Burke and Hare Read online

  April was too early for summer rates to be in force, and Burke and Hare evidently got £10 for other corpses delivered after Paterson’s. Of the £10 they received for the majority of their victims, split fifty-fifty in theory, Hare actually took £6, one pound of Burke’s share being appropriated by Maggie Laird ostensibly as a kind of tax on his use of her premises.

  In the ‘official’ confession Burke said that the body was disposed of ‘five or six hours after the girl was killed, and it was cold, but not very stiff, but he does not recollect of any remarks being made about the body being warm’. In the Courant confession, however, made nearly three weeks later, he recalled that Mary Paterson ‘had twopence halfpenny, which she held fast in her hand’. If rigor mortis had not yet set in, this tight grip on her coins would indicate a cadaveric spasm occurring at the moment of death under severe nervous tension. The students asked Burke to cut off the girl’s hair, which still had her curling-papers in it. One of them handed him a pair of scissors, and ‘she was warm when Burke cut the hair off her head’.

  Whether warm or cold, limp or stiff, it is certainly clear that Mary Paterson’s corpse made a dramatic impression, for one reason or another, on all who saw it, including Knox himself. One or more of them recognised the girl as someone they had seen around Edinburgh or were more familiar with, and all of them were impressed by the beauty of the naked but lifeless figure. Knox, Burke said, ‘brought a Mr –, a painter, to look at her, she was so handsome a figure, and well shaped in body and limbs’. He added that ‘she was not dissected at that time, for she was three months in whisky before she was dissected’. Who would have told Burke this? It surely can only have been Paterson. Knox’s biographer wrote that the body of Mary Paterson ‘could not fail to attract attention by its voluptuous form and beauty; students crowded around the table on which she lay, and artists came to study a model worthy of Phidias and the best Greek art’. Knox, he added, ‘wishing for the best illustration of female form and muscular development for his lectures, had Paterson’s body put in spirit for a time, so that when he came to treat of the myological division of his course, a further and daily publicity was given to Paterson’s remains . . .’5

  Davie Paterson, the janitor, also stated that it was the common opinion among Knox’s students and assistants that it was a finely proportioned body, ‘so much so, indeed, that many of the students took sketches of it . . .’6 Necrophilia, it seems, superseded medical science for a time on Dr Knox’s premises. There is a surviving pencil drawing by J. Oliphant which certainly appears to endorse opinions of Paterson’s shapely form, but there is a touch of the macabre in the fact that this ‘pin-up’ was drawn from a corpse.

  Meanwhile, Janet Brown and the two solicitous madams, Lawrie and Worthington, continued to enquire about Paterson’s whereabouts. Janet Brown asked Constantine Burke about her friend when she met him in the street one day. ‘How the hell can I tell about you sort of folk?’ he said. ‘You are here today and away tomorrow.’ He added that he could not answer for everything that took place in his house while he was out at work.

  Burke and Hare had, by this time, resumed normal business. The two fiends took to lurking in the dark and dingy streets and wynds of the Old Town like predatory animals ready to pounce on and devour the weakest and most vulnerable prey. Destitute, feeble and homeless creatures who depended on the kindness of strangers for a drink and a roof over their heads for a night fell easily into their foul ambushes. Their next victim, probably, was a destitute old woman who came to Hare’s place looking for a night’s lodging. Burke thought it was in May. He did not know the woman’s name. She was drinking heavily and soon became quite drunk. Burke declared to the Sheriff in his official confession that he suffocated her himself while Hare was out, and that evening they disposed of the body, in the customary manner, for £10. But in his Courant confession, Burke told a different story. According to this version, the drunken woman fell asleep after being lured into the house by Hare’s wife, and ‘when Hare came home to his dinner, he put part of the bed-tick on her mouth and nose, and when he came home at night she was dead’. Burke was mending shoes at the time, he said. They took her clothes off and put the body into a tea-chest for delivery to Dr Knox. When he told this story, Burke had had nearly three weeks sitting in the condemned cell to think about it, and he had every reason to implicate Hare as deeply as possible in the whole series of murders.

  Another of Hare’s temporary lodgers was a woman named Mary Haldane. The clerk writing down Burke’s confession in prison noted that Burke ‘knows nothing farther of her’. But again, in the Courant confession, Burke, putting her much further down the list in order, said that she was a stout old woman, with only one large tooth in her mouth, who had two daughters, one of whom had been in Calton jail until sentenced the previous summer to fourteen years’ transportation. ‘Mrs’ Haldane, who was unmarried, fell asleep in a drunken stupor on some straw in Hare’s stable, and the two suffocated her there and then, keeping the body hidden in the stable that night and taking it to Surgeons’ Square the next day.

  By this time, Burke and Hare, responsible for six profitable murders, had settled into a routine, scouting for suitable victims and disposing of them in their familiar manner. They had not used a pillow or cushion to smother their victims since the first, Joseph the miller, but relied on their bare hands, one of them clapping one hand over the mouth and holding the nostrils closed with the other, while his partner lay across the body to prevent struggling. The method had the supreme advantage that it left no marks on the body, and ‘when they kept the mouth and nose shut a very few minutes’, as Burke described it in his Courant confession:

  . . . they could make no resistance, but would convulse and make a rumbling noise in their bellies for some time; after they ceased crying and making resistance, they left them to die of themselves; but their bodies would often move afterwards, and for some time they would have long breathings before life went away.

  NOTES

  1 Lonsdale, pp. 101–2.

  2 Robert Buchanan et al, Trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal. Sharpe was the anonymous editor of this transcript of the trial from the shorthand notes of John Macnee.

  3 ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’, Letter to the Lord Advocate, Disclosing the Accomplices, Secrets, and Other Facts Relative to the Late Murders etc. (Menzies, Edinburgh, 1829). See Appendix V.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Lonsdale, pp. 101–2.

  6 ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’, Letter to the Lord Advocate.

  * * *

  4. PRACTICE

  * * *

  Burke and Hare called their victims ‘shots’, body-snatchers’ slang, and it appears likely that they allowed and perhaps encouraged people (their neighbours and possibly their consorts) to believe that they were body-snatchers, to account for their evident increase in wealth, since rumour had got about even beyond the shadowy confines of the underworld that body-snatching was a lucrative business, however ghastly. It would also explain their business with tea-chests and the like.

  Although one naturally tends to associate all the duo’s criminal activity with the darkness and stealth favoured by professional body-snatchers, who stayed at home on moonlit nights, it is remarkable that Burke and Hare committed almost the whole series of their murders during daylight hours. The reason was partly to do with the premises they occupied. Murder could not be committed in Hare’s house at night, when the place might be full of lodgers sleeping two or three to a bed. During the day these vagrants and derelicts would be out working or begging in the streets, and the evil pair and their women had the place to themselves. The murders in Hare’s premises were carried out either in Burke’s room, which was hidden from outside, unlike the interiors of the two larger rooms, or in the stable.

  There were no coroners’ inquests in Scotland. A sudden death was of no interest to the authorities unless some evidence of suspicious circumstances was presented to the Procurator-Fiscal. Delivery of a body in
broad daylight would be less likely to arouse suspicion than one carried furtively through the streets under cover of darkness.

  ‘Christopher North’ characterised the sequence of victims of Burke and Hare as ‘First ae drunk auld wife, and then anither drunk auld wife – and then a third drunk auld wife – and then a drunk auld or sick man or twa . . .’1 The truth, however, is a great deal more startling and varied than this summary suggests. But before resuming the gruesome litany of the murders, it will be useful to consider the men who offered Burke and Hare a ready – not to say voracious – market for their wares, and unwittingly incited multiple homicide. Who were these irresponsible reptiles whose actions cost the lives of so many?

  The three medical students who were present at 10 Surgeons’ Square when the Irish salesmen made their first cold call were William Fergusson, Alexander Miller and Thomas Wharton Jones. These young men were to become eminent surgeons. Jones was only narrowly beaten by von Helmholtz to being recognised as the inventor of the ophthalmoscope. Fergusson, born only a few miles from Edinburgh at Prestonpans, became Professor of Surgery at London’s King’s College, a post he held for thirty years. He invented many surgical instruments and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1843 and President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1870. He was also President of the General Medical Council and a surgeon to Queen Victoria, by whom he was duly knighted. At the time we are concerned with, however, the three, all about nineteen years old, were keen students and assistants of Dr Robert Knox.

  Born in Edinburgh, Knox was thirty-six years old. His mother’s forbears were German, but he claimed descent on his father’s side from the famous Protestant reformer, who had lived in a house in the High Street only yards from what was now Surgeons’ Square. Knox was conservator of the museum of Edinburgh’s College of Surgeons and had in 1826 succeeded John Barclay as proprietor of the school of anatomy set up independently of the university’s medical school, which was presided over by Professor Monro. Third of a declining dynasty and a disappointment to his employers and students alike, Monro saw his students deserting him for the lectures of first Barclay and then Knox, as well as other extra-mural teachers. Knox had himself failed his first university examination in anatomy because of the teaching inadequacies of Monro tertius, and had transferred his allegiance to Barclay, eventually becoming his partner and then his successor.

  John Barclay taught anatomy for nearly thirty years. He bought the three-storey house at 10 Surgeons’ Square and had his anatomy theatre on the top floor, continually enlarging it as his classes grew. Barclay considered Knox to be ‘a person of precision, method, and expertness, a growing naturalist, and an excellent human and comparative anatomist’.2 Knox became an assistant surgeon in the army and tended the wounded at Waterloo, then spent some time in South Africa and France before returning to Edinburgh to join his teacher. There were other extra-mural teachers of anatomy and surgery in the square. John Gordon lectured next door at No. 9 and David Craigie at No. 3. William Cullen taught in the house built by John Bell at the other side of the square at the eastern end of Surgeons’ Hall. But none of them attracted so many students as either Barclay or, after his retirement in 1825, Robert Knox. The lectures of both Barclay and Knox were so popular that, their anatomical theatre being limited in seating capacity, they had to give matinée performances. In the winter season of 1827–28, when Burke and Hare joined the motley crew of Knox’s suppliers of subjects, Knox had 247 registered medical students, compared with the 138 of his nearest rival, John Lizars. Monro at the university had 88 and John Aitken, another lecturer in Surgeons’ Square, only 47.3 At one point in Knox’s career, his students constituted the largest anatomy class in Britain.

  Knox presented a stiff upright figure, balding prematurely, with powerful shoulders and long arms. He had lost his left eye, which had atrophied as a result of smallpox in his infancy, leaving an empty socket. His students naturally nicknamed him ‘Old Cyclops’. When his concentration was at its most intense during his lectures, the muscles in his face were restless. ‘These involuntary twitchings,’ his biographer observed, ‘were far from agreeable, especially those which affected his under-lip, the crossing of which from side to side produced a kind of smacking noise.’4 He was flamboyant in his dress, with gold chains, diamond rings and embroidered waistcoats, all of which served to distract attention from his ravaged features. ‘Knox,’ said his biographer, ‘in the highest style of fashion, with spotless linen, frill, and lace, and jewellery redolent of a duchess’s boudoir, standing in a classroom amid osseous forms, cadavera, and decaying mortalities, was a sight to behold, and one assuredly never to be forgotten.’5

  He was arrogant and contemptuous of his professional colleagues, whom he regularly slandered with jealous lies. He is reported to have begun one lecture by describing an operation in which his famous rival Robert Liston had lost a patient. Without mentioning Liston by name, Knox sarcastically referred to ‘this professional celebrity, a gentleman who, I believe, regards himself as the first surgeon in Europe’. After ridiculing Liston’s judgement in this case, Knox concluded, ‘It is surely unnecessary for me to add that a knowledge of anatomy, physiology, pathology and surgery, is neither connected with nor dependent upon brute force, ignorance and presumption.’6

  He also attacked Dr Robert Christison and Dr James Syme in public, as belonging to a clique in the Royal Society, and referred to Professor Richard Partridge, of King’s College, London, who had failed to acknowledge Knox’s work in a published paper as ‘true to his class . . . [and] bound to strike out of his paper any view not of London growth’.7 ‘In the lecture-room,’ wrote the historian of the Edinburgh medical school, ‘the ridicule which he cast on the opinions, and too often on the men, of the time, did not on the whole help him.’8 Even Knox’s loyal friend and biographer, who religiously avoided anything in his text that was to Knox’s discredit, had to admit that, ‘Instead of a tongue that speaketh no evil, and the soft word that turneth away wrath, he showed an almost habitual disregard for prudent reticence.’9

  Fierce professional rivalry was a feature of the period, however, and Knox was not the only eminent medical man in Edinburgh to resort to vilification of his colleagues. Dr James Gregory, Professor of the Practice of Medicine at the university, had written of the famous surgeon John Bell, generally regarded as one of the greatest of his time, ‘Any man, if himself or his family were sick, should as soon think of calling in a mad dog as Mr John Bell, or any who held the principles he professes.’10

  John Lizars, a colleague at different times of both Robert Liston and John Bell, once condemned an operation carried out by James Syme, implying that Syme had endangered his patient’s life and ruined his health through lack of care. Syme, who had been a competitor for the post Lizars held as Professor of Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, sued for a thousand guineas in damages for a false and malicious statement, though there is no record that he got it.

  One of Knox’s subsequently eminent pupils, John Hughes Bennett, a pioneer in the use of the microscope in clinical pathology, turned out to have absorbed more than expertise in anatomy from his teacher. He became President of the Royal Medical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh College of Physicians, and Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, but when he lectured, he became ‘too often condemnatory of others, and hence did not fail to stir up antagonism . . . his critical and sarcastic remarks on the works of others did not make him a favourite among his professional brethren’.11

  Knox’s own acid tongue, together with the general opinion that he had married beneath him, left him with very few friends, either social or professional. He lived at Newington, a fashionable suburb to the south-east of Edinburgh, but we know so little about his elusive wife that even her name, Mary, is known only from inference. Lonsdale ignores Knox’s marriage altogether and barely mentions his wife, who, like five of his six children, preceded him to the grave. Despite his shortcom
ings, however, Knox was a man of considerable intellect and a brilliant teacher. Among others taught by him, as well as those mentioned above, were Sir Richard Owen,12 who became Director of the Natural History Museum at Kensington, and John Goodsir, Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University from 1846. Knox published learned papers on comparative and human anatomy and translated the works of foreign anatomists. ‘From 1826 to 1835,’ one of his biographers wrote, ‘there was but one temple worthy of the name in Edinburgh, in which aspiring youths might worship in the spirit of Galen . . . and that temple was “Old Surgeons’ Hall”, where Robert Knox presided as high priest, oracle and philosopher.’13 (Knox moved his classes from Barclay’s house to the old Surgeons’ Hall in 1832, when it was vacated by the College of Surgeons.) To maintain his reputation, Knox needed to ensure that he had an adequate supply of fresh corpses. He had never been a body-snatcher himself, like Liston and other contemporaries, but he was prepared to pay professional resurrectionists to keep him supplied, and he paid good prices promptly, so that they were keen to do business with him rather than other surgeons who might haggle over prices and be dilatory in paying up.

  And so Burke and Hare, purely by chance, had joined the small army of suppliers scattered about Britain and Ireland from whom Dr Knox purchased his subjects for demonstration. The two Irishmen were not known to him by name. He rarely saw them, for their frequent calls became a nuisance and he asked them to deal with his porter, David Paterson, who lived close to them in the West Port. His senior students also acted as negotiators with the two men known to them only as ‘John’ and ‘William’.