Page 16 - COBH EDITION 15th SEPTEMBER DIGITAL VERSION

‘Corpse and Robbers’ - Trevor Laffan

You probably think you know the neighbours pretty
well. You pop round for the odd cup of coffee and they
make you feel very comfortable, and you do the same
for them when the shoe is on the other foot. And that’s
how it should be.
Be careful though, because things might not always
be what they seem. Especially if those living next door
have a thing about shovels and like working in the
dark. In that case it might be worth having a closer
look at their nocturnal habits.
Ben Johnson wrote a story about two charming characters called William Burke and
William Hare. They were originally from Northern Ireland but they moved to Scot-
land separately, to find work in the 1800’s. I don’t know if they knew each other
while they were living in Ireland but they ended up living on the same street in
Edinburgh and soon became friends.
The two men were heavy drinkers and their lives were chaotic. They earned their
living as resurrectionists which was a very fancy title to describe guys who basically
worked as grave robbers. Their job was to exhume recently buried bodies and bring
them to various medical schools, where they would be dissected and studied by stu-
dents of anatomy. They were paid for each corpse they delivered.
Strictly speaking, medical and anatomical schools were the only institutions that
were legally allowed to dissect bodies, or cadavers, and they could only operate on
the bodies of criminals who died having been executed.

In the 1600’s and 1700’s, execution was commonly used to dispose of criminals so
there were plenty of bodies. As the years went by though, executions became less
popular and that created a problem for Burke and Hare.
Medical schools paid well for cadavers so there was good money to be made. To
compensate for the lack of earnings, they started robbing bodies from the graves of
ordinary citizens, but they ran into difficulties here too.

Because grave robbing was becoming so common, relatives took it in turn to stand
watch over the recently dug graves of their dearly departed, especially for the first
few days after the burial. The early days after death were critical because medical
schools wouldn’t accept bodies that were decomposing.

Burke and Hare were far from finished though. They took things to a new level
when they ran short of bodies by creating their own supply line. They started killing
people with the sole intention of providing remains for medical research to make a
profit.
By this time, Hare was living with a widow and they were running a boarding house.
In 1827 one of Hare’s tenants, an elderly army pensioner, died of natural causes