William Burke.
(From a Sketch taken in Court)
Neither such a production as this, nor the mild protest from the College of Surgeons, was likely to put a stop to a practice which was being found useful on the one side and profitable on the other. Dr. Alexander Monro, “primus,” the great anatomist, became Demonstrator of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh, and his fame brought around him a large number of students. These seem to have been making depredations on the churchyards in the city and neighbourhood, and the College of Surgeons again took action, this time by ordering, on the 24th January, 1721, the insertion of a clause in the indenture of apprentices binding them not to engage in the violation of graves. Four years later, however—in April, 1725—the practice had grown to such an extent as to cause popular commotion. The people rose in angry protest against the violation of the sepulchres of their dead, and before the authorities could quell the disturbance the windows of Dr. Monro’s anatomical establishment were destroyed, while the inmates stood in imminent danger of their lives.
Notwithstanding the extreme views the people of Scotland held against the resurrectionists, as the body-snatchers were named, their horrible trade continued to prosper, and it received many recruits. The surgeons, even, gradually dropped into the business; perhaps not themselves engaging in it personally, but at least sanctioning and approving of it by the purchase of the bodies offered them. But besides these, a class of men became resurrectionists as a matter of trade, and no churchyard in the country was safe from their depredations. The law was comparatively powerless, or took refuge under the pretext of the necessity for subjects being procured, but it took no steps to produce a remedy. The people, therefore, took matters into their own hands, and were not slow in punishing any one suspected of body-snatching, as the following story from the Scots’ Magazine for 1742 will show. On the 9th of March of that year the body of a man, Alexander Baxter by name, which had been interred in the West Kirkyard of Edinburgh, was found in a house adjoining the shop of a surgeon named Martin Eccles, in that city. The popular indignation had been raised by the suspicion, amounting almost to certainty, that the churchyards were being desecrated, and it needed very little to cause a tumult. The Portsburgh drum was seized, and beat through the Cowgate. The populace demolished the contents of Eccles’ shop, smashed the windows of the houses of other surgeons, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the authorities were able to quell the riot. Eccles and some of his apprentices were brought before the court charged with the offence of being accessory to the lifting of bodies, but the charge was abandoned for want of proof. Later, on the 18th of the same month, the house of a gardener named Peter Richardson, in Inveresk, was burned by the people on the suspicion that he had some hand in pilfering the village churchyard of its dead; and on the 26th, a chairmaster and carrier were banished the city of Edinburgh for being in possession of a street-chair containing a body, and the chair itself was burned by the public executioner under the order of the magistrates. In the July following, under the sentence of the High Court of Justiciary, John Samuel, a gardener in Grangegateside, was publicly whipped through Edinburgh for having been detected at the Potterrow-port, in the April preceding, selling the corpse of a child which had been buried in Pentland Kirkyard a week before. He was also banished from Scotland for seven years.
In Glasgow, about the same period, a riot of a serious nature occurred. On the 6th of March, 1749, according to the Newcastle Magazine, a disturbance arose in the city on a suspicion in the minds of the citizens that the students in the College had been raising bodies from one of the city graveyards. The windows of the University buildings in the High Street were broken, a large number of people sustained severe injury, and had not the appearance of the military intimidated the mob, the tumult might have assumed much more serious proportions.
But it is curious to notice, in view of the main subject of this work—the history of Burke and Hare—that the crimes of which these men were guilty had a prototype in one committed in Edinburgh between seventy and eighty years before they entered upon their murdering career. In 1752, two women, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, were executed for the murder of a boy of eight or nine years of age. They would appear to have been nurses, and they promised to some doctors’ apprentices that they would supply them with a subject, proposing to do so by the abstraction of a body from a coffin, when they were sitting at the death-watch, for it was then the custom—and still is, in some parts of the country—never to leave a corpse in a room alone. They were either unsuccessful in accomplishing this, or were anxious speedily to redeem their promise and obtain their reward, for they took even more reprehensible means to obtain a body. They met the boy and his mother in the street, and invited the woman into a neighbouring house to drink with them. She consented, and while she was sipping her liquor one of them went out to look for the boy. He was discovered leaning over a window, and the woman carried him into her own house, where she suffocated him among the bed-clothes. The mother afterwards searched for her son, but could not find him. Meantime, Torrence and Waldie took the corpse to the surgeon’s rooms, where they were offered two shillings for it, the one who had carried it receiving sixpence additional. They demurred at the lowness of the price, but the students would only increase it by tenpence, which was given them for a “dram.” The facts of the case at length came to light, and the women suffered on the scaffold for their barbarous crime.
CHAPTER II.
Tales of the Resurrectionists—The Students at Work.
What has been related in the preceding chapter are some of the early escapades of the resurrectionists. Throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, these worthies, to call them by a mild name, were the scourge of Scotland, and notwithstanding the utmost vigilance of the people graves were ransacked of their contents and bodies sold to the doctors. But it was in the first three decades of the present century that the horrible trade was in its most flourishing condition. Many tales of the adventures of resurrectionists are told—some of them serious as the subject warrants, others of them amusing in spite of the subject. In this chapter there has been gathered together a number of anecdotes which will illustrate the part the students themselves took in the movement.