke local communities into defensive action. They took care to cover their tracks by tidying up and replacing soil and turf so that, nothing being suspected, they need have no fear of visiting the same churchyards again. Two men working by the light of an oil-lamp, with another to keep watch, could quickly and quietly uncover a coffin buried only a few hours earlier, perhaps, in shallow and uncompacted soil, remove the lid, extract and strip the corpse, stuff it in a sack and restore the grave, leaving the churchyard virtually as they had found it except for the missing resident.

  As revelations of grave-robbing grew, and the public became ever more outraged as it realised the extent of the foul trade, two particular methods of protection were favoured, especially in Scotland. One was to appoint armed watches to guard churchyards at night. Men, usually local volunteers, would spend the hours of darkness in specially built watch-huts, keeping a lookout for any disturbance. The weakness of this system was that the men would get drunk, fall asleep, or shoot nervously at some perfectly innocent citizen passing through the churchyard.

  Another method, invented in Scotland a little later, was the iron ‘mortsafe’. The mortsafe was a strong and heavy iron grille which was lowered by block-and-tackle into a grave to form an impenetrable cage round the coffin until all danger of disinterment was past. A correspondent to the Quarterly Review in 1820 wrote, ‘The iron cage or safe is a Scotch invention which we have lately seen at Glasgow, where it has been in use between two and three years . . . The price paid for this apparatus is a shilling a day.’9

  The Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle had devoted a leader column to the existing system of supplying teachers of anatomy with subjects, pointing out that it was indispensable in the present state of the law. But the fury of the public could not be abated, and the zealousness with which the Scots guarded against body-snatching and pursued and punished resurrection men, when they were caught, led to a serious situation for the medical schools.

  One obvious consequence was to drive the trade across the border, and resurrection men in England – even as far away as London – did good business supplying corpses to Edinburgh and Glasgow. A diary kept by one London body-snatcher, generally believed to have been Joshua Naples, is preserved in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons, and the entry for Wednesday, 15 January 1812, is fairly typical of its contents:

  Went to St Thomas’s. Came back, packd up 2 large and 1 small for Edinburgh. At home all Night.

  The diary or log-book consists of 16 leaves (i.e. 32 pages, not 16 pages, as some writers have it). The pages are carefully ruled and mostly written in a flowing and legible hand, and cover the period from November 1811 to December 1812. The identification of this diarist as Joshua Naples is based chiefly on the fact that he is known to have been literate. The son of a stationer and bookseller, he served under Nelson and worked as a grave-digger after his discharge from the navy, then became a professional body-snatcher, working with a gang operating from Southwark and led by Ben Crouch. Naples was later given a job in the dissecting-room at St Thomas’s Hospital, but eventually died of drink.

  It is very likely that this same man gave evidence to the Select Committee on Anatomy set up by the House of Commons in 1828. Three professional body-snatchers were granted immunity from prosecution and protected from identification by the use of the initials AB, CD and FG. (One naturally wonders why the third was not EF, but speculation about that is pointless.) CD is thought to have been Naples. He was asked by the committee to state the number of subjects he and his colleagues had supplied to the anatomy schools in 1809 and 1810:

  A: The number in England was, according to my book, 305 adults, 44 small subjects under three feet; but the same year, there were 37 for Edinburgh and 18 we had on hand that were never used at all.

  Q: Now go to 1810 and 1811?

  A: 312.

  Q: Adults for that year?

  A: Yes, and 20 in the summer, 47 small.

  Q: 1811 to 1812?

  A: 360 in the whole, 56 small ones, these are the Edinburgh ones and all.

  Q: Go to 1812 and 1813.

  A: The following summer there were 234 adults, 32 small ones.

  Q: At what price, on the average, were these subjects delivered?

  A: Four guineas adults, small ones were sold at so much an inch.10

  The apparent confusion between the committee (‘1809 and 1810’) and the witness (‘the same year’) is explained by the fact that there was little demand for bodies during the summer months before the days of refrigeration, and a year for the body-snatcher was the winter period from the autumn of one year to the spring of the next, when most demonstrations of anatomy took place.

  There are many other recorded instances of body-snatchers in England eagerly supplying the market in Edinburgh. One of the most remarkable occu
rred in October 1826 when dockers at St George’s Dock, Liverpool, complained about the dreadful stench from three casks they had put aboard a smack bound for Leith. The casks were opened and found to contain eleven naked corpses, six male and five female, pickled in brine. The shipping note read, ‘Please ship on board the Latona three casks of Bitter Salts, from Mr Brown, Agent, Liverpool, to Mr G.H. Ironson, Edinburgh’. The carter who had delivered the casks to the dock was traced and said that he had been hired by a Scotsman to collect them from a cellar at 12 Hope Street. This address turned out to be the house of a clergyman, Rev James McGowan. He had let the cellar to a man named Henderson, who said he was a cooper.