Who were the Resurrectionists

William Burke

A.� A band of men in the 18th and 19th centuries who dug up bodies and sold them to surgeons.

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Q.��Why
A.� Surgeons and medical students needed corpses both to practise operations and to study how the body is made up. Bodies were hard to come by. People did not leave their bodies 'to medical science' as is sometimes the case now. It was believed that you wouldn't get to heaven without all your bodily bits.

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Q.��There weren't any bodies to practise upon
A.� Yes - but very few.�Surgeons were allowed to cut up the bodies of executed felons - but this wasn't a big enough supply for the big medical schools centred in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London.

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Q.��Executed felons
A.� Yes - hanged prisoners. James IV of Scotland originally gave permission for the bodies of�specific�executed criminals to be�dissected. In England, Henry VIII granted the bodies of four hanged felons a year. Charles II later increased this to six.

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Q.��Part of the punishment
A.� Yes - a fate worse than death for the worst offenders. Dissections performed on felons were public: the hangman delivered the corpse to surgeons at the scaffold after execution and the body, after dissection, was put on public display. This replaced the earlier hanging drawing and quartering, in which the four quarters were exhibited on spikes in various parts of the city.

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Q.��So there was good money to be made from the supply of bodies
A.� Fantastic amounts. In the case of Burke and Hare, they sold their first body for �7 10s - a huge sum in the early 1800s. Resurrectionists - so called because they helped bodies rise from the grave - had to move quickly. These men worked in gangs and surreptitiously followed funerals. That night, they would remove the corpse and replace the freshly dug earth.

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Q.��Speed was of the essence
A.� Yes - leave it too long and the body would decompose, making it worthless.

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William Hare

Q.��And this is what Burke and Hare did
A.� No - their infamy came from another practice. William Hare kept the Log's lodging house, in Tanner's Close, Edinburgh. William Burke was staying there. On 29 November, 1827, an old man died at the house, and, instead of having the corpse buried, Burke and Hare sold it to surgeon Robert Knox for �7 10s.

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Q.��So they looked for more corpses
A.� That was the idea - but there weren't any. So they made corpses. In the next year they enticed at least 15 travellers into the lodging house, got them drunk and murdered them.

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Q.� How
A.� By smothering: it left no trace of violence. They sold the bodies to Knox - who asked no questions.

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Q.���Their downfall
A.� It came when a lodger spotted the hidden body of a woman and told the police. Evidence was hard to come by and police did a deal with Hare to turn king's evidence against his partner in crime. He was set free and Burke was hanged in front of a mob of about 40,000.

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Q.���And that was an end of the matter
A.� Hare was never seen again. Knox was never prosecuted, although he received much criticism. In 1832 the Anatomy Act was introduced - and ended the resurrectionists' trade. It permitted the bodies of those who had died in prison, workhouse and hospital, that were not claimed by relatives, to be used for anatomy purposes. Executors and keepers of workhouses were allowed to assign bodies of which they had legal possession for anatomical dissection.

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Q.��And Burke's body
A.� Dissected - and put on public display.
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By Steve Cunningham

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