Burke and Hare

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

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

M
y 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

W
ell, 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

L
ate 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.