Burke and Hare (21 page)

The body in question was not Daft Jamie’s, because he was murdered at Hare’s place in Tanner’s Close. If it was Mrs Ostler’s, Burke and Hare murdered two more people later, in the very house that the police were supposed to be watching. But it is more likely that the body was that of Ann McDougal, if it was during the early part of October, as they got £10 for her corpse, but only £8 for the washer-woman’s. Nevertheless, Burke and Hare murdered at least two more people, and possibly three,
after
the police had been alerted by neighbours’ suspicions and posted a man outside Burke’s house. But these murders were not all committed there.

This part of the ‘Echo’s’ argument tends, if anything, to absolve Knox of any knowledge or suspicion of murder, rather than implicate him, and thus does the opposite of what commentators have assumed to be the pamphlet’s purpose – to achieve Paterson’s revenge on Knox for sacking him.

If Paterson’s claim that it was his own decision to leave Knox’s employment is true, that would suggest that Paterson had some other employment lined up, so perhaps the rumour that he was about to go into partnership with Burke and Hare had some basis in fact. The idea (in Paterson’s mind, at least) was not, presumably, to commit murder, but to obtain subjects from Ireland or elsewhere for the anatomy lecturers in Edinburgh. Paterson would have been aware of the possibilities of a lucrative living. He had already been approached by Syme, and knew well enough what prices corpses fetched.

Burke mentioned in the
Courant
confession that ‘Hare and him had a plan made up, that Burke and a man were to go to Glasgow or Ireland, and try the same there, and to forward them to Hare, and he was to give them to Dr Knox.’ Burke did not say who ‘the man’ was to be, but if it was Paterson, that would explain why he refused Knox’s request for him to resume work as his doorkeeper. He could earn a lot more than seven shillings a week in partnership with Burke and Hare. In nine months they had earned about £150 between them – that is nearly £2 each a week on average.

The ‘Echo’ goes on to pose a pertinent question. If the police had been alerted to a suspicion that Burke had a corpse in his house, whether obtained by body-snatching or any other means, why did they not obtain a warrant to search the premises, rather than merely posting an officer outside to keep watch? The probable reason is that the local police had instructions to look the other way, to some extent, when faced with body-snatching, which is what they thought they were dealing with. The officer outside was merely a token show of law and order to pacify the neighbours because one of them had voiced a suspicion. If the police had raided every house where body-snatchers lived, the reputation of the Edinburgh medical school would have evaporated in no time at all and the training of surgeons there would have come to a complete stop.

It was a common practice for the authorities to turn a blind eye on the purchase of corpses for anatomical study, whether bought from body-snatchers or persons who had corpses in their possession legally. In London, Sir Astley Cooper felt morally bound to intercede on behalf of any of his regular suppliers who fell foul of the law. When Joshua Naples, then a gravedigger, was sentenced to imprisonment in 1802, Cooper had gone directly to the Home Secretary and got him released. And Sir Astley’s accounts for May 1828 include this item:

Tom Vaughan was a member of a gang of body-snatchers operating from Southwark, and one of Cooper’s regular suppliers. Sir Robert Peel also quietly acquiesced, largely at Cooper’s urging, in the importation of bodies from France and Ireland.
¹

Knox himself had been in the act of drafting a letter to the Home Secretary to complain about the difficulties in which teachers like himself were having to work in the present state of the law. He explained how shipments of corpses from Ireland were obstructed by Irish anatomists jealous of Scotland’s reputation, and how packages intended for him had been seized and opened in places such as Liverpool and Carlisle by zealous Customs men, who only succeeded in occasioning pointless inquests and provoking local disturbances. ‘There is one subject in particular,’ Knox’s letter continued, ‘on which I beg most respectfully your attention.’

Just as Knox was about to despatch this letter to London, however, Burke and Hare and their women were arrested, and Knox wisely thought better of it.

What is clear in all this is that there was a conspiracy of silence among Edinburgh’s elite. The chief reasons were almost certainly that, first, they wanted to hide the truth about the extent of body-snatching and the practices of the anatomists from the public, and, second, they were anxious to protect the reputation of Edinburgh as the leading medical school in Europe.

The author of the
Letter to the Lord Advocate
, whoever he was, was a man of education and had some formal literary style and sophistication. He adopted a high moral tone, betraying a Calvinistic severity, quoted Shakespeare and, if it
was
Paterson trying to disguise his own authorship, switched very skilfully from first to third person throughout the thirty-six-page document in reporting his own words as if they were being quoted in support of a carefully argued case.

We are asked to believe that this was the work of a mere janitor, earning seven shillings a week and living in a poor lodging with his mother and sister. One, moreover, who bore his former employer a grudge and had tried to cheat him. The same man who was believed to be about to go into a lucrative enterprise with Burke and Hare to supply the Edinburgh anatomists with corpses shipped over from Ireland. And was this anonymous author, posing persuasively as a man of conscience and integrity, the same irresponsible young man who had sent his fifteen-year-old sister, alone, to a gloomy back-alley to call on a man he already suspected of being a murderer of women, or at the very least, a drunken body-snatcher? I, for one, do not think so!

If Paterson had a sister who was fifteen years old, it is not very likely that he was more than, say, nineteen. He was a single young man, still living with his mother and uncertain of his direction in life. He had joined the army, but returned to Knox’s employment after a couple of years. Is it conceivable that he would have possessed the self-assurance to address the Lord Advocate of Scotland in such confident formal tones?

And even if Paterson
did
write the pamphlet, who financed its printing? Was this low-paid whippersnapper so altruistic as to dig deep into his own pockets to publish an exhortation to the experienced Lord Advocate to ‘strain every nerve, and sift this dreadful plot to its very core’? I think not!

The pamphlet was printed by Menzies and advertised as being for sale at 132 High Street on 29 January. The only clue to occupancy of property in Edinburgh at that time is the record of the local property tax, called the ‘extent’. It appears probable from the extent roll in the Edinburgh City Archives that the ground-floor tenant of 132 High Street was James Stillie, a bookseller, stationer and proprietor of a circulating library. But there is no suggestion that he was a publisher – merely a retailer – and the person who paid for the printing and publishing of the pamphlet was most likely the man who wrote it.

The text of this obscure pamphlet is given as Appendix V, and reproduced in its entirety for the first time in any book about the Burke and Hare case, so that readers may judge its contents for themselves. My own impression is that the letter has something of the self-righteousness of a Puritan about it. But it is most likely the work of another medical man, probably one of Knox’s jealous rivals. There is more than a hint that he frequented Surgeons’ Square. Could the author have been Liston, who had good reason to hold a grudge against Knox? Or Syme, who was forced to give up lecturing on anatomy because he could not compete with Knox in keeping up a regular supply of subjects for his students to work on? Syme is known to have been an ill-tempered man who had good reason to want revenge on Knox, having suffered from his acid tongue. Syme became as eminent in the field of clinical surgery as Knox in anatomy, but jealous rivalry was ever-present in the relations of the medical men, as we have already noticed. That between Knox, Syme and Liston – all native Scotsmen – is particularly relevant to our present enquiry.

Robert Liston, born at Ecclesmachan, was three years younger than Knox, but like him, had gone to Barclay after failing anatomy under Monro. Liston was a tall, well-built man and a noted athlete of formidable strength. He was involved in almost legendary exploits as a body-snatcher before the advent of the professionals, and is reputed on one occasion to have carried two bodies away together, one under each arm. He was Barclay’s assistant for five years, and subsequently taught anatomy in partnership with Syme, gaining a reputation as both a fine teacher and a great pioneering surgeon. He was particularly noted for the speed of his operations when speed was of the essence, in the days before anaesthetics. He could amputate a leg at the thigh, without assistance, in half a minute, including sutures.

Liston was also arrogant and quarrelsome, however, and he had good reason to dislike Knox, as we have seen. He was expelled from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1822, after a dispute with the authorities, and some years later, when the Professorship of Clinical Surgery became vacant at the university, Syme, a younger man, got the post in preference to Liston, who then left Edinburgh for London, where he died in 1847 aged fifty-three.

James Syme, born in Edinburgh, was Liston’s junior by five years. He was a demonstrator in Liston’s dissecting-room until 1823, when Liston decided to concentrate more on his practice, and Syme then took over the teaching role. Syme lectured on anatomy for five years, but gave up at the beginning of the 1828–29 season, abandoning anatomy for surgery because he could not compete with Knox in maintaining a large class. Syme had approached David Paterson at one point to ask where Knox’s suppliers lived. Paterson is said to have replied that he did not know, but would mention Syme’s interest when he saw them again, provided Dr Knox’s supply was maintained.

Syme became Knox’s implacable enemy. He first became a thorn in Knox’s side by seconding a motion in May 1826 to defer electing Knox as Conservator of the new museum of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons. Then in September 1829 he was elected a Curator of the museum. He was a signatory to a proposal to institute a minute examination of all preparations in the museum to ascertain their condition, which was something of an insult to Knox, who had already declared them to be in good order. Syme crossed swords with Knox over one preparation, and complained formally to the College Committee, which admonished Knox for his ‘incivility’ to Syme.

Syme was by this time running his own surgical hospital, having been refused a post as surgeon at the Royal Infirmary, lest he should quarrel openly with Liston. Syme’s enmity towards Knox continued when he seconded a Royal College motion which forbade Knox to hold teaching courses anywhere, informing twenty-two licensing boards throughout Britain of this decision.

Liston was not noted for the clarity of his literary style. He might have realised that he could do himself more harm than good by any public attack on Knox, if his authorship were to be discovered. Syme seems to have been more reckless and impulsive.

Whoever did write the
Letter to the Lord Advocate
scored a palpable hit. The publication incensed the Edinburgh public even more against a man whom they already held to be the patron and criminal accomplice of Burke and Hare. The execution of Burke and the escape of Hare and the two women from justice focused the attention of the populace on the one remaining participant, and Knox was eventually forced to heed the advice of his friends and take action to clear his name.

NOTES

¹
For this and other aspects of the partnership between anatomists and their suppliers, see Bailey,
The Resurrection Men
, (London, Macdonald, 1991).

²
Quoted in Isobel Rae,
Knox the Anatomist
, (Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p. 63.

11. KNOX

I
f Knox had been called as a witness at the trial, what would he have said? He
could
have volunteered information to the Lord Advocate
before
the trial which would have prevented Hare from escaping justice. But he was obviously not going to implicate himself by admitting in court that he knew or even suspected that any one of the three persons listed in the indictment had died by violence. He
might
have testified that the bodies delivered to his premises had not been laid out or buried. As he was not called, he was able to maintain a ruthless silence about the whole matter which was not dignified, but arrogant, as subsequent events were to prove. Knox did not consider himself accountable to public opinion, which he held in contempt. ‘I will do just as I have done heretofore,’ he told his students after the trial.

On 14 January, while three of the homicidal quartet were still in prison, Sir Walter Scott had felt obliged to arrange for a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: