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 Tapping into a wealth of unpublished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.
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