Pod Insights After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal Burke & Hare's Serial Killing Dissection Business About this episode What did Ancient Egyptians discover while dissecting bodies? What did the first medieval dissecting manual say? Who were the serial killers who supplied 19th century surgeons with bodies in Edinburgh?
Joining Anthony today as a special guest co-host is Cat Irving, Human Remains Conservator at Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh, to take us back through this bloody history.
Edited by Anna Brant and Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.
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Transcript 10,151 words · 5 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Hello After Darkers. Now brace yourselves for a public service announcement.
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0:54 Speaker 01 Sixteen people were murdered in Edinburgh in the year 1828 by the infamous serial-killing duo William Burke and William Hare. They intoxicated and smothered their victims, preying on the underclass of the city. Burke and Hare killed in order to supply corpses to the anatomy table of Dr. Robert Knox. So yes, they were serial killers, but what about Dr. Knox and the other mighty medical minds of Edinburgh at this time? How responsible were they? Did they turn a blind eye to the horror beneath their noses as they strove towards fame and glory? Well, I can think of no one better to help answer these questions than the one and only Cat Irving,
1:37 Speaker 01 human remains conservator at the Surgeon's Hall Museum in Edinburgh.
2:01 Speaker 00 Okay. Hello. Welcome to After Dark. I am Cat.
2:04 Speaker 01 And I'm Anthony. And today we are talking about, well, it's an episode that combines both of our interests and knowledge. And we've worked on some of this before in a documentary we did for After Dark on the Edinburgh Murders.
2:19 Speaker 00 Yes.
2:19 Speaker 01 Burke and Hare, spoiler, you're going to be hearing a little bit about serial killers and body snatchers. They weren't body snatchers. They were serial killers. But of course, as Maddie is horse wrangling in the outback of Australia, I'm sure you knew that that's what she was doing. A hundred percent legitimate explanation there. We have our guest co-host for this month, which is Cat Irving. And Cat, of course, is the Human Remains Conservator at Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh. That is a great title. Do you ever like, when you're writing your job title, like when a form says job title and you're like, human remains conservator, are people like, what do you do?
2:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, I will admit, there are times, you know, certain audiences, and I'll just write conservator, because, you know, there are points, it's just like, I don't want to get into that conversation right now.
3:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. If you're tired, just like going through customs at an airport, you're like, not today, I'm just gonna.
3:13 Speaker 00 Not today. Let's not have human remains involved.
3:16 Speaker 01 Because eventually, everybody has a story as well. Like, it's like, oh, once I lost a kidney or something.
3:22 Speaker 00 Yeah. And there's a lot, I always find it really weird when there's people who seem just like, that must be the worst job ever. How, you know, why would you want to do that? And I'm just like, but my job is the best in the world.
3:34 Speaker 01 If only I was in any way scientifically minded, which I'm absolutely not at all. But we're not just going to be talking about Burke and Hare today. We are going to be talking about dissection more generally and the history of dissection, which is potentially much, much longer than you think. Well, for me personally, I always get the idea of Edinburgh in the 18th century. That's where I land myself, just, just off the top of my head. But of course, they didn't just start there.
3:57 Speaker 00 It didn't start in Edinburgh in the 18th century.
3:59 Speaker 01 So let's do a whole timeline for people, just to preface what we're going to be talking about more specifically. And take us to, I suppose, ancient Greece. Is that how far back we want to go?
4:10 Speaker 00 Well, ancient Greece is an interesting one, because obviously, ancient Greece, you know, you've got, you've got the, you know, the philosophy and the science and all of that kind of stuff going on.
4:21 Speaker 02 But weren't big on dissection.
4:24 Speaker 01 Oh, they weren't.
4:25 Speaker 02 They absolutely weren't. They had this real taboo about the body, you know.
4:31 Speaker 01 Right.
4:31 Speaker 02 So in ancient Greece, and you remember ancient Greece is lots of different city states. It's not one, you know, big.
4:39 Speaker 01 Just centre, yeah.
4:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, lots and lots of different places, but largely they believed that, you know, if you had contact with a dead body, that was polluting in some way.
4:48 Speaker 01 Polluting to the living person.
4:49 Speaker 02 Polluting to the living person.
4:51 Speaker 01 Oh, see.
4:51 Speaker 02 So, you know, there were a whole range of strictures. So if you were in contact with a dead body, you know, even if it was, you know, your husband had died at home, then you couldn't go to the temple for worship for, you know, a specified amount of days.
5:06 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
5:06 Speaker 02 Afterwards. And, you know, if you had a dead body at home, if somebody had died, you, you had to put a marker outside your house. So nobody could, you know, accidentally end up with that kind of pollution.
5:18 Speaker 01 Whoa.
5:18 Speaker 02 So they really did not like dead bodies. And, you know, certain places, you know, you, you always had to be buried away from the town. But, you know, it wasn't like today when you'll have a church with a burial ground around it, things like that. Burials had to take place outside.
5:33 Speaker 01 That is so interesting because we've talked before with Dr. Irving Finkel, who I'm sure you're aware of, yes, icon legend.
5:39 Speaker 02 Fan girl.
5:40 Speaker 01 And he talks about ancient Mesopotamia burial rites and the, the proximity of the dead. And they're often, if it was children that had passed, they were sometimes buried in the walls of the houses. They were buried in courtyards. And so I had had this idea, which is very naive in many ways, that ancient cultures generally were in more proximity to death, but not when it comes to ancient Greece.
6:01 Speaker 02 No, no, no, no. And that carries on into, you know, the Roman period as well. However, there is, in that ancient world, there is one place where dissection does happen.
6:12 Speaker 01 Okay.
6:13 Speaker 02 And that's Alexandria.
6:15 Speaker 01 Right.
6:15 Speaker 02 So, well, there's a lot of things going on. So first of all, Alexander the Great.
6:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:21 Speaker 02 He has, you know, created a big empire, then he inconveniently dies in Babylon in three hundred and twenty-three BCE, and they transport his body back to Alexandria. Takes quite a while. They actually preserve him in honey.
6:35 Speaker 01 Yes, I remember. I think we may have done an episode on that maybe.
6:38 Speaker 02 And then the empire is divided amongst four of his generals.
6:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:43 Speaker 02 And Ptolemy.
6:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
6:45 Speaker 02 Gets Egypt.
6:46 Speaker 01 Right.
6:47 Speaker 02 Yeah. Ptolemy the first, he, he was called Ptolemy Suter, Ptolemy Savior. I mean, you know, that's quite a name, quite a name to give yourself, isn't it? He gets Egypt and he has this idea that he would like to make particularly Alexandria, you know, the city that was founded by Alexander the Great, that he wants to make that a centre of learning.
7:07 Speaker 01 Right.
7:07 Speaker 02 You know, and so he sets up an institution called the Museon, which is where we get the word museum today. Though it seems from what I've read that you would probably think that, you know, it's more like a university. It's a place where, you know, learned men, of course, they're all men, would, would meet and discuss and, you know, generate ideas.
7:28 Speaker 01 Any discipline.
7:29 Speaker 02 Along any discipline, you know, but one of those is anatomy. And that's really interesting because you've got to think, he's Greek, he's, he's been brought up with these taboos. He knows about them, but we're not in Greece, we're in Egypt, you know, so we're not in Kansas anymore.
7:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, no.
7:45 Speaker 02 No.
7:45 Speaker 01 It's not Kansas, it's true.
7:46 Speaker 02 So, of course, there's a thing been going on with dead bodies in Egypt for quite some time.
7:51 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, how do I not think of this? Right.
7:53 Speaker 02 Again, you know, that's sort of shifting.
7:55 Speaker 01 Where is she going with this? We're no longer in Greece. Now we're talking about Egypt. And I was like, of course, there is a culture of the dead there already, right?
8:02 Speaker 02 So for very brief periods, only about forty years in Alexandria, under Ptolemy and his son Ptolemy the Second, they allow dissection to study the human body to be done. And we get two men, we get Erasustratus and Hierophilus.
8:20 Speaker 01 Easy for you to say.
8:22 Speaker 02 And they come along to Alexandria. To study the body. They're using the bodies of executed criminals.
8:30 Speaker 01 Right.
8:30 Speaker 02 And this is a theme throughout the history of dissection. And, you know, they actually discover things about the body. So, you know, Hierophantus tells us things about the brain, you know, the idea that before had been that it was, there had been discussion, but a lot of people thought that the heart was, you know, the intellectual centre of the body. And he, you know, he proves that this is actually the brain where this is happening. He sees the ventricles in the brain. He's looking at the differences between arteries and veins.
9:00 Speaker 01 Even then, wow.
9:01 Speaker 02 And then Erasistratus, he, he figures out that blood can only flow one way along veins.
9:07 Speaker 01 Wow.
9:07 Speaker 02 You know, because there are valves. And he almost, almost gets to the point of figuring out circulation of blood. Which is, what, like nearly 2000 years before Harvey?
9:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9:19 Speaker 02 So, you know, amazing things going on because they're able to study from the body. But, as I say, it's a very brief flowering of dissection in Alexandria that only lasts about 40 years.
9:31 Speaker 01 And I suppose one of the things to point out contextually here is that, yes, there is a culture of the dead in Egypt, but this is not how they treat them necessarily. This is not what they do with them, which is why you're talking about it being criminal bodies and.
9:42 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And as I say, the criminal body.
9:46 Speaker 01 You're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna be encountering it over the next few centuries.
9:49 Speaker 02 It's gonna get, it's gonna get a mention.
9:51 Speaker 01 Right, fast forward then, 14th century.
9:53 Speaker 02 14th century. So, you know, dissection has again gone underground. I am sure there must have been some people. Had to have been.
10:02 Speaker 01 You would have been doing it if nobody else.
10:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely.
10:05 Speaker 01 There you are in the 12th century, cutting away.
10:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, 1315.
10:11 Speaker 01 Okay.
10:11 Speaker 02 You know, we're in Bologna and we're now into the Christian era. And of course, the thing about Christianity is that it doesn't have taboos about the dead body. In fact, it's putting the dead body of Christ front and centre.
10:25 Speaker 01 True, yeah.
10:26 Speaker 02 And, you know, saints relics, things like that, you know, you're not getting the hand of Saint whatever without doing a little bit of chopping of the body. You know, there's a whole range of things that are already going on with dead bodies in Christianity. And so there isn't this taboo. So in thirteen fifteen in Bologna, we get the first dissection of the human body authorized to study anatomy in the modern world.
10:51 Speaker 01 Wow.
10:51 Speaker 02 And it's carried out by a man called Mondino de Luzzi and he apparently does two that year. Again, executed criminals.
10:58 Speaker 01 Right.
10:59 Speaker 02 And the following year, he writes what's effectively the first dissection manual. You know, how you go about this. So that's really, really interesting. Couple of years later, we get the first case of body snatching that we're aware of.
11:12 Speaker 01 Oh, I did not know that. So that can go back to fourteen.
11:15 Speaker 02 Thirteen nineteen, four students are accused of digging up a body to take to the hands of the, the house of their professor and.
11:24 Speaker 01 Is this in Bologna still?
11:25 Speaker 02 It's still in Bologna. Again, they've, they've had the example. Now they want a bit more of that.
11:28 Speaker 01 Sure.
11:29 Speaker 02 And so, you know, they're.
11:30 Speaker 01 This industry.
11:31 Speaker 02 Yeah. We, we don't know what happened in that case, but you know.
11:34 Speaker 01 Somebody was dug up.
11:35 Speaker 02 Somebody was dug up and it's going on.
11:37 Speaker 01 What's fascinating about that then is that we can say, and you will have known this, but for, for myself and listeners who are coming across that piece of information for the first time, is that anywhere there has been dissection or anatomizing, there has been most likely body snatching happening at the same time, that there will be this complementary, and we bear this in mind from when we do get to the nineteenth century, Edinburgh later on in this story, there is a complementary trade that is meant to supply this, this more official dissection thing. It is also worth pointing out that while even by the time of the early fourteenth century, there is this idea going, okay, this might be a worthwhile pursuit, or, or even if we're talking about in Egypt and dissection
12:20 Speaker 01 there. Yes, this is a worthwhile pursuit. The, the pursuit of knowledge is, is good for humanity. We can learn more about ourselves and about how to treat things and all the rest of it. But you don't want to be the one dissected. In order for us to gain that knowledge. And this is why we're constantly turning to the criminal class.
12:39 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
12:40 Speaker 01 Give that they've lost control over their own bodies, even though it's not a desecration. There seems to be the fact, this idea that you don't want this happening to a reputable body.
12:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:50 Speaker 01 So these two things are there from the very, very beginning, body snatching and not everybody should be dissected.
12:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. And we'll get on to this a bit later, but there was certainly an idea, particularly when we get into more Protestant times, that you have to be buried intact in order to go to hell.
13:07 Speaker 01 Of course, of course. So if you're taking off the old fingers or you're removing different organs, then that's a problem. Right. You have mentioned to me before that the incorporation of the Barbers and Surgeons of Edinburgh happens at the very beginning of the 16th century, 1505.
13:25 Speaker 02 1505.
13:26 Speaker 01 That is so early. I would have thought it was much later. Again, 18th century is in my head. So maybe in the 17th century, but no, we're here in the 16th century. It's 1505. Why is this happening now? What is happening in the timeline that Edinburgh goes, we need to regulate this?
13:42 Speaker 02 So the Barbers and Surgeons of Edinburgh starts life as a trade guild. So that effectively makes it like blacksmiths and butchers and fishmongers, people like that. So effectively, the reason they're wanting to become a trade guild is because that gives them a monopoly. This is basically, it's about commerce. It's about, it's business. It's how, how you're making the money. So that's the inspiration for setting this up in 1505. Plus, we had a king at the time, James IV of Scotland, and he was really interested in medical things. He believed to have tried to extract some teeth and things like that. So, you know, he had that kind of interest going on as well. And he ratifies our founding document in 1506, so the year after. And one of the things that document does is it gives the
14:25 Speaker 02 Barbers and Surgeons of Edinburgh one executed criminal per year to practice anatomy on.
14:31 Speaker 01 Oh, that's not going to be enough, Cass.
14:33 Speaker 02 That's not going to be enough. 1540, you get the Barbers and Surgeons in England set up. Henry VIII gives them four bodies per year.
14:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, but sure, he's got loads lying around.
14:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
14:43 Speaker 01 He needs someone. Help with the bodies.
14:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's, he's killing a lot of folks. So, yeah.
14:47 Speaker 01 So this barber and surgeons guild, just as a matter of interest, is that still the surgeons' home museum now? Is this still part of that? Or is it just this, this, the iteration of it now is the surgeons?
14:55 Speaker 02 It's the iteration. And the incorporation of barbers and surgeons, in the early 18th century, they lose the barbers. So they just become, become the surgeons. And then later on, the end of the 18th century, they get a royal charter. So they become the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
15:09 Speaker 01 Okay, so now we're very formal by then, but we'll get there. We'll get that one. Right. How does a murder act in 1752 feed into the history of anatomy?
15:17 Speaker 02 Right. So again, this idea that I was talking about, that you, you have to be buried intact to see the pearly gates. And at that point, you could get hanged for a lot of different things, you know, so poachers, pickpockets. You could get hanged for that. You know, children could be hanged for picking pockets. We have an instance in Edinburgh where the first publicly dissected person in Edinburgh, that happens at the beginning of the 18th century. And he was a 17 year old boy who was hanged for incest. So a lot of things could get you hanged.
15:54 Speaker 02 And there's an idea that starts, you know, there's a pamphlet, I think it's 1705 is published, which has said that hanging is not punishment enough for murderers. You know, the idea that if you commit this worst crime, that you should have some extra punishment.
16:09 Speaker 01 So I'm guessing then that post 1752.
16:14 Speaker 02 Well, then.
16:15 Speaker 01 Oh.
16:16 Speaker 02 The judge can say, after 1752, the judge can say, if you're hanged for murder, that he can give you another punishment.
16:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:24 Speaker 02 And so the options are, the judge can say, you get gibbeted.
16:28 Speaker 01 Ee, not great.
16:29 Speaker 02 Yeah. So you're hung up in a cage after you've been hanged to publicly decompose.
16:34 Speaker 01 Birds are going to be picking at you.
16:35 Speaker 02 Birds are going to be picking at you. Bones are just.
16:38 Speaker 01 Fallen off.
16:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:39 Speaker 01 Juices down onto the streets.
16:41 Speaker 02 It's not going to smell nice.
16:42 Speaker 01 No, it's not great.
16:43 Speaker 02 It's not good. But, you know, it's not only providing you with not buried intact body, but also going to act as a warning. You know, you can imagine that as you're walking into. Town and you see gibbeted body hanging up, you're gonna go, don't want that to be me.
16:57 Speaker 01 And this is 1752.
16:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:59 Speaker 01 That feels so medieval, not, not very 18th century. Okay.
17:02 Speaker 02 Yeah. The other option is that you could get sent to the anatomist's table.
17:06 Speaker 01 I'll take that one, Ben.
17:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:07 Speaker 01 If those are my two. Now, did, did the criminal get to decide or did the judge decide?
17:11 Speaker 02 The judge get to decide. And why certain bodies went to be hanged?
17:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't know.
17:17 Speaker 02 Don't know. There was a case where a father and son murdered the daughter slash sister, and one of them was sent for anatomization and one of them was gibbeted.
17:25 Speaker 01 Right.
17:25 Speaker 02 So, you know, covering both bases there.
17:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:28 Speaker 02 Women were never gibbeted.
17:30 Speaker 01 Right.
17:30 Speaker 02 You know, not, obviously not as many women being hanged for murder as men. But if you were, you would not be, you, you, you would not be gibbeted. That was considered indecent.
17:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:41 Speaker 02 So then you would end up on anatomist's table.
17:43 Speaker 01 Okay, but then, so then that was the only option for, for, and was, in this case, was it everyone who committed murder was gonna have one of those two fates? Nobody was just gonna go and be put in the ground? It was either gibbeting or?
17:54 Speaker 02 I've came across very occasional cases where they did end up with burial, but very, very, very few.
18:01 Speaker 01 Right, was that a class thing, do you think, or connections or some kind of?
18:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
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19:39 Speaker 01 So we're now in 1752. We're going to fast forward a little bit to the beginning of the 19th century. We're still in, just about in Georgian times. And I suppose one of the things that so many people go to visit Edinburgh for now is this idea, of course, not just happening in Edinburgh, but this idea of body snatching. And you go to Greyfriars, I have been for many a walk through that hallowed ground, literally hallowed ground, and it is so atmospheric. And if you've never been to Greyfriars Kirkyard, if you're ever you're in Edinburgh, you must. I mean, it's an absolute must stop. And I know there's some people that live around the edges of it. And if you're going, you see some of the tombs and then there's just somebody washing up in one of the windows above.
20:19 Speaker 02 I actually viewed a flat which looked over the graveyard and I was very disappointed that we didn't get that flat.
20:26 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that was, it just looks like such an atmospheric place.
20:30 Speaker 02 It would be, it would be hellish in terms of the amount of people you had walking past, but it would be a very good backyard.
20:35 Speaker 01 Worth the sacrifice. So we get to the 1820s. There are now watch stations in certain Kirkyards and graveyards, not just in Edinburgh, where family members or people that have been appointed to look over the dead are there. Why are they needing to be there? What is, what is happening at this particular time of the start of the 19th century? That means people are going to graveyards, such as Greyfriars. And digging people up.
21:02 Speaker 02 You've got to think there are just not enough people being hanged for murder. You know, if you think in Scotland, which is obviously where I'm based, you know, in Edinburgh, you've got one of the most prestigious medical schools in Europe. You've also got a medical school at the University of Glasgow and from the 1770s, you've got one in Aberdeen.
21:19 Speaker 01 Not to mention all the, the free ranging medical anatomy schools that are just kind of popping up in the 18th century.
21:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, that's it. Beginning of the 19th century, you start to get those that they're usually called extramural anatomy schools because they're outside the walls of the university and they're not even entitled to the bodies from the murder act.
21:37 Speaker 01 But they still need bodies.
21:38 Speaker 02 But they still need bodies. So they have, they have to get bodies from elsewhere. There's a huge trade, but it's not new in the 19th century. Like the first case, first known case anyway, of body snatching in Greyfriars Kirk is February 1678.
21:56 Speaker 01 1678, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. That, that adds up to, and you know, there are, I think, what is it 300,000 people buried in that Kirk yard or something?
22:04 Speaker 02 I'm not sure of the numbers, but it's a lot, it's a lot of folk.
22:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there's been a lot of people going in there for quite some time.
22:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:10 Speaker 01 This then, and we're just doing this as an overview, we'll get into some more particulars as we go to the next part of our conversation. But this then very directly leads to the 1832 Anatomy Act. Am I right in that date?
22:23 Speaker 02 So 1832 Anatomy Act will come in, that will end the murder act and give a different source of bodies.
22:29 Speaker 01 Oh, I see, that relates directly to that.
22:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's quite a lot of things going on before the 1832 Anatomy Act comes into place.
22:39 Speaker 01 Which we will talk about those things, some of those things in the, in the next part of our conversation. But before we move on, I do want to talk about why Edinburgh comes up so very often. As you know, we've talked about the fact that this is happening in Bologna in the 14th century. So this, this is not an Edinburgh exclusive activity. But it does become fixated in our imagination when we talk about resurrectionists or body snatchers. And of course, there are two names that are lurking in the air now, and those being Burke and Hare, we'll come to them, don't worry. But why is Edinburgh so linked to this trade of body snatching?
23:15 Speaker 02 Well, again, it's a huge story. So we'll just get a couple of the points in. But again, this medical school is very, very well renowned. You know, you have a lot of great teachers there. And it's also the Enlightenment. So it's a city where there's a lot of exchange of ideas. I mean, you've lived in Edinburgh. It's a very small, manageable city. The way that people can get around and communicate with one another is, it basically fosters that kind of environment. Plus, you've got the fact that, you know, we've just joined on to England. And, you know, all the rich, wealthy folk have gone down there, you know, all the lords and stuff like that. They're decamping to try and be near a royalty. And
23:58 Speaker 02 you're effectively left in Scotland with an intellectual elite who, you know, get to do what they want. Plus, you know, it's actually quicker in Scotland. You can get a medical degree in three years. So obviously, there's that kind of impetus. And things like the fact that the teacher, you're still examined in Latin, but the teaching is not in Latin. So, you know,
24:18 Speaker 01 We're getting a bit of accessibility.
24:19 Speaker 02 Again, accessibility. Plus, there are no religious stipulations. You know, if you've gone to Oxford or Cambridge, you need to be Church of England. We don't have that at the University of Edinburgh. So there are a whole array of different reasons which are making Edinburgh, you know, a popular place to be coming to study medicine.
24:37 Speaker 01 It's why a lot of the Irish medical practitioners go to Edinburgh as well. For that, literally just the religious aspect, most of the population of Ireland are Catholic, so they will go to Edinburgh. James Barry is a good example, comes from Cork to train. What is also interesting, you mentioned briefly there, Kat, and I think it just hit me for the first time, is that in order for the trade, the body snatching trade, to flourish, you almost need to be within a community that is close enough to know when people are dying and when they're being interred. Because you only have a certain window of time. And if you know the geography of Edinburgh at all,
25:19 Speaker 01 What were the medical schools, the building for the medical school, Robert Knox's medical school is there as well, and there's different, but the university medical schools are within minutes of Greyfriars. And so you will have somebody, a slightly on retainer maybe, who's linked with the Kirk yard, who's like, by the way, Joan is coming in at 12:30 and she's fresh off the, she's fresh off the slab, the kind of thing. And so Edinburgh lends itself in this way. And then nighttime, you are potentially carrying bodies in bags. You need to be able to go through streets or winds or whatever it is that are dark, that are enclosed, that you're not, you know. So it lends itself geographically in some ways to this trade.
26:00 Speaker 02 But you've got to think that, I mean, people are getting wise in Edinburgh. You know, we've got the protection in a lot of places, you know, people know about this. A lot of the bodies are coming from a lot further afield, you know, so Knox was getting, Knox was getting quite a lot of bodies from Ireland.
26:17 Speaker 01 Huh.
26:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
26:19 Speaker 01 Stop it.
26:20 Speaker 02 So you've got this body that's being delivered to James Sign and it's waiting for the mail coach down in Newcastle, but the mail coach is delayed. And then the people suddenly notice that there's, you know, a bit of a smell and something oozing out of it.
26:34 Speaker 01 Please don't be August, please don't be in the middle of August.
26:37 Speaker 02 Well, anatomy is usually done in the winter months for that reason. But yeah, there is this trade of bodies coming from, you know, far away to get here.
26:48 Speaker 01 I didn't know that.
26:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And this is really, really interesting because in our archive at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, we have a notebook from a man called Thomas Hume, who studied medicine, well, he wasn't actually studying medicine, but he went to study a number of medically related subjects, largely because of who his friends were, and you know, he wanted to go along with them. He went to Knox's dissecting classes. So we have handwritten firsthand account of what it was like to be there. And he talks about the fact that the body was not that fresh and that there was quite a smell from it. And you imagine if the bodies travelled a distance, you know, it might have been stuck in a barrel of Brian or something like that to, you know, to get to Edinburgh, but it's not going to be that fresh.
27:32 Speaker 01 That's what I mean, that's why I'm surprised to hear this.
27:34 Speaker 02 It's going to be a wee bit stinky.
27:35 Speaker 01 You've got only a few hours, well, I mean, let's say 48 hours max before things start to.
27:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, start to get, you know.
27:43 Speaker 01 Interesting.
27:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:45 Speaker 01 So what we have is, we've got. Sorry to harp on about Ireland, but I'm Irish, so I will. So we've got some medical practitioners coming from Ireland because they can practise or learn in Edinburgh because of the lack of restriction over religion. We have got some bodies coming from Ireland that are being dissected there for whatever reason, whether they were criminal or not in Ireland, who they probably were, but just under the same act. But we also have two men coming from the north of Ireland named Burke and Hare.
28:14 Speaker 02 Yeah. William Burke and William Hare.
28:16 Speaker 01 William Burke, all the Williams. And they come over and they are surrounded by Irish people and some of the key players in them being exposed are Irish, actually. But there is this community of builders, people are working on the canals, Burke and Hare are part of that, but it ain't paying enough. But they decide to feed into this and people have always assumed, and we've done episodes on this in the podcast, we've done the documentary, that they then turned to body snatching in order to facilitate the link between the demand for dissection in Edinburgh at the time and then just death rates that are being, whatever else. But these people never, ever stole from a grave.
29:00 Speaker 02 Absolutely no evidence of that. I've heard them getting referred to body snatchers all the time, all the time. I've even seen it on museum labels and things like that.
29:10 Speaker 01 Definitely in Tours of Edinburgh.
29:11 Speaker 02 Oh, God, I mean, some of the things I've heard on Tours of Edinburgh. No, no, no, no. Do not rely on a ghost tour of Edinburgh for your facts about Burke and Hare. That should be the lesson that everyone takes away from this podcast.
29:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, if nothing else, just that.
29:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
29:29 Speaker 01 Let's talk about them for a little bit. So as I said, they're immigrants, they've come from the north of Ireland, they are working class, they are now murdering. And the first victim that they come across is kind of somebody that owes them rent.
29:45 Speaker 02 Well, he's not a victim.
29:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, he actually dies of natural causes. So this is old Donald.
29:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:51 Speaker 02 And he was waiting for a pension payout and he owes Hare four pound. Hare by this.
29:56 Speaker 01 For lodging.
29:56 Speaker 02 For lodging. Hare by this point is running a lodging house. And old Donald dies in the lodging house owing him rent. And it's apparently Burke who has the idea that if they sell the body, then they can recoup Hare's.
30:09 Speaker 01 It only makes sense.
30:10 Speaker 02 It does.
30:10 Speaker 01 Just going around selling bodies willy nilly to get rent.
30:13 Speaker 02 But of course, you know, you don't want people to know you're doing that. So old Donald's coffin is filled with stones. So that they, you know, the people lifting it think they've got a body. And Burke and Hare go off taking his body to sell.
30:27 Speaker 01 Hmm. And we'll talk about who they take the body to after we've spoken about these two. Now, am I right in thinking, you you'll know the figures better than me. But am I right in thinking that you could get, depending on the the specimen that's given, you could get between seven and even up to seventeen pounds?
30:45 Speaker 02 I don't know. I don't know if I've heard as high as seventeen.
30:47 Speaker 01 I thought that was high as well.
30:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm not. I'm not saying that's wrong.
30:50 Speaker 01 No, no, no.
30:51 Speaker 02 I've never heard that. But certainly ten to twelve pounds.
30:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:56 Speaker 02 You know.
30:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:57 Speaker 02 If it was a child's body, it was, you know, you know, by the length, you know.
31:02 Speaker 01 Really?
31:02 Speaker 02 So, yeah, so it's all very unpleasant.
31:05 Speaker 01 But it's a lot of money for these people.
31:07 Speaker 02 It's a lot of money, you know, that's, you know, a couple of months' work.
31:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, it's months in a night.
31:12 Speaker 02 You can see, you can see why.
31:15 Speaker 01 There's a, I can't believe I'm saying this, there's a logic to it.
31:18 Speaker 02 There is, there is a logic, you know, you don't have much money. This is, this is an easy way of getting money. And I say easy, and again, scare quotes, this is an easy way of getting it.
31:28 Speaker 01 Now, that's old Donald. And you're right, he's not necessarily a victim of of the murder, but potentially still a victim of the exploitation, but whatever. But now they're inspired because let's say they take Donald and they might not get the 10 or 12, but they might get a good solid eight or nine.
31:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, they get, I think it's seven pounds and 10 shillings.
31:45 Speaker 01 Oh, do we even know? We know exactly what they get. Oh, my God. Incredible.
31:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:49 Speaker 01 Oh, God, I love history so much. Anyway, so he gets seven, they get seven, eight for that. And they're like, that's, that's a lot of money. That's, as you say, a couple of months there.
31:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:57 Speaker 01 Maybe next time, we could, we could hasten.
32:00 Speaker 02 And in fact, one of Knox's assistants said that they'd be glad to see them again.
32:05 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes.
32:06 Speaker 02 If they had another body.
32:07 Speaker 01 We enjoy your bodies.
32:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, from Knox's point of view and from Knox's assistant's point of view, you've got to think how, how nice this is going to have, not having, you know, one of those stinky bodies that's travelled. So this is going to seem, you know, win-win situation for everyone, apart from the person who gets murdered, which is where they go.
32:30 Speaker 01 So we now have people who are lodging often in Hare's Lodging House. They will exploit the fact that they're there, that often they're immigrants themselves, that they don't necessarily have family around. We will often have situations where people are living on the streets and, or, or are not necessarily living on the streets, but are part of, of a class that are vagrant and people locally will know them. I'm thinking about the person that was known as Daft Jamie, who was very beloved in Edinburgh, but, but certainly was somebody who it took a while for people to notice was missing from the usual streets that they were there. And they start to exploit the situation that they find in Edinburgh at that time through what became known as birking, which is, as you
33:10 Speaker 01 said, murder. And the fact that they even lend, or William Burke lends his name to this activity really shows how tied in they become to, to some of the dastardly, dastardly things that they are, that they're doing. One of the things I want to point out here, and we've spoken about this in the podcast before, I find this so remarkable because it's so rare that you get this close to this type of history. But because you work at Surgeon's Hall Museum, and because the only one of the two, Burke and Hare, who was tried, convicted and executed, was William Burke, his skeleton has been preserved at the Anatomy Museum at Edinburgh. And I know you have an, an artefact as well, which we'll talk about
33:53 Speaker 01 at the Surgeon's Hall Museum. But you have worked.
33:58 Speaker 01 I'm writing, thinking, I'm on the body of William Burke.
34:02 Speaker 02 I have worked with his skeleton.
34:04 Speaker 01 With his skeleton.
34:04 Speaker 02 So he went on, on a little holiday.
34:07 Speaker 01 I'm sure he'd need it after that.
34:08 Speaker 02 You know, a couple of years ago, they had a big exhibition at National Museum of Scotland called Anatomy, A Matter of Death and Life.
34:15 Speaker 01 I was there.
34:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. And Burke, Burke's skeleton was taken to the museum for that exhibition. And before it went over there, I was the person who got to go and do conservation work on it. So I have actually been inside Burke's head.
34:29 Speaker 01 That to me is just, when I think about getting up close to history, because you know, as historians, we try and we're trying to recreate these worlds. But then I speak to two people, someone like you or archaeologists, who are actually hands on assembling or unassembling, whatever it is. You described to me once that as part of that process to work on his skeleton, you had to put his arm around your shoulder.
34:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:58 Speaker 01 And we think that that was probably one of the ways in which he, he coaxed people in as well. And I know it was just the skeletal arm. But come on, Kat, you must have had a moment where you were like, I have the skeletal arm of a serial killer around my neck. Or do you just not, are you just in work mode?
35:15 Speaker 02 No, no, it is that kind of sort of thing, you're in work. Because I should say, this wasn't like, I wasn't taking a selfie of him with my arm, his arm around my shoulder.
35:22 Speaker 01 That'd be me, just to let you know.
35:23 Speaker 02 It was absolutely nothing like that. But this was, this was a way, and I do it with any articulated skeleton work, where that you just kind of put it, just balance it over your shoulder, just so that you can get to the ribs.
35:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
35:32 Speaker 02 You know, because this is meant to be, the way he's been, his bones have been put together, you're meant to be able to move them and see the way that, you know, these joints would move in life.
35:42 Speaker 01 That's the whole point, right?
35:43 Speaker 02 This is, this is the whole point. So it is just an easy way for me to get to the ribs when I'm, when I'm working on the ribs. So just, just to make it clear, I, you know.
35:52 Speaker 01 In case anybody from.
35:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's not.
35:54 Speaker 01 The museum or the university is listening.
35:56 Speaker 02 It's not, it's not that kind of situation. But yeah, there, there is a moment where, you know, I think about this a lot with what I do, that there's this kind of slippage. You know, you, you have this moment where it's, it's a physical task, it's often a very delicate task. And, you know, you're very focused on what you're doing. And then your brain kind of pulls back and you get the long shot and you suddenly go, who is this person? And of course, when that is William Burke.
36:22 Speaker 02 A whole array of different things come into your mind.
36:25 Speaker 01 I'm so jealous. I could never do what you do because again, not scientifically minded enough, but I am so, so jealous. And you guys at the Surgeon's Home Museum, you have, you have a book that we think is bound in Burke's skin.
36:39 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. So it's a small book, about the size of my iPhone. And it's, you know, a brown leather, some gold detailing on it. And it says Burke Skin Pocketbook on the cover. And it has a little loop, you know, just like my notebook does here for a pencil or such like that. No pages left inside it. And yeah, it's an amazing thing. And it's, it's just, I always think of what I do is very, very humbling. But you know, that kind of thing where you see it and it really does give you a shiver, you know, that kind of connection to what was going on at that time.
37:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a real tangible. You talked about this idea of slippage and I love that. It's this real, it's almost reaching out and shaking hands or as close as you possibly can. And that, that's so evocative in so many different levels, not necessarily in a, an amazing way. It's, it's quite dark at times considering what he was part of. But yeah, it just, now, one of the people who I think we talk about Burke and Hare, and when we did our documentary on History Hit TV, which you can go and watch now, it's on YouTube too, actually. The whole documentary is available for free on YouTube. When we did that documentary, one of the key points that I was keen to push home was this idea that it's Burke, Hare, and there's another man, and you've mentioned him already. And the other man is Dr. Robert Knox.
38:00 Speaker 01 And it'll be a name that most people won't be familiar with, certainly not on the scale of, of Burke and Hare. But Burke and Hare needed somewhere to take the victims that they were murdering, or else they wouldn't be murdering them. So tell us a little bit about this enigma of a man, the man that is Dr. Robert Knox.
38:18 Speaker 02 So Robert Knox was in Edinburgh, he trained as a surgeon, he actually went over, he was treating some of the casualties after the Battle of Waterloo and he returned to Edinburgh. And it's very interesting because Robert Knox actually failed his anatomy exam on first sitting.
38:36 Speaker 01 Of course he did.
38:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. So he had been taught by Professor Monroe, Alexander Monroe Tertius.
38:42 Speaker 01 No less.
38:43 Speaker 02 Yes. Alexander Monroe Tertius was the third in line of a dynasty of anatomists who hold the position of Chair of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh between them for 126 years.
38:56 Speaker 01 Definitely nepo babies.
38:57 Speaker 02 Absolutely, absolutely nepo babies. So Alexander Monroe, you know, third in line, it's, you know, Alexander Monroe primus, secundus, great anatomists, great teachers, very, very inspiring teachers, apparently. Tertius, not so much.
39:13 Speaker 01 Not so much.
39:14 Speaker 02 Not so much. And apparently he, he used to use his grandfather's notes to lecture from, you know, so he's not even giving the most up to date information. And, you know, Charles Darwin went to his classes and he said, he makes his lectures on anatomy as dull as himself.
39:29 Speaker 01 Great.
39:29 Speaker 02 So they weren't great. And Knox will actually say that it's because of Monroe's terrible teaching that he fails his anatomy exam.
39:39 Speaker 01 I see.
39:39 Speaker 02 First time round. For his reasons, he goes to one of the, the private, these extramural teachers that I was talking about, and he goes to a man called Dr. Barclay. So he's got his anatomy school in Surgeon's Square, right next to Old Surgeon's Hall. And so you can see that he's trying to capture those students as they're, as they're coming out of Surgeon's Hall. And he's a much better teacher and Knox goes to him.
40:04 Speaker 02 Passes exams, goes off, practises at Waterloo, comes back to Edinburgh. And Barclay actually invites him to help him teach in his anatomy school. And then Barclay retires in the mid 1820s and Knox takes over that anatomy school.
40:23 Speaker 01 I see. So it's almost straight away then when he takes over.
40:27 Speaker 02 Absolutely, yeah. And again, it's really interesting because Barclay, he's got a huge anatomy collection, anatomy and pathology collection that he uses to help his teaching. He leaves that to Surgeon's Hall with the condition that they build a purpose-built museum for this. And this is how we get new Surgeon's Hall, where we are today in 1832, for this collection. And the man that oversees this being, this collection being installed in the museum is Robert Knox. He is the first conservator of the museum.
40:57 Speaker 01 Oh my God, he's the first one. I don't know if I was aware of that. Okay. Oh, that's so interesting, particularly when I'm going to go where I'm going to go with this line of questioning next, which is essentially he's your, your centuries old boss in many ways. But what I want to know then is we, we talk about these three men coming together in this transaction. And we have victims, of course, and, and we do really try to highlight those in the documentary. So do recommend that you go and, and you, you, you watch that to get a better idea of the likes of Mary Patterson or, or Daph Jamie that we talked about. And these are people who were, Daph Jamie particularly was, was loved by some of the people in Edinburgh. And, and am I right in thinking that Jamie in particular was recognised on the slab?
41:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
41:42 Speaker 01 And this is someone who-
41:44 Speaker 02 Apparently before he was taken out for dissection. So Knox removes his head and his foot. He had a club foot before he goes out for public dissection. It had been commented on that Jamie had gone missing, you know, that nobody had seen him. And then here he is. So it does seem that Knox is trying to hide the fact that Jamie was there.
42:07 Speaker 01 No, and this brings me to my, to my point. How much guilt do you think, is guilt the right word? How much responsibility do you think does Knox have? How much knowledge, how aware is he? Because it seems to me he must be aware of how these bodies, you know, he's an anatomist. He's very familiar with the, the, the conditions of bodies, of dead bodies. He knows often, probably just by looking at a body, how that body has ended up there. Oh, that's a head injury. I can see how that person died. We're getting bodies turn up from Burke and Hare that they're like, this body's been suffocated again and again. There's marks around the neck. What, but you know.
42:48 Speaker 02 Apparently, well, the, the method they used was called, became known as, as Birkin. And effectively, one of them would sit, sit on the chest while the other one covered the mouth and the nose. So you're not going to have the marks around the neck. And, you know, it was said that you wouldn't be able to tell this had been done until you get into the era of sort of modern forensics.
43:06 Speaker 01 I see.
43:07 Speaker 02 I think you would question how, these were not elderly people usually, you know, you know, Mary Patterson was 18 or 19. So healthy people that suddenly turned up without any signs of a cause of death and very fresh, that, that would seem suspicious to me. But Burke said that Knox knew nothing of the bodies. And obviously it was assistants who were receiving the bodies into the, into Knox's anatomy school. I, I think at one point Knox said that if he had examined the bodies themselves when he came in, that he would have known.
43:41 Speaker 01 Of course.
43:41 Speaker 02 Of cour-, of course. So he must have at least had suspicions.
43:45 Speaker 01 Must have had.
43:45 Speaker 02 He must have, but we don't know. Certainly the people of Edinburgh.
43:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:52 Speaker 02 Thought that he had something to do.
43:53 Speaker 01 I think that's key though, right?
43:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:55 Speaker 01 Because there's this, there's this little quote here that says, Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the boy that buys the beef.
44:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, this was a skipping rhyme in, in 19th century Edinburgh after, after these crimes. But again, this Thomas Hume notebook that I talked about before, you know, where we're getting a first hand account. Thomas Hume talks about how he was there when the mob showed up at Knox's anatomy school and how they had to escort him to his Newington home and basically stand guard. And people were throwing stones and breaking the windows of Knox's house. They thought that he had done something wrong. So, you know, there, there was definitely that guilt in the mind of the public.
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45:32 Speaker 01 One of the things that happens afterwards, then, after, as you say, they've gone to the, and I've stood outside that building. They're very close to where he is at that point, although he skips out of the back window. Essentially, it makes himself very scarce just in time. That's Knox, but Burke does go on to have a trial. He is executed. And then in an irony, although a fitting irony, I suppose, in terms of the legislation at the time, in terms of what he has been supplying a trade for, he is also dissected.
46:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
46:03 Speaker 01 How public is that?
46:04 Speaker 02 That's very public.
46:05 Speaker 01 Okay.
46:06 Speaker 02 The 1752 Murder Act is still in place, so he is actually condemned to be anatomized after he's hanged for murder.
46:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course.
46:15 Speaker 02 But the judge does say that he hopes that his skeleton will be preserved so that people will always remember his crime, which is how his skeleton is still at the University of Edinburgh.
46:26 Speaker 01 Oh, so this is a public.
46:28 Speaker 02 Public execution and then a public dissection. And apparently so many people wanted to see it. People were allowed half hour shifts.
46:36 Speaker 01 Whoa.
46:37 Speaker 02 To get through.
46:38 Speaker 01 And when you're talking about that kind of a dissection, what does that look like? If I, if I was one of those people that went in for half an hour, what am I, what will I see on a slab?
46:48 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, it depends which half hour you get.
46:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:50 Speaker 02 You know, um, usually they would start with the head. So you, you know, you would reflect the skin back and then you would saw the, um, the top of the, the skull off the Calveria. And having worked very closely with that skull, it's, it's not a good cut.
47:08 Speaker 01 Oh.
47:09 Speaker 02 It's not being well done.
47:09 Speaker 01 God, you're reviewing them now.
47:12 Speaker 02 And again, is that reflecting that Monroe wasn't a good anatomist? Or did he get one of his assistants to, we don't know that. But certainly you would have seen the brain would be the first part. Then they usually moved on to the intestines. Then they moved on to the abdominal cavity and the thoracic cavity. So you'd look at the heart and the lungs and the digestive organs. And then maybe you would look at some of the, the limbs possibly. They didn't always go as far as going to the limbs. So we don't know exactly what you'd see. Presumably as this is a show, they would be doing the whole lot.
47:44 Speaker 01 Okay. So say they were doing this for a show.
47:46 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
47:47 Speaker 01 A, do we know how long Burke's one went on for? And if not, i- is there any kind of a guidance that we know how long these things went on for generally?
47:54 Speaker 02 I have to admit, I'm not sure how long they took over Burke, but certainly we have reports like, I mentioned that guy that was hanged for incest before he was the first part of the dissection. They dissected him over seven days, like showing a different, a different system every day. So there was a different lecturer doing each bit. And then at the end, Archibald Pickher and gave the, the sort of summing up.
48:14 Speaker 01 Oh my, seven days.
48:17 Speaker 02 And then the, the rule was that after that, that was when they had to go for, for burial.
48:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, fair enough. Like there's not much left.
48:23 Speaker 02 Not much left at that point.
48:25 Speaker 01 Oh my God. Okay. So Knox has done a runner. Burke is dissected. Hare, in case you don't know, runs essentially gets away. We don't know where he ends up. Like there's probably descendants of William, well, there's maybe descendants.
48:40 Speaker 02 Possibly, yeah.
48:41 Speaker 01 Like, like there's definitely descendants of William Hare living. Like there's some theory that he went to Ireland, back to Ireland. I think that's probably quite a strong one.
48:50 Speaker 02 I, I think that seems, seems quite likely, but a lot of the stories, you know, like one of them, he falls into a lime pit and he gets blinded. You know, another one where he's beaten by a mob. A lot of them end up with him having some form of justice. You know, some, something, something has happened. Absolutely no evidence.
49:09 Speaker 01 If you are living in County Tyrone or another part of the north of Ireland, and you think you might be related to William Hare. Get in touch, [email protected] . We want to, we want to make that DNA link. Right. So as I wait to finish this conversation up, because I could just talk about this forever. As well, you know, we have talked about this a lot over the years. What is the change then? We've, we've hinted at this a couple of times already that we're heading towards the Anatomy Act. Is it a direct result, do you think, of the, the Burke and Heron and Knox happenings? Or is this something that would have happened anyway? And what is the real change that we see coming after the Anatomy Act?
49:45 Speaker 02 Okay, so saying that Burke and Hare are the direct cause of the Anatomy Act is a stretch. A very, very big stretch. There was a lot going on at the time. So at the same time as Burke and Hare were carrying their killings out, we actually have men formulating the Anatomy Act down in London, you know.
50:07 Speaker 01 So it's underway.
50:08 Speaker 02 It's underway. So in 1828, they're getting that together. They, they tried to get that to pass Parliament shortly after. It fails. You know, Parliament aren't interested in this. This was a medical men who are really trying to get a better source of bodies. So they didn't have to rely on body snatchers. And, you know, there were a lot of reasons for that. You know, first of all, they wanted to avoid body snatching and the cost of body snatching. That made studying in Britain much more expensive than it did in Europe. And of course, Napoleonic wars have come to an end. People can go to Paris and get their medical learning cheaper over there than they can over here. So there's financial reasons for it as well. Plus, you know, especially for surgeons trying to break that connection with the criminal corpse.
50:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
50:51 Speaker 02 You know, that's, that's something they really want to do again, to try and raise their prestige somewhat, as well as just, it's an important thing. You know, I can't stress enough how important dissection is to medical research, to medical learning, to medical understanding at this point. This is a necessity.
51:09 Speaker 01 World changing.
51:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. So it is very, very important. It's just really, we just really need to get a better supply of bodies. So they are trying to do that already before William Burke and William Hare and all of that. But as I say, they can't generate the, the political influence to be able to, to get that to pass. Then you have the crimes of William Burke and William Hare. At the same time, you have, you know, those same men that were, were trying to get that original Anatomy Act through, they're rewriting it. They're trying to make it more politically appealing.
51:46 Speaker 02 Removing some of the language that might, might seem to make people feel a bit squeamish, things like that. But of course, the Burke and Hare crimes and then the copycats, you know, we've got the London Burke's as well. They're giving some sort of political impetus to, you know, this thing that they're already trying. And so that really, really helps shift the focus, you know, make people understand that there is a need for a better supply of bodies for medical teaching and for medical research. And so this leads to the 1832 Anatomy Act actually passing Parliament.
52:18 Speaker 01 It is such a long history. And I mean, continues after that. That's not the end of the, the history of anatomy, but just in terms of that period or those periods, that it's fascinating to see how actually much changed. Yes. But the links that you're still seeing back, even to the ancient Greek or in Egypt, the, the dissection that you're seeing there and the criminal classes present the whole way along. And this idea that actually to get rid of those bodies with the Anatomy Act is then legitimizing the, the surgeons as a trade and how in the middle of all of this, respectability, commerce, social class, status, starts to really
52:59 Speaker 01 infiltrate. It's not necessarily, although it is of course, about scientific discovery and about medical discovery. Of course, that's there and it's at the core. And I think that's undeniable, as you were saying earlier. But beneath it all, there's money and finance and commerce and status. And I think that's really interesting. And it's also what allows, that, that commerce side of things allows for the murders of Burke and Hare and the, the body snatching that, that develops across the world, not just in Edinburgh. Because there is money to be made. And when there's money to be made, people will fill those slots, right? Absolutely riveting. I could do 438 episodes on this. Thank you so much for listening to After Dark today. If you've enjoyed this episode, and I know you have, go and leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts,
53:43 Speaker 01 because it helps other people to discover us as well. If you have an idea for a future episode, then you can email us on [email protected] . You can find Kat at, at
53:55 Speaker 01 Tomical Cat on social media.
53:58 Speaker 02 Yes.
53:58 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, go, go.
53:59 Speaker 02 Say that if you want more of this kind of dissection history and you like medical history, Beyond the Knife, the Surgeon's Hole podcast.
54:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
54:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
54:07 Speaker 01 It's really good. It is really, really good. And there's so many different periods covered there as well. It's not just this.
54:13 Speaker 02 It goes from, from this kind of stuff up to things that are actually happening in modern medicine. So, yeah.
54:18 Speaker 01 And the branding is really good, too. I'll say that. I know it's another podcast, but it's true. It's very good. And you can find us on social media, as I said. Go back and listen to Cat's earlier episodes. Go and watch the Burke and Hare documentary right now for free on YouTube. And until next time, happy listening.
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