Burke and Hare (2 page)
Authors: Brian Bailey
Surgeons had to be trained by qualified teachers of anatomy and surgery. The study of anatomy was by this time recognised as a vital part of the training of skilled medical men. There was no shortage of young men wanting to become surgeons. Students from home and abroad were flocking to British medical schools, which had taken over the lead from pioneering continental universities such as Padua in Italy and Leiden in the Netherlands. The medical school at Edinburgh had become established as the leading school in Britain and one of the finest in Europe. Alexander Monteith, who had founded the Edinburgh school at the end of the seventeenth century, had promised the town council that he could make ‘better improvements in anatomy in a short time than have been made by Leyden in thirty years’. And Alexander Monro, who played a major role in establishing Edinburgh’s reputation, had himself studied at Leiden.
The surgeons of Edinburgh had been granted ‘ane condampnit man’ every year since 1505, when the town council had first granted a charter to the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers. The medical school’s increasing fame and popularity led it to petition the council to grant the right to dissect – in addition to executed criminals – unclaimed corpses, suicides and foundlings who died in infancy. But the city fathers were reluctant to increase the supply by grants which would cause enormous public outrage and civil disorder. When the corpse of a gypsy, executed for murder, vanished from its grave in Greyfriars churchyard in 1678, local people were convinced that it had been stolen ‘to make an anatomical dissection of’, and a contemporary commented that it was ‘criminal to take at their own hande, since the magistrates would not have refused it, and I hear the chirurgeons afferme, the town of Edinburgh is obliged to give them a malefactor’s body once a year for that effect’.
The Professor of Medicine at Aberdeen in 1636, William Gordon, had petitioned the Privy Council not only for the bodies of executed criminals, but for those of the poor who died in hospitals, and the local authorities were directed, with startlingly blunt class distinction, to deliver to him
. . . twa bodies of men, being notable malefactors, executte in thair bounds, especiallie being rebells and outlawis; and failzeing of them, the bodies of the poorer sort, dieing in hospitalls; or abortive bairns, foundlings; or of those of no qualitie, who hes died of thare diseases, and hes few friends or acquaintance that can tak exception.
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The requirement for corpses could certainly not be met legally from the gallows alone. Some later anatomy teachers were apt to suggest that no person ought to be let loose on the unsuspecting public as a qualified surgeon before he had dissected at least three corpses. In practice, the dearth of available bodies necessitated a number of students gathering round a dissecting table to share the same cadaver. The supply in Edinburgh, as at other medical schools in Scotland and England, became increasingly inadequate for the efficient teaching of growing numbers of medical students. The doctors’ dilemma was an urgent matter which the medical profession in general and teachers of anatomy in particular continually pressed the government to resolve, but the government remained stubbornly unresponsive, largely because of pressure from the Church; the law in Christian Europe had for centuries permitted only the bodies of executed criminals to be used for lectures on anatomy.
In Scotland, religious opposition to dissection had grown soonest and loudest. Calvinist doctrines had ensured that Scottish education and culture leaned towards the practical sciences rather than the arts, and kept national creativity outside religious debate. That is, until the reality of body-snatching entered the public consciousness and upset the status quo with a vengeance, causing widespread riots, especially in the university towns of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, where there were medical schools. Anatomists were perceived as men who were depriving the poor of their chance of an afterlife, for it was always the poor who were laid out on their cold tables. The mass of the people believed absolutely in the material resurrection of the flesh on Judgement Day, and did not the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer confirm them in this faith? ‘. . . we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto this glorious body . . .’ Mutilation of the corpse would surely preclude this consummation. How could it come to pass if their corporeal beings were to reach their ignominious terminal by being rent asunder on marble slabs? Grave-robbery was no more than a misdemeanour in English law, but in Scotland it was a heinous offence.
Sir Walter Scott was aware of this problem as well as the danger of appearing to punish the poor for their poverty. He wrote to Maria Edgeworth in February 1829, after the Burke and Hare revelations:
Certainly I thought, like you, that the public alarm was but an exaggeration of vulgar rumour; but the tragedy is too true, and I look in vain for a remedy of the evils, though it [is] easy to see [where] this black and unnatural business has found its accursed origin. The principal source certainly lies in the feelings of attachment which the Scotch have for their deceased friends. They are curious in the choice of their place of sepulchre – and a common shepherd is often, at whatever ruinous expense to his family, transported many miles to some favourite place of burial which has been occupied by his fathers. It follows, of course, that any interference with their remains is considered with most utter horror and indignation. To such of their superiors as they love from clanship or habits of dependence, they attach the same feeling of attachment. I experienced it when I had a great domestic loss; for I learned afterwards that the cemetery was guarded, out of good will, by the servants and dependents who had been attached to her during life; and were I to be laid beside my lost companion just now, I have no doubt it would be long before my humble friends would discontinue the same watch over my remains, and that it would incur mortal risk to approach them with the purpose of violation. This is a kind and virtuous principle, which every one so far partakes, that, although an unprejudiced person would have no objection to the idea of his own remains undergoing dissection, if their being exposed to scientific research could be of the least service to humanity, yet we all shudder at the notion of any one who had been dear to us, especially a wife or sister, being subjected to a scalpel among a gazing and unfeeling crowd of students. One would fight and die to prevent it. This current of feeling is encouraged by the law which, as distinguishing murderers and other atrocious criminals, orders that their bodies shall be given for public dissection. This makes it almost impossible to assign publickly the bodies of those who die in the hospitals to the same fate; for it would be inflicting on poverty the penalty which, wisely or unwisely, the law of the country has denounced against guilt of the highest degree; and it would assuredly deprive all who have a remaining spark of feeling or shame, of the benefit of those institutions of charity of which they are the best objects. This natural prejudice seems too deeply rooted to be eradicated. If not very liberal, it is surely natural, and so deeply-seated that many of the best feelings must be destroyed ere it can be eradicated. What then remains? The only chance I see is to permit importation from other countries. If a subject can be had in Paris for ten or twenty francs, it will surely pay the importer who brings it to Scotland, and if the medical men find it convenient to use more oeconomy they will teach anatomy for all surgical purposes equally well, though they may not make such advances in physiology. Something must be done, for there is an end of the
Cantabit vacuus
, the last prerogative of beggary, which entitled him to laugh at the risk of robbery. The veriest wretch in the highway may be better booty than a person of consideration, since the last may have but a few shillings in his pocket, and the beggar, being once dead, is worth £10 to his murderer.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.