Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and this is another classic episode of
Speaker 1: the podcast. This one goes into one of my favorite
Speaker 1: super morbid, very weird pieces of science history, that time
Speaker 1: when the easiest way to obtain research cadavers was by
Speaker 1: grave robbery, which humans, being entrepreneurial, led to at least
Speaker 1: a few murders. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And
Speaker 1: of all the possible get rich quick schemes you could
Speaker 1: involve yourself in, I'm betting you would stop short of
Speaker 1: serial killing. Yes, even if it meant you'd be aiding
Speaker 1: the advancement of science. But that's not the case for everybody.
Speaker 1: Take William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants who
Speaker 1: ran a boarding house in Edinburgh, Scotland, and killed at
Speaker 1: least fifteen people during a ten month period across eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven and eighteen twenty eight. And we're not trying
Speaker 1: to aggrandize serial murders here, but they made a small
Speaker 1: fortune doing it. Burke and Hare had no criminal records
Speaker 1: before they got into the murdering business. Burke was a
Speaker 1: cobbler and hair a laborer who owned a lodging house
Speaker 1: with his wife. When a boarder who owed the Hares
Speaker 1: a good deal of background died one day in November
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty seven, Hare complained to his friend Burke. The
Speaker 1: two decided that the best way to recoup Hare's financial
Speaker 1: loss was to sell the man's corpse to an anatomy
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Edinburgh. Anatomy research was a
Speaker 1: booming business in Edinburgh in the early eighteen hundreds, and
Speaker 1: though many human dissections were conducted every day in the city,
Speaker 1: human remains were hard to come by. A grave robbing
Speaker 1: was frowned upon, but anatomists were only technically allowed to
Speaker 1: study the bodies of deceased prisoners, suicide victims, orphans and
Speaker 1: abandoned children. So Edinburgh's underbelly was crawling with body snatchers.
Speaker 1: Since the demand was high for gadavers and the supply
Speaker 1: relatively low, many anatomists used the services of so called
Speaker 1: resurrection men to fill their human corpse requirements. Resurrection men
Speaker 1: were folks who made a business of body snatching or
Speaker 1: clandestinely removing a body from a burial site. There was
Speaker 1: no law against digging up a dead body and selling
Speaker 1: it since the dead didn't officially belong to anyone. Oh
Speaker 1: what an innocent time, but the general public was perhaps
Speaker 1: understandably dismayed by this practice, in addition to the living's
Speaker 1: emotional attachment to loved ones remains. At the time, many
Speaker 1: Christians were concerned that the dissection of bodies after death
Speaker 1: would prevent the deceased from rising during the final judgment. However,
Speaker 1: anatomists desperate for cadavers were willing to pay good money
Speaker 1: for bodies, sometimes in terrible condition, without asking questions about
Speaker 1: where those bodies came from. A doctor and anatomist named
Speaker 1: Robert Knox was a popular lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Speaker 1: When Burke and Hare came to him with that first
Speaker 1: cadaver from the boarding house, Knox paid them seven pounds
Speaker 1: ten for the body. In today's money, that's almost seven
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pounds or over nine huns durding and
Speaker 1: fifty American dollars, and was almost double with the dead
Speaker 1: man owed hair in back rent. The body was pretty fresh,
Speaker 1: which pleased Knox, and he was even more pleased a
Speaker 1: few months later with the body of Burke and Hare's
Speaker 1: first murder victim. She was a lodger who fell ill
Speaker 1: with fever in the boarding house. Perhaps worried that her
Speaker 1: illness would mean bad business for the boarding house, or
Speaker 1: perhaps looking to make a quick buck, the two men
Speaker 1: suffocated her. Knox paid them ten pounds that's thirteen dollars
Speaker 1: for that cadaver, worth over one thousand pounds or thirteen
Speaker 1: hundred dollars today. Over the course of the next year,
Speaker 1: Knox bought a total of sixteen bodies from the Pear,
Speaker 1: mostly women. Most of their victims were killed, likely with
Speaker 1: the knowledge of the murderer's wives, by applying them with
Speaker 1: whiskey and then suffocating them. Burke and Hare preyed on
Speaker 1: people who were poor and alone or disabled. During the
Speaker 1: eventual trial, the three victims named in the indictment were
Speaker 1: a mentally disabled young man, a young woman reputed to
Speaker 1: be a prostitute, and their final victim, the one who
Speaker 1: got them caught, a middle aged irishwoman named Margaret Doherty.
Speaker 1: Reportedly in Edinburgh's searching for her misas son, Burke and
Speaker 1: Hare were discovered by a couple staying in Hare's boarding house.
Speaker 1: They saw the two men drinking with the woman in
Speaker 1: the evening, and the next morning she had disappeared. They
Speaker 1: found her body packed in straw under a bed, ready
Speaker 1: to be taken to Knox. After the couple alerted the police,
Speaker 1: the authorities rated Knox's cadavers and found the woman's body
Speaker 1: among them. In the trial, Hare testified against Burke, and
Speaker 1: he and his wife were released. Burke's wife was also released,
Speaker 1: but Burke was executed. Knox was exonerated of all charges
Speaker 1: because Burke testified that Knox didn't know about the providence
Speaker 1: of the bodies he was buying. The case was extremely
Speaker 1: high profile, and along with other murder cases, including copycat crimes,
Speaker 1: it led to the passing of the Anatomy Act of
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty two. This controversial legislation opened up anatomist's options.
Speaker 1: Any donated body could not be dissected, but with dissections
Speaker 1: still considered a sort of desecration, the only people who
Speaker 1: considered such a donation tended to be those in poverty.
Speaker 1: The Act therefore shifted dissection from being a sort of
Speaker 1: of secondary punishment for criminals after execution to being a
Speaker 1: sort of punishment for not having the family or funds
Speaker 1: to provide for yourself after death and led to riots
Speaker 1: at the Cambridge Medical School. Though attitudes and laws have
Speaker 1: changed since then, the issue of the ownership transfer and
Speaker 1: treatment of the dead is definitely still under discussion. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article Burke and Hair Murderers
Speaker 1: for Money and Science on how Stuffworks dot com, written
Speaker 1: by Jesslyn Shields. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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