BrainStuff Classics: Why Did People Once Rob Graves for Science?

In the United Kingdom in the 1800s, anatomists wanted to study real bodies, but laws and cultural stigma made bodies hard to come by. Learn how the shocking Burke & Hare murder trials changed that in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/burke-and-hare-murderers-for-moneyand-science.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and this is another classic episode of
the podcast. This one goes into one of my favorite
super morbid, very weird pieces of science history, that time
when the easiest way to obtain research cadavers was by

(00:24):
grave robbery, which humans, being entrepreneurial, led to at least
a few murders. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And
of all the possible get rich quick schemes you could
involve yourself in, I'm betting you would stop short of
serial killing. Yes, even if it meant you'd be aiding
the advancement of science. But that's not the case for everybody.

(00:47):
Take William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants who
ran a boarding house in Edinburgh, Scotland, and killed at
least fifteen people during a ten month period across eighteen
twenty seven and eighteen twenty eight. And we're not trying
to aggrandize serial murders here, but they made a small
fortune doing it. Burke and Hare had no criminal records
before they got into the murdering business. Burke was a

(01:10):
cobbler and hair a laborer who owned a lodging house
with his wife. When a boarder who owed the Hares
a good deal of background died one day in November
eighteen twenty seven, Hare complained to his friend Burke. The
two decided that the best way to recoup Hare's financial
loss was to sell the man's corpse to an anatomy
professor at the University of Edinburgh. Anatomy research was a

(01:30):
booming business in Edinburgh in the early eighteen hundreds, and
though many human dissections were conducted every day in the city,
human remains were hard to come by. A grave robbing
was frowned upon, but anatomists were only technically allowed to
study the bodies of deceased prisoners, suicide victims, orphans and
abandoned children. So Edinburgh's underbelly was crawling with body snatchers.

(01:52):
Since the demand was high for gadavers and the supply
relatively low, many anatomists used the services of so called
resurrection men to fill their human corpse requirements. Resurrection men
were folks who made a business of body snatching or
clandestinely removing a body from a burial site. There was
no law against digging up a dead body and selling
it since the dead didn't officially belong to anyone. Oh

(02:15):
what an innocent time, but the general public was perhaps
understandably dismayed by this practice, in addition to the living's
emotional attachment to loved ones remains. At the time, many
Christians were concerned that the dissection of bodies after death
would prevent the deceased from rising during the final judgment. However,
anatomists desperate for cadavers were willing to pay good money

(02:37):
for bodies, sometimes in terrible condition, without asking questions about
where those bodies came from. A doctor and anatomist named
Robert Knox was a popular lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
When Burke and Hare came to him with that first
cadaver from the boarding house, Knox paid them seven pounds
ten for the body. In today's money, that's almost seven

(02:58):
hundred and fifty pounds or over nine huns durding and
fifty American dollars, and was almost double with the dead
man owed hair in back rent. The body was pretty fresh,
which pleased Knox, and he was even more pleased a
few months later with the body of Burke and Hare's
first murder victim. She was a lodger who fell ill
with fever in the boarding house. Perhaps worried that her
illness would mean bad business for the boarding house, or

(03:19):
perhaps looking to make a quick buck, the two men
suffocated her. Knox paid them ten pounds that's thirteen dollars
for that cadaver, worth over one thousand pounds or thirteen
hundred dollars today. Over the course of the next year,
Knox bought a total of sixteen bodies from the Pear,
mostly women. Most of their victims were killed, likely with
the knowledge of the murderer's wives, by applying them with

(03:40):
whiskey and then suffocating them. Burke and Hare preyed on
people who were poor and alone or disabled. During the
eventual trial, the three victims named in the indictment were
a mentally disabled young man, a young woman reputed to
be a prostitute, and their final victim, the one who
got them caught, a middle aged irishwoman named Margaret Doherty.
Reportedly in Edinburgh's searching for her misas son, Burke and

(04:01):
Hare were discovered by a couple staying in Hare's boarding house.
They saw the two men drinking with the woman in
the evening, and the next morning she had disappeared. They
found her body packed in straw under a bed, ready
to be taken to Knox. After the couple alerted the police,
the authorities rated Knox's cadavers and found the woman's body
among them. In the trial, Hare testified against Burke, and

(04:22):
he and his wife were released. Burke's wife was also released,
but Burke was executed. Knox was exonerated of all charges
because Burke testified that Knox didn't know about the providence
of the bodies he was buying. The case was extremely
high profile, and along with other murder cases, including copycat crimes,
it led to the passing of the Anatomy Act of
eighteen thirty two. This controversial legislation opened up anatomist's options.

(04:47):
Any donated body could not be dissected, but with dissections
still considered a sort of desecration, the only people who
considered such a donation tended to be those in poverty.
The Act therefore shifted dissection from being a sort of
of secondary punishment for criminals after execution to being a
sort of punishment for not having the family or funds
to provide for yourself after death and led to riots

(05:08):
at the Cambridge Medical School. Though attitudes and laws have
changed since then, the issue of the ownership transfer and
treatment of the dead is definitely still under discussion. Today's
episode is based on the article Burke and Hair Murderers
for Money and Science on how Stuffworks dot com, written

(05:28):
by Jesslyn Shields. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio
in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced
by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.