Burke and Hare, Who Didn't Steal Corpses

From 1827 to 1828, Burke and Hare were accused of killing fifteen people and selling their bodies to medical students. But were they really resurrectionists? Tune in to learn the truth about Burke and Hare in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey. And this is
our episode un Burke and Hair, in which we learn
not to die when you owe your landlord Wrent and

(00:23):
that perhaps a wooden coffin is not the best coffin,
at least not in the time of the sackam Up men,
also known as the Resurrectionists. But to start with, we
are going to uh speak a little song for you
up the close and down the stair in the house
with Burke and Hair. Burke's the butcher, and Hair's the thief,

(00:44):
and Knox is the boy who buys the beef. I
don't think they're really talking about beef, Sarah, No, I
think this is a Sweeney Todd kind of situation. Are
subjects today the Williams Burke and Hair were killers and
not resurrectionists. We want to make that clear from the beginning.
But they were part of a society in which gray
robbing had become a common, if not a publicly accepted

(01:07):
career for in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The
only way medical schools could get bodies for dissection was
from felons who were condemned to death and dissection as
their fate. Wait a minute, what, Yeah, let's let's back
up a little bit and give a history of dissection.
So we have evidence that dissecting humans goes back as

(01:29):
far as four thousand BC. Then it was thought that
your innerds could tell the future, although I much prefer
the Harry Potter approach to the nation and in yeah,
I'd agree with that. One of our early notable dissectors
was Leonardo da Vinci, of course, who believed in empirical observation,
so when he drew the body, he wanted to actually

(01:51):
understand it, to understand the structure of muscles and nerves
and what was inside. But at the time you had
to dissect your cadavers in secret. It was not something
that was looked upon kindly well, and most people weren't
even interested. They relied on Galen's texts, which were completely inaccurate,
and at the time, this was how medical students learned

(02:13):
about the human body. They would assemble in an anatomy theater,
which was so crowded they couldn't even see the body
being dissected, and while they tried to look over each
other's heads. They listened as an anatomy text was read
to them. Whether the text matched up to the body
simply wasn't a matter of concern. You know, who needs
nerves anyway, You could just ignore them because no one

(02:33):
can see. And da Vinci was hoping that if you
actually investigated the body, you wouldn't just learn about how
everything worked, but maybe you would find the soul, which
we've talked about that on an earlier podcast. And he didn't.
But what he did do was author the first real
anatomy textbook, even though it wasn't considered important until late

(02:54):
in the eighteenth century, but his text was finally widely
published because this idea of empirical observations suddenly seemed essential
to science. When more people who go into hospitals are
ending up sicker or even dead than cured, perhaps we
can figure out why. But how did dissection go so

(03:15):
awry and lead to grave robbing? So in this podcast
we're going to focus on the grave robbing situation in
the United Kingdom. And the whole thing probably started with
James the Fourth in Scotland, and in the sixteenth century
he gave his patronage to the Edinburgh College of Surgeons
and Barbers. Barber's doesn't really seem to fit in there, right,

(03:37):
But barbers were surgeons and dentists to back in the day,
and it wasn't until later that surgeons with actual medical
training and academic knowledge were separated from barber So I
think you could be going and getting your haircut, get
your teeth cleaned, maybe have a little light surgery. It
would be a time saver if you didn't die. Yeah,

(03:58):
remembering might be real time favor. But James was the
one who decided that felons who had been executed could
also make good lessons for medical men, and they couldn't
be buried after that, so this was a pretty heavy punishment.
But the problem was that once medical students started dissecting,
they all realized how important it was for medical knowledge

(04:21):
to to really know the body. But there weren't many bodies,
so few criminals were executed and then donated and they
all went bad since refrigeration wasn't exactly all figured out
at the time. They need these bodies, but they can't
get them. There's demand, but there's no supply, or is there. Well,

(04:41):
there is the supply, and that's fresh graves, of course,
and at first the medical students actually do this themselves,
they go out and dig up the graves, but it's
soon forbidden by med schools and it's really weird, I think,
to imagine these young doctors going out and hunting for bodies.
It's very Dr Frankenstein. So once they're forbidden, someone else

(05:06):
had to steal the bodies a resurrectionist. So we've got
some entrepreneurship and flesh. But the resurrectionist would sell the
bodies to the doctors or the met students, so everybody's
getting what they want, except perhaps the families of the deceased. Yeah,
and we should talk a little bit about how they
would actually get these bodies to how a resurrectionists would work.

(05:30):
And it was easiest to do this in pairs. Obviously,
we're talking about possibly adult body deadweight that you're logging,
and one person would be to look out while the
other one dug and then according to an article in
History Magazine by Phil Jones, there was a pretty efficient
way of carrying out the eximation. And here's what you

(05:51):
would do. You would dig the hole at one end
of the grave, and then you would crowbar the part
of the coffin that you uncovered, so sort of popping
it back against soil to break up. Yeah, and you
would cover that with sacking so that it wouldn't make
a really loud noise and alert authorities or angry family members,
and then you would put ropes around the corpse and

(06:12):
heave it up through that hole that you've made. Um.
But there's a weird legal loophole here, and to get
around it, these people had to further desecrate the bodies. Right,
you had to take all of their clothing and belongings
and then put that back into the coffin. So they're
stripping these corpses and returning everything to the grave. And

(06:35):
that was because it was a crime to steal property.
But there wasn't anything specifically mentioned about taking bodies. So
if you just took the corpse, you were fine. But
if you took a corpse who was you know, dressed
and perhaps wearing jewelry, well that was just taking criminals
too far. Yeah, So this obviously doesn't sit well with families,

(06:59):
and soon we have armed guards at cemeteries and walls
built with steel housings called mort saves put over graves
think more actually of like your modern cemetery with that
concrete casing around upgrades and wealthier people even were buried
in metal coffin, so families were really trying to protect

(07:20):
their dead. Our grave robbers are very resourceful. However, they
started buying bodies directly from the undertakers or pretending that
they were the relative of a dead person and claiming
the body. So they're either outright stealing the bodies before
they're buried, or they're getting them from an undertaker and
having him fill the coffins with something else. Yeah, And

(07:42):
in case you're wondering why people want to go through
the trouble of digging up probably kind of gross old
bodies and selling them, it's because it was very very lucrative,
and it turns out to be pretty lucrative for Burke
and Hair to in eighteen seven and eighteen when they
start their plan. William Burke and William Hair were both

(08:04):
irishmen who ended up in Scotland. And to give you
a little physical description, Burke was about five five and
considered attractive, while Hair was hideous and stupid looking. And
this is not my assessment. I would never be so
mean it's a contemporaries and they were drinking buddies. Jerks
tend to find each other, and they ended up in

(08:26):
the same boarding house together. Burke was living with a
woman named Helen McDougall, and Hair with Margaret Laird, who
ran the place after her husband died. And an opportunity arises. Yeah,
an old man who was boarding there died and he
owed Margaret money, and so Hair suggests that maybe to
get the money back and maybe even make a little extra,

(08:49):
we should sell the body. Oh yeah, but didn't I
think of that one of your guests dies, So it
was surprisingly easy. A med student told them to go
see doctor Robert Knox, who was in charge of this
private anatomy school and must have had a little reputation
for buying bodies, and he paid them what was then

(09:09):
several months wages and promises more if they can find
him a fresh corpse. So these two scoundrel a type
of guys suddenly have a really good prospect in front
of them, because how do you get the freshest of
the fresh and corpses by killing someone and then delivering
the corpse immediately? And that they do. Their m O

(09:32):
was to give the person plenty of alcohol, and then
when he or she was drunk or passed out, one
of them would immobilize the body while the other suffocated
the person with his hand over his or her mouth
and nose. And they killed perhaps fifteen people, older women,
younger women, prostitutes, beggars in general, the down and out,

(09:53):
or people who were not as likely to be missed.
Uh Their cockiness eventually caught up with them, however. They
murdered a mentally retarded boy that everyone around town knew,
and when he was brought into the anatomy lab, some
of the students told Dr Knox that they recognized him,
they knew who he was, so Knox took off his

(10:14):
face first, but even then they weren't caught quite yet.
Their last victim was an older woman named Margaret Dougherty,
and this found out in a very poor way of
running their hotel business. So there's another couple staying at
the lodging house of the time, the Grays, and they're

(10:34):
asked to leave one night, leave their room, and that's
kind of weird, they think, And so when they come
back the next day, Mrs Gray is trying to get
back into the room to look at some of her
belongings and she's not allowed in. This is just raising
their suspicions something something's going on. So they wait and
when the coast is finally clear, they go back into

(10:55):
the room, and when she's looking for her belongings instead,
she finds the body of an old woman under her bed,
and it is Dougherty and Burke and Hair try to
bribe them, trying to split the money with them, but
they refuse and they go to the authorities. So by
the time the police get there, the body had been
smuggled out, but it was soon found in doctor Knox's

(11:17):
school in the trunk they always used to transport their bodies,
and so now they're caught. But it turns out that
there wasn't much hard evidence against any of them, not
against Burke, not against Hair, not against their common law wives.
So to get pin any sort of crime on them,
Hair was offered a deal. He and Margaret Laird could

(11:39):
have immunity if he would testify against Burke, and he
took it. The trial started on December fifty eight, and
the very next day Burke was found guilty of Docherty's murder.
Everyone else got off completely. Scott free, and no one
knows for sure if the women knew about the murders
or even had a hand in them, but public suspicion

(12:00):
and leaned towards yes. I have to think of the
poor jury on this court on Christmas Day listening to
this grizzly trial. I probably want to get out there
pretty quickly. So after the conviction, Burke, in an interview says,
neither Hair nor myself ever got a body from a churchyard.
All we told were murdered save the first one. I

(12:20):
don't know if he thought that was better or if
he wanted to make more of a name for himself.
As you know, I mean, clearly he's got a podcast
about him, so I guess it worked. He was sentenced
to be hanged and publicly dissected fittingly, and that was
carried out Janu and twenty thousand people showed up to

(12:42):
see his hanging, and forty people came to see the
dissected body. Burke had testified that Knox didn't know where
the bodies came from, but no one really believed him.
Public sentiment toward Knox wasn't positive, and his students eventually
went away, but the public really him after the women
and also Hair Burke being hanged wasn't enough. They basically

(13:04):
ran them out of town. And we don't know what
happened to Hair. He may have become a beggar. He
may have left for the United States. For the record,
we did not want you hair and plaster masks were
made of both of them, perhaps for the edification of
phrenologists trying to figure out what bumps exactly it turns
you into a criminal. In February two thousand nine, two

(13:25):
of them were found at a former prison in Scotland
and you can see burke skeleton at Edinburgh University and
supposedly his skin was used to cover books and a
snuffbox like the skin book at e g A exactly. Um,
So what happens after this? Though, obviously this doesn't end

(13:47):
this body shortage. In England we have copycats, the London Burgers,
who are three guys who try to sell a teenage
boy's body and he had clearly been murdered. Two are hanged,
one is sent to Australia and people start riding. Something
has to be don't imagine how scary this is. It's
not just your friends and relatives. Bodies being stolen from

(14:08):
their graves anymore. You could just get bumped on the
head one day and sold yourself. No one is resting
in peace. In eighteen thirty two, Parliament took action. They
passed the Anatomy Act, which detailed that appointed Medical inspectors
would supervise the teaching of anatomy and also the getting
of the bodies. But there's more to the legal procurement

(14:31):
of bodies. The lawment that people in a hospital who
applied for treatment, basically the poor and died, we're giving
up their bodies for anatomical examination, whether they liked it
or not. And the same went for the workhouses. If
you were too poor to afford burial, which you probably were,
or you wouldn't have been there, your body could be
donated against your will. Between eighteen thirty nine and eighteen

(14:54):
forty one, three hundred poppers had been dissected under the Act,
which of course was perfectly legal. So it takes several
decades for this unfair treatment of the poor to end.
But we were talking about how it's interesting people are
more willing to donate their bodies to science. Now, I mean,
that's obviously how we get medical examination. Boy, there still
aren't enough. There aren't enough. But um, it's perhaps because

(15:19):
the bodies are eventually returned to the families, you know
that they're going to be treated with a certain amount
of respect, people are more willing to donate them. Although
I'm going to say I don't know about the respect part. Well,
I do think of that box of twenty heads that
was just found at an airport. I mean, I think
I'd completely missed that story a box of heads there. Yeah,

(15:39):
there was a box of about twenty heads I think,
found in an airport. They stopped it because it was
a box of head box of heads being shipped by airliner.
It turned out to have the appropriate paperwork, but still
people were quite upset that remains were being shipped in
this sort of haphazard manner. I would love to see

(16:00):
that paperwork and how you fill out take care of
the box. But a little side note on the legacy
of burke and hair. The word burking is in the
Oxford English Dictionary, which we English majors snotily referred to
as the O. E D. And burking means that one

(16:21):
person immobilizes a body while the other covers the nose
and mouth of a person to suffocate them. So Burke
lives on Yeah, this is why he gave that little
quote that gets see in the dictionary stuff like that.
We've gotten lots of emails asking for this one, so
if you have another not entirely too grizzly, please topic

(16:42):
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(17:03):
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(17:23):
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