The History of Burke and Hare, and of the Resurrectionist Times: A Fragment from the Criminal Annals of Scotland
1884
The History of Burke and Hare, and of the Resurrectionist Times: A Fragment from the Criminal Annals of Scotland
1884
They called them resurrectionists: men who dug up fresh corpses and sold them to Edinburgh's medical schools. But William Burke and William Hare discovered something more profitable than grave-robbing. In 1827-1828, they murdered at least sixteen people, often tenants in their own lodging house, and delivered the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox, the city's most prominent anatomist. The scheme unraveled when a servant discovered one of their victims, and the resulting trial captivated Scotland. Burke was hanged and anatomized in turn; his skeleton still hangs in Edinburgh's medical museum, his skin bound into wallets sold as souvenirs. Mac Gregor's 1884 account situates this infamous partnership within the larger resurrectionist movement, tracing how medical science's desperate need for cadavers and the law's refusal to provide them created a marketplace in human flesh, and how one pair of murderers exposed the grim bargain at the heart of anatomical progress.
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Gregor, George Mac. The History of Burke and Hare, and of the Resurrectionist Times: A Fragment from the Criminal Annals of Scotland. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-history-of-burke-and-hare-and-of-the-resurrectionist-times-a-fragment-from-t-6bc43102-d7ee-4ba7-ae90-aba4b7b0b870.Gregor, G. M. (1884). The History of Burke and Hare, and of the Resurrectionist Times: A Fragment from the Criminal Annals of Scotland. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-history-of-burke-and-hare-and-of-the-resurrectionist-times-a-fragment-from-t-6bc43102-d7ee-4ba7-ae90-aba4b7b0b870Gregor, George Mac. The History of Burke and Hare, and of the Resurrectionist Times: A Fragment from the Criminal Annals of Scotland. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-history-of-burke-and-hare-and-of-the-resurrectionist-times-a-fragment-from-t-6bc43102-d7ee-4ba7-ae90-aba4b7b0b870.
