Book description
Up the close and down the stair,
Up and down with Burke and
Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the man
who buys the beef.
-anonymous children's song
On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh,
Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in
the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police
discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr.
Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious
murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's.
Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of
killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to
sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing
criminal investigation into the "Anatomy Murders" raised
troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men
obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys,
and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder.
Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the
first serial killers to capture media attention, yet The Anatomy
Murders is the first book to situate their story against the
social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century
Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the
murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the
unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different
aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of
unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of
doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called
dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the
half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press.
The Anatomy Murders resurrects a tale of murder and medicine in
a city whose grand Georgian squares and crescents stood beside a maze
of slums, a place in which a dead body was far more valuable than a
living laborer. Listen to an interview with Lisa Rosner at the Penn
Press podcast web page.
"Lisa Rosner . . . has carried out a fascinating 'CSI' style
investigation. . . . Her remarkable discoveries-told in her new book,
The Anatomy Murders-[have] unraveled poignant details which
bring to 'life' the personalities of some of the pair's unfortunate
and, until now, largely anonymous victims."-Evening News, Edinburgh
Lisa Rosner is Professor of History at Richard Stockton College of
New Jersey and author of The Most Beautiful Man in Existence: The
Scandalous Life of Alexander Lesassier, also available from the
University of Pennsylvania Press.
