Post #120950 by Gigantalope on Thu, Oct 21, 2004 7:10 PM

Here's my fave...best told over a mug of "Old Rasputain"

Please excuse my spelling and it's ramble.

The Neo Classical Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh founded in 1505 has in it's dark recesses a museum, which is not for the weak of stomach. It's full of disturbing antique surgical devices, frightening dentistry equipment, jars of formaldehyde with specimens of almost every existing curiosity that the mind could endure. Most tours are never finished, as visitors allowed in get partway through and leave with silent reproach.

The star of the exhibit strangely is a small pocketbook. It is not calf hide or vellum it appears to be, but the flayed skin of a mass murderer named William Bourke.

Scotland has four ancient universities from whom many of the world's most gifted men have come from. In the 1720's Scotland was enjoying a Renascence, and Scottish sciences were swept to the forefront of worldwide renown. Robert Whyte, discoverer of the nervous system, Joseph Black discoverer of Carbon Dioxide, James Simpson, inventor of anesthetics, Joseph Lister, inventor of Antiseptics, Flemming inventor of Penicillin…all products of this establishment.

This was in part credited to the emphasis of hands on teaching. With Knowledge came fame and wealth, During the last quarter of the 18th c and beginning of the 19thc. Anatomists were like movie stars, with all the rivalry and self-importance which that would imply. The pressure to produce new research and bring prestige and earnings to attract new pupils became intense. Amusingly, this depended on certain raw materials which came into increasingly short supply…human tissue for dissection.

Officially sanctioned sources of fresh specimens were executions, and deceased vagrants simply could not keep up with demand. We all know when supplies dwindle, prices escalate. And over time the worlds most distinguished medical men became steadily less scrupulous about the origins the new cadavers. It seems at first that they were imported from Ireland. Pickled in cheap whisky, but that got expensive, and unreliable. As sources nearer to Edinburgh began to "develop" strange things started happening in the southern part of Edinburgh after dark. Soon there became quite a bit of shifty traffic late at night bumping around the university with covered wagons, loading and unloading at back doors. The new tradesman was called "Resurrectionist" or in more commonly, "Body Snatcher"

Bodies buried by grieving families in the morning were dug up and spirited away usually that night. It was very lucrative work; fresh corpses could fetch about what a months rent would cost. This of course led to a battle of wills in the cities cemeteries between the bereaved, and the agents of the Medical Profession. Families would hire thugs to guard graves. Burial grounds built watchtowers to guard them. Then came the invention of "the body safe, a coffin shaped iron box which took 6 men to lift. These were placed over a grave for a period of time, which allowed the body to decay past being valuable.

William Bourke, an Irishman who was a discharged soldier from the Army at Waterloo came to Edinburgh, along with thousands of Irish to work on the digging of the Union Canal. When the canal was finished in 1822 events took a strange turn for Bourke. He met up with a fellow Irishman William Hare, who resided at the same slum house. And at some point an elderly lodger at the flophouse they resided in, died. When the coffin arrived at their house, Burke and hare filled it with bark, then loaded up the corpse and paid the University a visit.

A Dr. Robert Knox paid for the cadaver, and the two men were told in no uncertain terms that more would gladly be received. Knox did not have long to wait. It seems what happens next was when someone would take ill at the boarding house, Burke and Hare would expedite the process by the use of a "Heavy Pillow". This went on for quite a while, nobody is certain how many people were sold to the Knox once Burke and Hare went from wholesale to manufacture. Soon Burke and Hare began to seek out and prey upon the city's copious poor population, usually fellow Hiberian laborers.

At some point some of the University staff started recognizing the cadavers, in one case, a rather popular prostitute showed up in the sacred halls of medical learning. And had to be wheeled out before the students who would have also recognized her would have started to ask questions.

Eventually Burke and Hare got so sloppy with their business, that they went so far as to have a large well attended Halloween party, and Burke murdered a woman named Mary Docherty in full view of the other guests. By the tome the Authorities arrived, the corpse was gone but was swiftly traced to Dr Knox's dissecting rooms.

Burkes trial was opened on Christmas Eve 1828 and by Boxing day he was condemned. On January 28th at Edinburgh's Lawn market, Burke was executed in front of and angry mob who bayed for him to be smothered and not hung. (To smother is still called to be "burked") His body according to tradition was sent to the medical school for dissection and the skeleton hangs there still.

For reasons never given the Dean of the University ordered Burke to be skinned, and later a lively competition ensued for artifacts covered in his cured epidermis…including the pocket book lovingly preserved by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. This odd tale is said to be the basis for many stories of fiction written later.

Ironically, the Burke and Hare case make the same point with history that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein makes with fiction; namely, that the noble spirit of scientific inquiry if taken to excess has the capacity to create great evil. This lesson surly remains cogent in the age of genetic engineering as it did in the frontier days of anatomical surgery.