Burke and Hare (24 page)
Authors: Brian Bailey
At what point should Knox have had sufficient suspicion to raise the alarm? After the second corpse, or the third, or the sixth, or the tenth? Burke was clearly an accomplished liar, and if my proposed order of the murders is correct, there is no reason why Knox or anyone else should have had any strong suspicions about the first two, or perhaps three, bodies sold to him by Burke and Hare. After all, the poor who appeared to have died in workhouses and other such places with no friends or relatives to claim the bodies were just what the doctors ordered. But it seems reasonable, in all the circumstances, to suggest that, even without Liston’s intervention, Mary Paterson’s corpse ought to have been the one to alert him to the possibility of murder, and make him speak out. If he had done so, Knox could have saved the lives of perhaps a dozen people and Hare could have been brought to justice as well as Burke. Dr Knox’s silence was a costly evasion, and may be seen in retrospect as part of a tacit conspiracy.
Sir Robert Peel said after the trial that he doubted whether uncertainty as to the extent and history of the murders was not as great an evil as any exposure of the facts could be. But that was clearly not the view of the Edinburgh elite. Knox’s remark in his letter to the
Caledonian Mercury
, that as he had not been charged, it proved that the authorities had nothing to charge him with, was patently absurd. But the intellectual leadership produced by the Scottish Enlightenment would have been irreparably damaged by public arraignment of one of its most celebrated members.
NOTES
1
Scott,
Journal
, p. 574.
2
Ibid, p. 575.
3
Ibid, p. 580.
4
The Scotsman
, 11 February 1829.
5
Caledonian Mercury
, 29 December 1828.
6
Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle
, quoted in George MacGregor,
The History of Burke and Hare
, (Glasgow, Thos. D. Morison, 1884), p. 157.
7
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
, March 1829.
8
Lonsdale, p. 108.
9
Ibid, p. 111.
10
Sir Humphrey Rolleston, ‘Provincial Medical Schools a Hundred Years Ago’, Cambridge University Medical Society magazine, 1932, p. 8.
11
I am told by the present Marquis that he has no family papers relating to the matter.
12
Scott,
Journal
, p. 618.
13
Christison, p. 311.
14
Cockburn, pp. 457–58.
15
Medical Times and Gazette
, 27 December 1862. (The editor of the journal and author of this notice was Dr Robert Druitt, an uncle of Montague Druitt, who committed suicide in 1888 and remains one of the chief suspects in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.)
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Lonsdale, pp. 149, 236, 363, 394.
19
Ibid, p. 115.
20
Ball, p. 96.
21
Lonsdale, p. 89.
22
Rae, p. 61.
23
Christison, pp. 310–11.
24
The Lancet
, 21 March 1829.
25
Petition of the Royal College of Surgeons in London to the Viscount Melbourne
, 1831.
26
Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy
, House of Commons, 1828.
27
Ibid.
28
Dr Ruth Richardson cites a draft letter of April 1826 from Bentham to the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, in her
Death, Dissection and the Destitute
(London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 112.
29
‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’,
Letter to the Lord Advocate.
30
Richardson, p. 327.
12. AFTERMATH
I
t is one of the inescapable paradoxes of human existence that out of what we regard as evil can come goodness. Body-snatching itself was a necessary evil. Burke and Hare and their unfortunate victims contributed to medical science and helped to educate much-needed surgeons. They were also about to expedite changes in the law which had been long overdue. Events in Edinburgh blasted the government’s apathy with an explosion of outrage.
Burke also made a contribution to the English language. He gave it a new verb which is still in the dictionaries. Within months of his execution, the anatomical theatre of Dr Andrew Moir in Aberdeen had been nicknamed ‘the burkin’ hoose’. To ‘burke’ was used originally as a synonym for ‘kill’ or ‘murder’, but soon came to mean, more specifically, to smother or suffocate someone. For a time afterwards, moronic youths in Scottish and some English towns thought it a great joke to leap out at women and girls in the streets and slap sticking-plaster over their mouths, delighting in the shock and terror they caused in the aftermath of such fearful revelations. A confusion of ideas seems to have linked Burke and Hare with sticking pitch-plasters over their victims’ faces. But in the few
serious
cases of ‘burking’ recorded, the evidence appears to suggest that this method was being used to facilitate sexual assault. ‘Burkophobia’, as it was called, among other names, certainly caused genuine and widespread fear and distress, and some actual injury, but it never resulted in murder.
On the same day that the Knox committee’s report was published in Edinburgh, 21 March 1829, the House of Commons in London was presented with a Bill by Henry Warburton, MP for Bridport and Commons spokesman for the medical profession, who had headed a Select Committee appointed to enquire into the subject of teaching anatomy. The Bill was intended to bring some control to the study of anatomy by licensing qualified teachers, providing a legal supply of subjects, making grave-robbing a felony, and repealing the Act which gave judges the power to order dissection after execution, thus removing the widely felt stigma resulting from the association of anatomy with crime. The Bill was supported by Sir William Rae, the Lord Advocate for Scotland. The Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, said the measure was necessary to put a stop to the various atrocities caused by the difficulties of obtaining dead bodies. It was painful, he said, to allude to the recent Edinburgh murders, but he hardly dared to think that those were the only crimes that had sprung out of the system.
Sir C. Forbes, the Member for Malmesbury, observed that the sick in hospitals could only be visited once a week, on Tuesdays. He feared that if this Bill became law, ‘a husband might enquire after his wife’s health on one Tuesday and be told that she was getting well, and on the following Tuesday, he might be told that she was dead and dissected’. Another MP expressed his fear that ‘in a moment of excitement or intoxication’, some men might engage to ‘sell their bodies to the Jews’. Nevertheless, the Bill was passed by the Commons on 20 May, but thrown out by the House of Lords on 5 June, opposition to it there being led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
There was a great deal of nervousness in government circles about legalising the dissection of unclaimed corpses from hospitals and workhouses, as the Bill proposed, and it was considered unsatisfactory in its present form, notwithstanding that one member of the Select Committee, Ralph Leycester, delivered himself of the opinion that paupers would welcome dissection after their deaths in poorhouses because they would thus be able to repay the debt they owed to those who had cared for them! The truth, of course, was as Edward Gibbon Wakefield explained it:
The thought of being dissected after death, or of having the body of a relative dissected, is quite horrible to the great majority of people of all conditions. This prejudice, against the conversion of inanimate flesh to the only useful purpose of which it is susceptible, has been fostered in various ways; and in particular by the law, which directs that the bodies of murderers shall be ‘anatomised’.
1
Thomas Wakley took the opportunity to attack the government’s timid approach to the problem, writing in
The Lancet
that, had it not been for Burke and Hare, there would be no debate, and:
. . . that which would never have been sanctioned by the deliberate wisdom of parliament, is about to be extorted from its fears . . . It would have been well if this fear had been manifested and acted upon before sixteen human beings had fallen victim to the supineness of the Government and the Legislature. It required no extraordinary sagacity to foresee, that the worst consequences must inevitably result from the system of traffic between resurrectionists and anatomists, which the executive government has so long suffered to exist. Government is already in a great degree, responsible for the crime which it has fostered by its negligence, and even encouraged by a system of forbearance.
2
During the Lords debate the Earl of Harewood considered that it was a national disgrace that the recent affairs in Edinburgh had not been investigated more fully and the public properly informed of the facts, but he was answered by the Earl of Haddington, who assured their lordships that the dreadful atrocities which had taken place in Edinburgh had in fact been probed as deeply as possible. Lord Tenterden thought that greater vigilance by doctors in discovering whether subjects were victims of barbarity, or persons who had died a natural death, would prevent any recurrence of such crimes as had lately been committed in Edinburgh.
The Scottish press was full of fresh revelations about body-snatching and accompanying riots, but as far as the London papers were concerned, Scotland was a long way off and most of the trouble there was put down by
The Times
to Scottish hooliganism and the magistrates’ lack of wisdom. The English, however, were soon to get a shock of their own.
Meanwhile, in July, John Broggan, the man who had absconded with his wife and the rent money from the basement flat which Burke and McDougal had lived in, was arrested in Glasgow and accused, along with one Bernard Docherty, of the attempted murder, in the course of robbery, of Andrew Naismith, a tailor, by means of laudanum. In September, James Gray, the homeless labourer who had blown the whistle on the homicidal careers of Burke and Hare, died penniless. His widow wrote to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, ‘the only friend that I have in this place’, begging for financial help to bury him.
3
Mr Gray’s honesty and selfless action had undoubtedly saved lives. If it had not been for his incorruptible character, Burke and Hare would have continued undetected for who knows how long.
On Saturday, 5 November 1831, two London body-snatchers, John Bishop and James May, called on William Hill, porter at the King’s College medical school, and offered him a subject for twelve guineas. It was, they said, a male of about fourteen years, very fresh, and they could deliver it that afternoon. The porter knocked the price down to nine guineas. The two men came back later, while it was still daylight, with another body-snatcher, Thomas Williams, and a street porter carrying a hamper. They tipped a corpse out on to the floor and asked for their money. But Mr Hill was immediately suspicious. It was obvious that the boy’s body had not been buried. Rigor mortis was still present and there was a deep cut on the forehead with blood round it. The lips and jaw were swollen and there was blood about the mouth and neck. Hill asked what the boy had died of, but May, who was drunk, told him that was neither his business nor theirs. The anatomy demonstrator, Richard Partridge, then came in to look at the body.
Mr Partridge did immediately what Dr Knox had never done at all. He detained the men, on the pretext of having no cash ready to hand, while someone went for the police. All four men were arrested on suspicion of murder. Enquiries revealed that the same body had previously been offered to Guy’s Hospital and Grainger’s Anatomical Theatre, but both had declined to purchase it. The outcome was that at the Old Bailey on 1 December 1831 – almost two years after the trial of Burke – Bishop and Williams were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. In the condemned cell, Bishop admitted that they had got the idea of murdering the boy, and two other victims, from the Burke and Hare case. He thought that all the body-snatchers in London had tried ‘burking’. Bishop and Williams had rendered their victims insensible with rum laced with laudanum, then drowned them by lowering them head-first into a well in Bishop’s garden, apparently in the belief that the contents of the stomach would run out at the mouth, leaving no trace of foul play. Bishop and Williams were hanged outside Newgate Gaol and their bodies dissected, Bishop’s at King’s College and Williams’s at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Horace Bleackley wrote in
The Hangmen of England
:
The case of Bishop and Williams caused a great sensation in England, coming as it did so soon after the similar crimes of Burke and Hare, ‘the Scottish resurrection men’, who had murdered more than a dozen victims in West Port, Edinburgh, by suffocating them with pitch-plasters in order to sell the corpses to the surgeons.
4
An anonymous letter to the Home Secretary, signed ‘Anatomicus’ and dated 29 November 1831, suggested that all dissection should be suspended until other arrangements were made to supply subjects for teaching anatomy. There was not the shadow of a doubt, the writer claimed, ‘but that the practice of Burkeing (horrible to relate!) was adopted at Edinburgh by members of the fraternity of Resurrectionists’, and similar outrages ‘transpire here daily’.
5
A few days later, Henry Warburton presented a revised Bill to the House of Commons. A much improved version of the proposal to license anatomists and provide them with a legal supply of subjects, it also proposed abolition of the practice of dissecting executed murderers, and its provisions obviated the need for new laws against grave-robbing. It thus successfully dissociated the study of anatomy from crime. By this time, the country had a new government, and Sir Robert Peel had been replaced as Home Secretary by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne.
