Burke and Hare
Infamous cadaver suppliers
Burke and Hare refers to William Burke and William Hare, Irish immigrants who murdered at least sixteen people in Edinburgh in 1828 to sell their bodies for anatomical dissection.
The case was notorious enough to spawn the verb *burke*, meaning to smother or suffocate, or more broadly to suppress quietly: They tried to burke the scandal before it reached the press.
- murderersThose who kill unlawfully
- EdinburghScotland's seat of government
- bodysnatchersPeople who exhume corpses illegally
- corpsesDead human bodies
- anatomyStudy of organism structure
dissection · Knox · serial killers · Victorian · Scotland · cadavers · medical school · suffocation · lodging house · Old Town · smothering · victims · gallows · hanging judge · execution · infamous · macabre · surgeons
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- medical historyHippocrates, germ theory, bloodletting, Galen, four humors
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Burke and HareFlorence Nightingale
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Burke and Hareresurrection men
Cadaver thieves for dissection
grave robbers · body snatchers · resurrectionists · exhumers