ByRonan O’Connell
Published October 20, 2023
• 6 min read
It began as a lurid tale of sadism and corruption in Edinburgh’s old town. Between 1827 and 1828, William Burke and William Hare terrorized the cobblestone streets of Scotland’s capital, kidnapping and murdering 16 people for medical experimentation. This killing spree ended with a controversial court case that transfixed the nation.
Two centuries may have passed, but tourists intrigued by the duo’s legend can follow their ghastly story through museum exhibits, interactive experiences, and walking tours, such as “Blood and Guts: The Twists and Turns of Edinburgh’s Medical History.”
Scientific ambition creates grim opportunity
After immigrating from Ireland to Scotland, Hare became a keeper of a lodging house on West Port Street in Edinburgh, where he met Irish-born Burke in 1827. Burke and Hare began their life of crime soon after. On November 29, 1827, angry that a tenant died before paying, Hare devised a plan to recover the money by breaking into the deceased’s coffin with Burke and selling the body to an Edinburgh anatomist.
Realizing that the doctor needed a steady supply of fresh corpses, the pair escalated from grave robbing to murder. They lured their victims into the lodge they were residing in on West Port Street, plied them with alcohol, and then suffocated them. Each corpse was peddled to Robert Knox, an anatomist who was among a wave of Scottish doctors trying to decode puzzles of the human body via dissection. Knox paid $10-12 for fresh corpses delivered to his laboratory at Surgeon’s Square.
(Learn why human bodies are medicine’s most essential taboo.)
But their business soon mutated into bloodlust. Burke and Hare’s killings became urgent and careless, says Caroline McCracken-Flesher, author of The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders. “With their 16th murder, Burke and Hare seduced an apparently friendless old woman from Ireland,” says McCracken-Flesher, an English professor at the University of Wyoming. “Then they hid her corpse under a pile of hay used for bedding, as they waited for the anatomy labs to open.”
Witnesses spotted the pair dumping the body and alerted the authorities. The police raided Knox’s surgery, found the victim, and arrested Burke and Hare soon after. Relief in Edinburgh quickly led to outrage as details of the trio’s dealings were divulged. “This was murder in the service of science,” McCracken-Flesher says of the public’s perception. “There was suspicion that the doctors should have understood where fresh, never-buried corpses might have come from.”
(This mysterious son of a witch founded Glasgow.)
Yet Knox never went to prison, protected by his lofty status and a lack of proof that he knew of Burke and Hare’s misdeeds, although the case ruined his reputation and career. Heightening the drama, Hare also avoided prison by giving testimony, which helped convict Burke of the 16 murders.
This court case was “sensational,” says Ewen Cameron, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh. “Edinburgh was a capital city and a city of the establishment; its reputation was carefully burnished compared to the smoky industrial cities of the west,” he says of the backdrop to this trial. “But [Burke and Hare] exposed the shadows of the medical establishment.”
Following their steps in old town
In Surgeons’ Hall Museums, grisly artifacts, such as Burke’s death mask and a pocketbook made from his skin after his execution, help tell “the story of the burgeoning medical scene in 19th-century Edinburgh and the growth of the study of anatomy,” says curator Louise Wilkie. The museums are on the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh campus.
Tourists can watch actors reenacting slivers of this ghastly tale at Edinburgh Dungeon, an underground attraction dedicated to the city’s eerie history. During its Ghosts and Gore events, Cadies and Witchery Tours guides visitors through the photogenic, cobblestone streets of the Old Quarter, near Edinburgh Castle, to the High Court, the site of Burke’s Christmas Day trial. Tours continue to the site of Burke’s public execution, Lawnmarket, where he was then dissected (like his victims) and turned into souvenirs made from his skin, many of which can be seen in the William Burke Museum. Burke’s skeleton was kept and preserved as an anatomical teaching aid and can be viewed today at the University of Edinburgh’s anatomical museum.
Hare, on the other hand, vanished after Burke’s trial. Although he ended his days in anonymity, his and his partner’s crimes endure in infamy.
Ronan O’Connell is an Australian journalist and photographer who shuttles between Ireland, Thailand, and Western Australia.
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