During the time on the 'Teaching English for Medicine' course, the story of Burke and Hare in 1827 was recounted numerous times.
In order to run a successful School of Medicine, one requires 3 things:
- A student body
- Teaching bodies and
- Dead bodies (or cadavers)
However, due to mainly religious reasons, it was against the law to use a human body for resection. This led to 'gravediggers' or 'resurrectionists', individuals who would steal bodies from graveyards to supply the local medical schools on the black market. Towers built in cemeteries(like the one in the middle photo) housed sentinels to protect the graves.
However, the price paid for a body depended on it's freshness causing 2 Irish immigrants to hatch a plan to get rich quick!! They would search out lonely individuals, get them drunk, lure them back to their lodging house and then suffocate them before selling them to an ambitious Edinburgh anatomist named Dr Robert Knox. They killed 17 people over the course of a year before being discovered.
Because the evidence against the pair was not overwhelming, the police offered Hare immunity against prosecution if he testified against Burke whicih he duly did. Burke was found guilty and hanged to death in January 1829, after which his body was publically dissected at the Edinburgh School of Medicine. 42,000 people filed past to see the murderer's body. His skin was used to make wallets and book covers and examples of these and his skeleton can still be seen in the Royal College of Surgeons Museum.
In 1832, the laws which led to this case were abolished and people now bequeth their bodies!!
For more information, please click on the title 'The Body Snatchers' at the top of this page which will take you to Wikipaedia.
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