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Mccallum, Malcolm curator of the Anatomical Museum in Edinburgh, tells us about the city’s history of grave-robbing and the skeleton of William Burke
Tell us about yourself and the museum…
I’m the curator of the Anatomical Museum and to all intents and purposes we are the Museum of Edinburgh Medical School. The medical school itself goes back to 1726 and our collection really tells the story of how anatomy was taught at the university over a period of 300 years. As part of that, we have a lot of human remains.
What was Edinburgh Medical School’s attitude towards body-snatching and its students’ procurement of bodies for research?
As far as I’m aware, it was tacitly acknowledged.
The trade itself had existed for some time and wasn’t just a 19th century phenomenon – there’s reports of grave-robbing in Edinburgh around 171011. During the 1820s you had to dissect a body if you were going to take an anatomy degree and the universities knew that there weren’t enough legally acquired bodies to go around. Essentially, the medical schools turned a blind eye to the trade.
What Impact did the William Burke and William Hare scandal have on the school?
It actually had a positive one. The scandal led to the Anatomy Act of 1832 which made greater numbers of cadavers legally available to schools. If you died in an asylum or hospital, and had no relatives or means to cover your funeral costs, your body would go to the schools for dissection. Crucially, the institutions which were providing the cadavers only supplied them to anatomy schools that were associated with teaching hospitals. So for the Medical School, the impact was that the Act got passed and the school regained its prominence at the expense of other extramural schools.
How does the museum approach this legacy of body-snatching?
One of the first things to note is the idea of consent. If you look around the museum, there are specimens, full skeletons as well as body parts, which are used in teaching. But the individuals who these belong to didn’t give full consent. Before 1832 we have very little documentary evidence but it’s likely they either would have belonged to people who would have been grave-robbed, or people who were dissected as punishment under the terms of the Murder Act after committing murder. After 1832 it’s poor people, again most likely without their individual consent, although this time taken legally under the terms of the Anatomy Act. The museum is aware that for a lot of the collection historically there’s no consent given and that the history of the medical school is completely different to the current way that you could possibly donate your body.
What items do you have relating to bodysnatching history?
We’ve got life masks of both William Burke and Hare and death masks of Burke and Dr Knox. The reason we have the Burke mask is that Edinburgh was at that time a centre for phrenology, a strange pseudoscience where they thought they could work out if somebody was prone to committing crime by studying the lumps and bumps on their head. We’ve also got a couple of Knox’s medical specimens used in teaching and, most disturbingly, we’ve got a letter that’s said to be written in Burke’s blood which was apparently taken from his head during the dissection. We think that this was written by Alexander Monro Tertius, who was the professor of anatomy who dissected Burke.
Famously, you have the skeleton of William Burke on display. Can you tell us about that?
Following his execution Burke’s body was handed over to Professor Alexander Monroe for dissection. The sheriff of the trial, David Boyle, had said to Burke: “Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomised and I trust that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved in order that posterity be keeping remembrance of your atrocious crimes.” So after a public dissection, where thousands of people came to see Burke’s body, the skeleton was basically quartered, put into barrels and displayed in the museum – where it remains to this day.