Burke and Hare
Burke and Hare are probably the most infamous partnership in the long history of Edinburgh. They are generally known as grave robbers, however the reality is more likely to have been that they killed victims themselves. Either way there is no doubt that they were illicit traders in human corpses for medical research and training.
Medical research was a rapidly growing field in the early 19th century, especially the field of anatomy. Doctors, researchers and students needed a constant supply of human bodies on which to operate. The Scottish laws of the time made these difficult to come by so many of the less respectable physicians turned to the so-called resurrectionists - grave robbers.
Fear of being removed from one's final resting place was justifiably common at the time. An observant visitor to Edinburgh might notice that some of the graves in the city's churchyards have large iron "cages" placed over them. These were intended to protect the grave against desecration. Some churchyards also have lookout towers in them. Guards were employed by the relatives of the dead to keep a watch on their graves.
Burke and Hare were immigrants from Ireland who came over as labourers. They learned of the market for human remains and realised that it was a quick way to make money. Rather than go to the effort of digging up corpses, Burke and Hare decided to "cut out the middle man" and simply kill people themselves. For two years from 1827 they regularly set upon and murdered Edinburgh citizens, mainly vagrants about whom nobody would care. The corpses were then sold to the infamous Doctor Knox, a professor of anatomy at Edinburgh University who gave the city's resurrectionists much of their work.
Burke and Hare eventually pushed their luck too far when they killed Mary Docherty. An investigation discovered her body in the possession of Knox and the trail led back to Burke and Hare. Hare agreed to testify against Burke in exchange for his own life and Burke was hanged in 1829. Doctor Knox somehow escaped trial - as a professor at the university he presumably had influential friends.
Burke's body ended up being used for research at Edinburgh medical school. Some of the students were said to have taken slivers of flesh from his body and sold them at high prices to ghoulish souvenir hunters. A pocketbook said to have been be bound in Burke's skin is, at the time of writing, on display at the Edinburgh Surgeons' Hall Museum.
