Burke And Hare Quotes

Unlike most biographers it is here I leave Messrs. Burke and Hare, at the peak of their glory. Why destroy such an artistic effect by requiring them to languish along to the end of their lives, revealing their defects and their deceptions? We need only remember them, mask in hand, walking abroad on foggy nights. For their end was sordid like so many others. One of them, it appears, was hanged and Dr. Knox was forced to quit Edinburgh. Mr. Burke left no other works.

In fact, the humor was extraordinary. The narrator, Thomas Hyland, was played absolutely deadpan by Lou Merrill. Over the sound of rainfall came his droll voice. “That’s the way it sounded when it rained, because the room was just below gutter level, and the rainwater rushed by the room’s only window, and many lodgers caught cold in this room. They were lucky. Many other lodgers wound up on dissecting tables. They were murdered, by Mr. Burke, who smothered, and by Mr. Hare, who held. So tonight, my report to you, If a Body Needs a Body, Just Call Burke and Hare.” Other stories had similar titles: John Hayes, His Head, and How They Were Parted; The Younger Brothers—Why Some of Them Grew No Older; and Good Evening, My Name Is Jack the Ripper.

The fresher the corpse, the better the pay. This led to burking—the murderous practice of clapping a pitch plaster over a victim’s nose and mouth, ensuring a speedy death that left few or no signs of the violence responsible. It also produced the freshest corpse possible. Burking was named for William Burke, an Irish ne’er-do-well who, between 1827 and 1828, with his accomplice William Hare, murdered 16 people in Scotland and sold their bodies to an esteemed Edinburgh anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. The doctor escaped prosecution, Hare turned King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged for the crimes in 1829. In a pitiless twist of lex talionis, Burke’s body was then dissected at the University of Edinburgh, and his skin was made into pocket-books and other macabre trophies. His skeleton still hangs in the college’s medical school today. Horrors

Then, in the 1400s, medical education began including dissection of human corpses in a new, realistic approach to anatomy. But even then, students were not allowed hands-on participation. Typically, the teacher sat and lectured while a barber did the cutting and students observed. Not for several hundred years thereafter were students themselves permitted to do dissections. But as the practice spread, it became harder to obtain bodies for teaching. Enter the grave robbers, or resurrectionists as they were called, who by the eighteenth century turned a good profit supplying bodies for physicians to study. They robbed the graves of the poor and unclaimed, those who were least likely to be missed. Some took their practice a bit far, as witness the notorious Burke and Hare, who committed several murders to procure corpses for sale. So, absent those who took the career too seriously, grave robbers may actually have contributed to medical understanding.

The word criminal is more an emotional than legal term. Go to any U.S. post office and view the faces on the wanted posters. Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photographs often taken in late-night booking rooms—unshaved, pig snouted, rodent eyed, hare lipped, reassuring us that human evil is always recognizable and that consequently we will never be its victim. But