BrainStuff Classics: Why Did People Once Rob Graves for Science?

a few murders. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And of all the possible get rich quick schemes you could involve yourself in, I'm betting you would stop short of serial killing. Yes, even if it meant you'd be aiding the advancement of science. But that's not the case for everybody. Take William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants who ran a boarding house in Edinburgh, Scotland, and killed at least fifteen people during a ten month period across eighteen

twenty seven and eighteen twenty eight. And we're not trying to aggrandize serial murders here, but they made a small fortune doing it. Burke and Hare had no criminal records before they got into the murdering business. Burke was a cobbler and hair a laborer who owned a lodging house with his wife. When a boarder who owed the Hares a good deal of background died one day in November

eighteen twenty seven, Hare complained to his friend Burke. The two decided that the best way to recoup Hare's financial loss was to sell the man's corpse to an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh. Anatomy research was a booming business in Edinburgh in the early eighteen hundreds, and though many human dissections were conducted every day in the city,

human remains were hard to come by. A grave robbing was frowned upon, but anatomists were only technically allowed to study the bodies of deceased prisoners, suicide victims, orphans and abandoned children. So Edinburgh's underbelly was crawling with body snatchers. Since the demand was high for gadavers and the supply relatively low, many anatomists used the services of so called

resurrection men to fill their human corpse requirements. Resurrection men were folks who made a business of body snatching or clandestinely removing a body from a burial site. There was no law against digging up a dead body and selling it since the dead didn't officially belong to anyone. Oh what an innocent time, but the general public was perhaps understandably dismayed by this practice, in addition to the living's

emotional attachment to loved ones remains. At the time, many Christians were concerned that the dissection of bodies after death would prevent the deceased from rising during the final judgment. However, anatomists desperate for cadavers were willing to pay good money for bodies, sometimes in terrible condition, without asking questions about where those bodies came from. A doctor and anatomist named Robert Knox was a popular lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.

When Burke and Hare came to him with that first cadaver from the boarding house, Knox paid them seven pounds ten for the body. In today's money, that's almost seven hundred and fifty pounds or over nine huns durding and fifty American dollars, and was almost double with the dead man owed hair in back rent. The body was pretty fresh, which pleased Knox, and he was even more pleased a few months later with the body of Burke and Hare's first murder victim. She was a lodger who fell ill

with fever in the boarding house. Perhaps worried that her illness would mean bad business for the boarding house, or perhaps looking to make a quick buck, the two men suffocated her. Knox paid them ten pounds that's thirteen dollars for that cadaver, worth over one thousand pounds or thirteen hundred dollars today. Over the course of the next year, Knox bought a total of sixteen bodies from the Pear,

mostly women. Most of their victims were killed, likely with the knowledge of the murderer's wives, by applying them with whiskey and then suffocating them. Burke and Hare preyed on people who were poor and alone or disabled. During the eventual trial, the three victims named in the indictment were a mentally disabled young man, a young woman reputed to be a prostitute, and their final victim, the one who got them caught, a middle aged irishwoman named Margaret Doherty.

Reportedly in Edinburgh's searching for her misas son, Burke and Hare were discovered by a couple staying in Hare's boarding house. They saw the two men drinking with the woman in the evening, and the next morning she had disappeared. They found her body packed in straw under a bed, ready to be taken to Knox. After the couple alerted the police, the authorities rated Knox's cadavers and found the woman's body among them. In the trial, Hare testified against Burke, and

he and his wife were released. Burke's wife was also released, but Burke was executed. Knox was exonerated of all charges because Burke testified that Knox didn't know about the providence of the bodies he was buying. The case was extremely high profile, and along with other murder cases, including copycat crimes, it led to the passing of the Anatomy Act of eighteen thirty two. This controversial legislation opened up anatomist's options.

Any donated body could not be dissected, but with dissections still considered a sort of desecration, the only people who considered such a donation tended to be those in poverty. The Act therefore shifted dissection from being a sort of of secondary punishment for criminals after execution to being a sort of punishment for not having the family or funds to provide for yourself after death and led to riots

at the Cambridge Medical School. Though attitudes and laws have changed since then, the issue of the ownership transfer and treatment of the dead is definitely still under discussion. Today's episode is based on the article Burke and Hair Murderers for Money and Science on how Stuffworks dot com, written by Jesslyn Shields. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced

by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.