Grave concerns
To secure bodies for dissection, doctors and researchers began purchasing bodies, on a “no questions asked” basis, from grave robbers or resurrectionists, who exhumed the recently departed from their graves. As early as 1738, bodies were reported missing from grave sites. The public was horrified, and many Edinburgh cemeteries erected watchtowers, gates, and walls to protect the dead and keep out “body snatchers”.
In 1828, the public found out about an extremely gruesome twist that the grave-robbing business had taken, and the ensuing scandal would send the common people of Edinburgh into a frenzy of panic and rage toward the medical establishment. William Burke and William Hare came to Edinburgh from Ireland looking for work as laborers, but the men quickly decided that grave robbing was a more profitable business opportunity. The two began digging up graves and selling the bodies to medical students and researchers. One of their most loyal clients was none other than the esteemed Knox. Before long, Burke and Hare bypassed grave digging in favor of murder. Many historians argue that the duo never bothered with grave robbing and went straight to murder.
Burke and Hare strangled their victims; they perfected a method that left no obvious signs of violence on the corpses. Reportedly, Knox was not only the beneficiary of their anatomical discoveries (2–3 bodies per week); he allegedly helped the men perfect this clean manner of killing, or “burking”, a term popularized by the scandal. This contributed to the lack of evidence, which proved beneficial to the killers in the subsequent trial. Their victims were poor people living on the fringes of society, such as vagrants and prostitutes. Burke and Hare assumed that their victims would not be missed, and even if they were, that the authorities would make little effort to begin an investigation.
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