Burke and Hare: the true story of the bodies that fed Edinburgh's medicine

A city that needed bodies

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh's anatomy classes were packed: Dr Robert Knox's alone had more than four hundred students. And you can't teach anatomy without bodies.

The town had been wrestling with that for centuries. In 1505 the council granted the guild of surgeons and barbers one condemned man a year, after death, to study anatomy. The same document, as it happens, gave them the sole right to make and sell aquavite in the burgh. From 1752 a British law went further: the bodies of executed murderers were to be handed to the surgeons, as an extra punishment and a "peculiar mark of infamy".

It was never enough. So graveyards were frightening at night, and not because of ghosts. In 1742, when the body of someone buried in the West Kirk's graveyard turned up near a surgeon's shop, a crowd wrecked the shop. Families kept watch over their dead, and in St Cuthbert's kirkyard there's still a watchtower dated 1827.

Christmas 1827: a coffin full of bark

William Burke and William Hare were Irish labourers who'd worked on the Union Canal. They lived in Portsburgh, just outside the old West Port gate, where Hare let out seven beds to lodgers.

Around Christmas 1827 one of the lodgers died: a sick pensioner called Donald, who owed Hare four pounds. The body went into its coffin, but before the burial they prised the lid open with a chisel, took him out and filled the coffin with tanner's bark. That same afternoon, in the university quadrangle, a young man who looked like a student pointed them to No. 10 Surgeons' Square: Knox's school. The doctor looked the body over, paid seven pounds ten shillings and showed no interest in how they'd come by it. His assistants made it clear they'd be welcome back whenever they had another.

That was the only "stolen" body in the whole affair. And the only one they didn't kill.

Sixteen people

Next, they set about making the goods themselves. According to Burke's confession, they murdered sixteen people. First they got them drunk; then, in Hare's house or in Burke's room, they suffocated them.

Burke didn't even know all their names. Some we do know: Abigail Simpson, from Gilmerton, who sold salt and scouring stone and was the mother of a daughter; Mary Paterson; and James Wilson, who was just eighteen. According to a 1994 study, twelve of the seventeen bodies they sold were women's. They were poor, elderly, ill or passing through, and several, the same study says, had no family to miss them.

The straw and ten pounds a week

They were found out by a couple of lodgers. At the end of October 1828, James and Ann Gray were staying a few days at Burke's. On the 31st Burke came home with a woman he'd met that morning, Margery Campbell, and that night he paid for the Grays to sleep elsewhere. Next morning Ann was looking for her son's stocking in the straw on the floor, and Burke kept steering her away from it. As soon as she was alone, she looked. Under the straw was the body.

Helen M'Dougal, Burke's partner, tried to buy their silence: keeping quiet, she told James, "might be worth ten pounds a-week". Ann later told the court she would not take money "got for dead people". James went to the police. By then the body had left the house in a tea chest. The police found it the next day at Knox's premises.

The deal, the gallows and the dissecting table

Hare saved his own neck by giving evidence against Burke, as did his wife, and the trial was confined to the murder of Margery Campbell. The case against Helen M'Dougal was found "not proven", and she walked free. Burke was sentenced to hang, and to something more: his body was to be handed to the professor of anatomy, Alexander Monro, to be publicly dissected.

He was hanged on 28 January 1829 in the Lawnmarket, at the top of the Royal Mile, before twenty to twenty-five thousand people; some had paid days in advance for a window. When he appeared on the scaffold, one cry rose above the rest: "Burke him!", meaning do to him what he'd done to others. According to the National Library of Scotland, three brass markers in the pavement at the north end of George IV Bridge show where the gallows stood.

The next day, at the College, students who hadn't got a ticket for the dissection rioted. There were truncheons and broken glass until Professor Robert Christison suggested they come in groups of fifty. The day after that, it was the city's turn: about twenty-five thousand people walked past the body, sixty a minute. His skeleton is kept in the university's Anatomical Museum. He ended up where his victims had: on an anatomy table.

What was left: a verb, a myth and a law

Edinburgh didn't forget Burke, but it remembered him in its own way. His name became a verb: "to burke" first meant to kill by suffocation and, over time, to hush something up quietly. And a myth was born. After the trial, plenty of young men in Edinburgh and other Scottish towns amused themselves by slapping sticking-plaster over the mouths of passers-by, mostly girls, until the authorities had to take the strictest measures. In time the prank was mistaken for the real method, and many people became convinced that Burke and Hare had attacked their victims in the street with a plaster over the mouth. The confessions say otherwise.

And the rest? There were attempts to lynch Hare and M'Dougal; the stories that Hare lost his sight in a lime pit, or ended his days begging in London, belong to folklore. Robert Knox was never charged. A committee set up at his own request found no proof that he knew the bodies came from murder, though it admitted circumstances that ought to have aroused suspicion: his dealings with suppliers were left to his assistants and his doorkeeper. The street passed its own verdict: a crowd tore apart an effigy bearing his name and stoned the windows of his house. Knox had to give up his post as curator of the College of Surgeons' museum, and spent his last years in London.

The real change came with the Anatomy Act of 1832, which gave medicine a legal supply of bodies. Its preamble admits that people had been murdered for the sake of selling their bodies. And the watchtower at St Cuthbert's, according to Historic Environment Scotland, was redundant within ten years.

Fact or legend.

• Grave robbers? No. Their only body that wasn't murdered came out of a coffin before it was buried; the rest were sixteen murders.
• A sticking-plaster in the street? A myth, born of the pranks that followed the trial.
• Are the seventeen miniature coffins found on Arthur's Seat in 1836 a memorial to their victims? It's a hypothesis from 1994, with no proof and one objection: the figures show no difference between men and women, and twelve of the bodies were women's.
• Did Knox know where the bodies came from? It couldn't be proved. The report that cleared him was commissioned by Knox himself.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "Burke and Hare and Edinburgh Medicine": twelve stops between the West Port, where the pair lived ("They never robbed a grave"), and Surgeons' Hall ("The customer: Robert Knox"), by way of the gallows and the sticking-plaster myth. Along the way you'll also meet a woman who survived the noose, the first women to study medicine at a British university and the surgeon behind Sherlock Holmes.

If it's your first walk in Edinburgh, start with the free route along the Royal Mile.

Further reading

• Anonymous, West Port Murders; or, an authentic account of the atrocious murders committed by Burke and his associates, Thomas Ireland jr., Edinburgh, 1829 (includes the trial and Burke's confession). https://archive.org/details/westportmurderso00burkrich
• George MacGregor, The History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times, T. D. Morison, Glasgow, 1884. https://archive.org/details/historyofburkeha00macg
• Samuel Pyeatt Menefee and Allen D. C. Simpson, "The West Port Murders and the Miniature Coffins from Arthur's Seat", Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, New Series 3 (1994), pp. 63–81. https://oldedinburghclub.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/BOEC_NS3_1994_The_West_Port_Murders_and_the_Miniature_Coffins.pdf
• National Library of Scotland (blog), "Doors Open Day: Through 'The Void' to Libberton's Wynd". https://blog.nls.uk/doors-open-day-through-the-void-to-libbertons-wynd/
• Historic Environment Scotland, listed building LB27346, "St Cuthbert's Churchyard, Watch Tower". https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB27346
• University of Edinburgh, Curious Edinburgh, history of medicine entries ("Surgeons' Hall Museums", "Robert Knox's Anatomy School"). https://curiousedinburgh.org/2016/04/19/surgeons-hall-museums/