v. to
murder (a person) in such a way as to produce no incriminating marks,
usually by suffocation, and with the intention of selling the body for
dissection
—Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition
This
grisly eponym comes from the cursed name of William Burke who, along
with his corpse-collecting companion William Hare, became a serial
murderer to generate cadavers for the Edinburgh Medical College. Such
was the state of British medicine in the 1820s.
Contrary
to the twentieth-century film adaptations that focus on the collection
of assorted body parts as an essential element of the horror story, the
original monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
was an entirely new creation of its namesake doctor (also sans the
silly electric tables and sparking apparatus)—perhaps due to the fact
that body snatching would have been no great shock to readers at the
turn of the nineteenth century. At least in the United Kingdom, the
market for fresh corpses in the early 1800s was primarily (and almost
exclusively) medical schools (see also Cooper’s ligaments),
which were allowed to use only cadavers from legal executions. As
capital sentences for trivial offences (e.g., pickpocketing) were
eventually outlawed, demand quickly outpaced supply—and grave robbers
filled the void.
What
was frighteningly commonplace at the time is almost inconceivable
today. Coffins were made of iron and relatives kept watch over fresh
graves to ensure they stayed intact. The unfortunate side effect of
these efforts was that some of the body snatchers—who came to be known,
euphemistically, as resurrectionists—turned to murder to freshen their produce. Enter Burke and Hare.
William
Burke was an Irish immigrant who left his wife and two kids to move to
Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1817 and quickly picked up a mistress named
Helen MacDougal. Ten years later, Burke and MacDougal moved into a
boarding house in the West Port area of Edinburgh owned by another Irish
immigrant named William Hare and his common-law wife, and double-daters
embarked on a corpses-for-cash killing spree that lasted eighteen
months. In a scene straight out of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace,
the plot started out relatively innocently. An elderly tenant of the
boarding house died naturally, and Burke and Hare sold his body to
anatomist Dr. Robert Knox at the nearby medical college. Burke and Hare
quickly discovered that they could receive double payment for
particularly fresh bodies and began using intoxication and suffocation
to produce a posthumous parade of sixteen more pensioners, prostitutes, and poor people that was not discovered until November of 1828.
Burke
and Hare and their partners were all soon arrested, but the ensuing
trial proved to be an absurd affair. Of all the participants in what
came to be known as the West Port murders, Hare was granted immunity for
testifying against Burke, neither his wife nor MacDougal could not be
proven to be complicit, and Dr. Knox was not prosecuted at all. Burke,
on the other hand, was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged on the
28th of January, 1829. Three years later, their notoriety, as well as that of the London Burkers (see bishop), led to Britain’s passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832, which finally curbed body snatching.
To
bring the story full circle, Burke’s body ended up at his adopted
medical school—the Edinburgh Medical College—where it was dissected,
tanned, and set up for display.
