William Burke and William Hare were both Irish immigrants living in the Grassmarket and West Port area of Edinburgh’s Old Town when they committed their first murder in late 1827 or early 1828. Burke was a cobbler from County Tyrone; Hare ran a lodging house on Tanner’s Close in the West Port. Their association led to a series of killings that were not random or passionate but calculated: a rational economic response to a specific market created by the deficiencies of Edinburgh’s anatomy laws.
Sixteen people were murdered. All of them were supplied as fresh corpses to the anatomy school run by Dr Robert Knox at 10 Surgeons’ Square. Knox paid Burke and Hare 7 pounds 10 shillings per body, a sum equivalent to several weeks’ wages for a labourer. The method – holding the victim down and covering their mouth and nose until they suffocated – left no external marks that would indicate violence rather than natural death. The technique became known as burking.
The Body-Snatching Context
To understand Burke and Hare it is necessary to understand the anatomy trade they entered. Edinburgh in the 1820s was the centre of medical education in Britain. The university’s medical faculty attracted students from across Britain and beyond; the anatomy schools attached to it, of which Knox’s was the most prestigious, required cadavers for dissection in quantities that legal supply could not meet.
The Murder Act of 1752 had permitted only the bodies of executed murderers to be used for anatomy. Executions in Edinburgh numbered a handful per year. The anatomy schools required dozens of bodies annually. The gap was filled by resurrection men – body snatchers who exhumed recent burials and sold the corpses. Grieving families paid for iron mort-safes – heavy grilles placed over graves to prevent exhumation. The anatomy trade ran on a supply chain that everyone involved preferred not to examine too carefully.
Dr Knox
Robert Knox was 36 in 1828, the most celebrated anatomy teacher in Edinburgh and possibly in Britain. Students paid to attend his dissection demonstrations. He asked no questions about provenance when Burke and Hare brought him bodies. Whether this was wilful blindness or genuine ignorance has been debated by historians since the trial. The circumstantial evidence – the freshness of the corpses, the regularity of supply, the lack of signs of burial – suggests that Knox must have had suspicions he chose not to act on. He was never prosecuted. His career was destroyed by public obloquy instead.
The Trial and Execution
Burke and Hare were arrested in October 1828 after the body of Marjory Docherty was discovered under a bed in Hare’s lodging house by two other lodgers. Hare turned King’s evidence and was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying against Burke. This was a legal expedient that the Edinburgh public found deeply unsatisfactory.
William Burke was tried, convicted of the murder of Marjory Docherty, and executed in January 1829 before a crowd of 25,000 people on the Lawnmarket. His body was publicly dissected at the University of Edinburgh – a final irony that was noted by the press at the time. His skeleton is still on display in the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
The Anatomy Act 1832
The murders produced the legislative change that body snatching had never managed to generate. The Anatomy Act of 1832 made unclaimed bodies from workhouses available for medical dissection, at a stroke supplying the anatomy schools with a legal source of cadavers. The Act ended the resurrection trade. It also directed the moral burden of supplying anatomy onto the bodies of the poor – those who died in the workhouse – rather than distributing it equally. This aspect of the Act’s operation was criticised at the time and has been examined critically by historians since.
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