In those days, nobody donated their bodies to science and anatomy schools had to rely on the gallows.
The first third of the 19th Century was tough for medical schools in the United Kingdom, especially for their anatomy departments. The toll taken by the Napoleonic wars and the need to send boatloads of convicts to populate the new colonies of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land meant that the supplies of hanged criminals for the dissection tables had slowed down considerably, but the last straw came in the form of the 1823 Judgement of Death Act which reduced the number of hanging offences from 200+ to just two, murder and treason. In those days, nobody donated their bodies to science and anatomy schools had to rely on the gallows.
A contemporaneous surge in a scientific approach to medicine soon caused demand for cadavers to outstrip supply, and body-snatching and grave-robbing became commonplace. The ghoulish activities of ‘Resurrectionists’ became so widespread that bereaved families could not leave their departed loved ones unattended for a moment, nor their graves unguarded until decomposition rendered them no longer worth robbing. That was the grey area of anatomy – not legal, but it could be worse. Of course it wasn’t long before it got worse, became downright black anatomy.
Cadavers
Edinburgh had one of the more famous medical schools and there was a thriving business for doctors who gave private classes to medical students. Dr Robert Knox, a widely travelled man, offered private anatomy classes that attracted more students than all the other private anatomists in the city put together. Dr Knox had a need for many cadavers.
William Burke and William Hare were friends. Both were from Ulster; both worked on the Union Canal and both lived in Tanner’s Close where Hare’s wife ran a boarding house. When an elderly boarder died, owing £4 in rent, they buried a weighted coffin and set out to sell his body. Dr Knox bought it for £7.10s. That, their only case of gray anatomy, was in late 1827. A year later, by the time they were caught, Dr Knox had bought sixteen more bodies from the pair, no questions asked.
Their victims had to be carefully killed, no telltale signs like stab-wounds, gunshots, bludgeon or strangulation marks, so the pair would get them drunk, then smother them and compress their chests, a method that became known as ‘burking’. Some were prostitutes, recognised, it is said, by some of Dr Knox’s students. Another was ‘Daft Jamie’ Wilson a well-known mentally retarded 18-year old who limped. Several students recognized Jamie and it is said that the lad’s head and feet were cut off when Knox realised he was known. Knox denied it was Jamie, but, with this corpse, the face was immediately ‘dissected.’
The killings only came to light when a couple staying in the boarding house heard a struggle as the last victim was being killed and, next morning, found her body under a bed in an adjoining room. Burke and Hare were arrested, along with their accomplice wives. Realising that it might be hard to get convictions – as there were no marks of murder on the body – Hare was offered immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. His detailed narrative is why there is such a full account of their infamous year of black anatomy. There was outrage when Dr Knox was not prosecuted but his reputation was in ruins and he left Edinburgh shortly afterwards.
Hanged
Burke was hanged in January 1829 and his body publicly dissected at Edinburgh Medical College. In a move that was not much less ghoulish than the actions of the murderers, the professor, Alexander Monro, dipped his pen into Burke’s blood and wrote: “This is written with the blood of Wm Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh. This blood was taken from his head.” Burke’s skeleton, death mask, and items made from his tanned skin are displayed at the college’s museum.
Shortly afterwards, in response to these killings and others like them, the laws that restricted the supply of corpses for dissection to those of executed criminals, were changed.
