The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  That said, Hunter’s lack of ethics gravely undermined his reputation. Condemning scientists in the past for not living up to today’s moral standards is unfair, but even in his own day, people despised Hunter. In a neat trick, he managed to make enemies of both patrician doctors, who recoiled at his rubbing elbows with body-snatchers, and the plebian masses, who resented being fodder for his research. Even Hunter’s fellow anatomists blanched when he stole Charles Byrne’s body. He’s a classic example of someone rationalizing his sins by pointing out all the good that resulted, as if ethics was merely moral accounting, with the good deeds canceling out the bad.

  Worse was to come. More than anyone else, Hunter transformed grave-robbing from the wanton sallies of students into an industry, and the sheer number of bodies he bought distorted the market for them. The boom in medical-school enrollment further exacerbated the shortage of bodies and drove the price still higher, from roughly £2 in the 1780s to £16 (nearly $1,000) in some places by the 1810s—equal to what an average laborer made in five years. To be sure, Hunter was no monster. However flexible his conscience was, he at least had one. But the higher the price for bodies rose, the more that people without any scruples at all were tempted to jump into the game. People like Burke and Hare.

  The memory of smothering the old man with a pillow tormented William Burke. He took to gulping whiskey at night just to fall asleep, and kept a bottle on his nightstand for reinforcement. William Hare was less troubled. The old man would have died anyway, so why sweat it?

  Given their circumstances, however, neither man gave back the money they’d earned. Burke, then in his mid-thirties, had grown up poor in Ireland and fathered a child when young. He’d eventually moved to Scotland alone to support his family and taken various dead-end jobs there—digging canals, soldiering, baking bread. His wife back home finally stopped answering his letters, and he’d moved in with another woman in Edinburgh. Hare’s background was sketchier. He was probably younger than Burke and had likely also immigrated from Ireland. While Burke had a round, warm face, Hare had narrow eyes and that lean, hungry look that Shakespeare warned against. For a few years, Hare had been helping to manage his wife Margaret’s boardinghouse, but they were barely scraping by. Burke, who worked as a cobbler, was struggling, too. So, troubled conscience or not, when Burke ran low on money again, Hare had little trouble convincing his friend to give murder another go.

  A fairly inaccurate dramatization of a Burke-Hare murder. Their victims were almost always passed out drunk, and both men helped kill them—not by strangulation, but by sitting on the chest and plugging the mouth and nostrils, a murder method now known as “burking.” (Engraving by Robert Seymour.)

  An elderly woman named Abigail Simpson took a room at the boarding house in mid-February 1828. The duo got her so drunk she vomited, but they kept plying her with porter and whiskey until she passed out. Honestly, she might have died of alcohol poisoning at that point, but Hare lay on her chest to be sure, and Burke pinched her mouth and nostrils shut until she fell still. Simpson’s body likely fetched around £10, and although Burke reverted to gulping booze at night, it was a little easier to sleep this time.

  It would soon get a lot easier. As Burke once put it, the pair figured “we might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” and over the next ten months they went on one of the biggest murder sprees in history, burking fourteen more victims. They killed an old woman and her mentally handicapped grandson. They killed another old woman with a single tooth in her mouth, then a daughter who’d reportedly stopped by to search for her. With two victims, they never even learned their names. At first, the duo simply waited for good candidates to visit the boardinghouse, but they eventually got itchy and started luring people in. Burke, the chatty one with the warm face, would linger near liquor stores in the early morning, scouting for down-on-their-luck alcoholics who needed a daily eye-opener. Then he’d win their confidence and invite them over to Hare’s for a warm meal and more drink. When the dupes finally passed out, the Williams sprang. Burke remembered that the victims “would convulse and make a rumbling noise in their bellies” as they sank toward death. All the bodies then made their way to anatomist Robert Knox.

  Although not as brilliant as John Hunter, Knox was a talented scientist, and he was vastly more couth. During lectures he wore handsome coats and shirts trimmed with lace, and his fingers, while stained red, were studded with diamond rings. Still, he shared Hunter’s appetite for human flesh, and he faced stiff competition for bodies in Edinburgh, where hundreds of new medical students arrived each year. Given that pressure, it was all too easy to accept bodies from anyone who knocked. In the words of a later nursery rhyme about the trio, “Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief / And Knox the boy who buys the beef.”

  The notorious Dr. Robert Knox, who “bought the beef” from the murderers Burke and Hare. (Courtesy of Wellcome Trust.)

  To be sure, Knox’s assistants had their suspicions about Burke and Hare. One actually confronted Burke once with some hard questions about where a certain corpse came from. (Burke shot back, “If I am to be catechized by you, where and how I get subjects, I will inform the Doctor [Knox] of it!” The assistant backed down.) Even if the assistant had informed Knox, Knox might not have done anything. Any competent anatomist could have seen signs of asphyxiation in the Burke and Hare bodies: bloodshot eyes, flushed faces, a telltale trickle of blood near the mouth. But the intact hyoid bone gave Knox plausible deniability. Most of the victims reeked of booze anyway, and it was sadly common for alcoholics to suffocate on vomit. In short, Knox closed his lone eye to any sign of trouble, hesitant to upset such reliable suppliers and interrupt his research.

  The more “beef” Knox bought, the more reckless Burke and Hare became. One day Burke saw two policemen harassing a drunk woman and chivalrously offered to escort her home; he steered her to the Hares’ instead and burked her. The most ballsy murder involved Daft Jamie, a beloved “town idiot,” who wandered the streets barefoot and was known by sight to everyone. The duo snuffed him out anyway and trundled him over to Knox. And instead of burning Jamie’s clothes, as they’d done with other victims, they gave the clothes away to friends; several articles were recognized around town by their former owners, who were puzzled. When Knox and his team gathered to dissect Daft Jamie, an assistant took one look at the face and gasped. A tight-lipped Knox said nothing, and ordered them to prep the body.

  These close calls only emboldened Burke and Hare, and their murder spree culminated with a triple homicide plot around Halloween in 1828. This time the guests—a young couple named Ann and James Gray and a petite, forty-something Irishwoman named Margaret Docherty—weren’t staying with the Hares but with Burke and his common-law wife. (Burke had reeled Docherty in at a grocery shop by claiming that his name was also Docherty.) In an effort to dispatch Docherty first, Burke made several rather transparent excuses to send Ann and James away. Hare then met Burke at the latter’s place. As usual, Burke and Hare got Docherty drunk; perhaps nostalgic for home, they also induced her to sing some Irish ditties. Things then swerved unexpectedly. Sometime around 11 p.m., Burke and Hare got into a violent quarrel and Burke began strangling his junior partner. Docherty screamed, “Murder! Murder!” and an upstairs neighbor alerted the police.

  This being Halloween, however, a night full of mischief, the police were busy elsewhere. No one stopped by. And when Burke and Hare finally disentangled themselves, they turned their murderous rage toward Docherty and burked her. Afterward, they stripped off her red gown and hid her body in some straw at the foot of a bed.

  Incredibly, Burke let Ann and James Gray back into his house the next morning, probably with an eye toward murdering them, too. But his behavior made Ann—the hero of this whole story— suspicious. Burke clumsily spilled whiskey several times, as if to mask an odor, and when Ann offered to tidy up his house, Burke refused. She noticed in particular that he never let her near the straw at the foot of one bed.

>   Finally, late on November 1, All Saints’ Day, Ann found herself alone in the house and made straight for the straw. She suspected Burke and Hare had pulled a Halloween heist of some sort and were hiding illicit goods there. Instead she found an arm, which was attached to a naked woman with a trickle of blood on her lips. Ann grabbed her husband and fled, but they met Burke’s common-law wife Helen at the door. Helen offered them money to stay mum, but Ann and James pushed past her and ran for the police.6

  The police quickly realized, however, that this wasn’t an open-and-shut case. Yes, there was a dead body, but Burke and Hare could always claim Docherty had gotten drunk and choked. So in a bit of gamesmanship, the police weighed the two men’s characters, decided Hare had fewer scruples, and offered him a plea bargain. It worked like a charm. Hare turned King’s evidence, and in return for testifying against Burke, he escaped all charges.

  Burke’s trial started in late December and ran for twenty-four hours straight, ending inevitably in a guilty verdict. The judge sentenced him to hang. Hare, meanwhile, walked out of the courtroom a free man—albeit in disguise, since a mob was waiting to exact revenge. He fled like his animal namesake, and after some close calls in different towns, he finally escaped Scotland and disappeared, his last years every bit as mysterious as his early ones.

  Burke was hanged on a rainy morning a month later. The death itself was unremarkable, although every last window in the buildings surrounding the jail was packed with faces. In a satisfying twist, his body was then handed over to Robert Knox’s biggest rival for dissection and display in a museum. Macabrely, the rival even dipped his quill in the blood from Burke’s skull to write out a placard: “This is written with the blood of Wm Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh on 28th Jan. 1829…”

  Knox came within a spade of being indicted himself, but the evidence just wasn’t there: he could still claim he didn’t know. A mob in Edinburgh made an effigy of him anyway, “bald head and all,” as one contemporary recalled. Rather than burn the effigy, the crowd burked it instead.

  Outrage over the Burke and Hare murders (as well as some copycat homicides in London) finally forced British officials to do something about the lack of cadavers available for dissections. Specifically, they introduced a law to give anatomists unclaimed bodies from poorhouses and charity hospitals, bodies that no family members or friends stepped forward to claim. This would not only expand the number of bodies available for training and research, it would undercut the black market for them and allow scientists to cut ties with thieves, thugs, and grave-robbers.

  But however tidy this solution seemed, using unclaimed bodies raised ethical issues of its own. In particular, poor people hated the plan, since they would still be the ones supplying most of the corpses. After all, it wasn’t the well-heeled or well-connected who were dying unclaimed in almshouses.

  In a callous response to this complaint, one politician argued that supplying bodies for research was the least the poor could do. After all, look at all the free meals and medical care they’d enjoyed on the public dime during their lives. (A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.) More compassionately, some supporters of the law pointed out that, despite the unfair burden of supplying bodies, improving the training of doctors would benefit the poor more than any other group. For one thing, diseases often hit the poor much harder. The rich could also afford experienced doctors and surgeons, while the poor were stuck with greenhorns who would be fumbling around and making mistakes. Given that, better the greenhorns do so on dead paupers than living ones. Allowing the dissection of unclaimed bodies, in other words, was the lesser of two evils and would ease suffering for the poor overall.

  In the end, such arguments won the day, and Parliament passed the Anatomy Act in 1832. But while the act eased tensions in Great Britain, it did nothing to quell resentment in the United States, where anatomists had always been loathed and “anatomy riots” were a regular feature of life. One anatomy department in particular—at that most renowned of American institutions, Harvard University—got dragged into a deliciously tawdry scandal when an illustrious alumnus went missing, and turned up somewhere he shouldn’t have in expertly dissected pieces.

  Footnotes

  1 In perhaps his most clever discovery, Hunter settled a longstanding dispute about digestion. Many scientists back then argued that the stomach digested food either by applying heat to break it down or by mechanically churning it. But after noticing holes in his cadavers’ stomachs, Hunter argued for chemical digestion. After death, he reasoned, the body stops producing the protective mucus that lines the stomach, and the acid there begins to digest the organ itself. This explained the holes, which neither the heat nor mechanical theories could. We now know that mechanical churning does play a role in digestion, but chemical action is primary.

  2 People who died during the summer were lucky in that their bodies decayed faster in the heat. Hence, they were of less use to anatomists, who often took summers off. Wintertime deaths almost always meant a body-snatch. On especially cold days, when the bodies were still stiff, the resurrectionists didn’t even have to conceal them. They could simply prop them up in carriages like passengers and drive them right up to the anatomist’s back door. In other cases bodies were concealed in shrouds or sacks, or even shipped around in barrels labeled “pork” or “beef.” This might explain the line about “beef” in the nursery rhyme later in this chapter.

  3 Anatomists dissected infants and children whenever possible in part because they were eager to chart the course of human growth and development, a hot scientific topic at the time. More practically, infants made for handy teaching specimens. To study the nerves and blood vessels, anatomists had to pump colored wax or mercury throughout the body, sometimes by blowing it with a pipe. And it was a heck of a lot easier to pump fluids throughout a tiny child’s body than a full-grown adult’s.

  Incidentally, anatomists dissected the bodies in a strict order, based on how quickly different tissues went putrid. The lower abdomen was first, since those organs turned foul fast. Then came the lungs (which were often black from London’s sooty air) and the heart. Muscles decayed more slowly, so they could be put off. Finally came the bones, which anatomists would sometimes wire together to form skeletons. Despite the rush to get through the putrid parts, dissecting rooms often reeked of rotten flesh—as did the anatomists. In order to keep them focused on their studies, medical schools often banned surgical apprentices from marrying, but given where they spent much of each day, you wonder whether the ban was necessary.

  4 Just to clear up some of the legal subtleties: Possessing a dead body wasn’t a crime; no one could technically own a body, and corpses weren’t considered property. That said, resurrectionists could still get nailed for violating a grave, which was illegal. And again, stealing clothing or jewelry on the body was definitely a crime, often punishable by death.

  5 The famed neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing finally opened up the Irish Giant’s skull in 1909 and found clear evidence of a tumor. Namely, he noticed that a structure called the sella turcica—a saddle-shaped notch in the base of the skull that houses the pituitary gland—was enlarged in Byrne, a common occurrence in giants.

  6 Despite her heroics, Ann Gray’s story does not have a happy ending. Her husband James died within a few months of their run-in with Burke and Hare, and as happened to so many widows then, she was basically left indigent.

  4

  MURDER: THE PROFESSOR AND THE JANITOR

  According to legend, America’s first anatomy riot started with a crass joke. One afternoon in April 1788, a medical student at New York’s General Hospital was dissecting a woman’s body in a lab there. Suddenly, he realized he wasn’t alone. A gang of street urchins had gathered at the window outside—gaping wide-eyed at a real-life dead person.

  This annoyed the student, who wanted to work in peace. So to spook the b
oys, he reportedly grabbed the cadaver’s arm and waved it at them. Yoo-hoo! Then he hollered, “This is your mother’s arm. I just dug it up!”

  Har har. Unfortunately, one of the boys had indeed just lost his mother, and he ran home to his father bawling. The father in turn grabbed a shovel and marched out to his late wife’s grave. He found exactly what he expected inside—nothing—and he was furious.

  He wasn’t the only one. Body-snatching had always hit the poor harder than the rich. Rich folks could afford robbery deterrents like mortsafes, iron cages that surrounded coffins and made them hard to pilfer. The rich could also afford private guards to watch over their loved ones for the week or two it took a body to get too putrid to dissect. The poor had no such safeguards, and certain groups were hit especially hard in the United States: American Indians; Black people, both enslaved and free; and German and Irish immigrants. So when the boy’s father returned from the graveyard and proposed storming New York General, he found plenty of pissed-off neighbors willing to join him.

  When the mob arrived at the hospital, hundreds strong, the doctors and anatomists fled in panic; one hid up a chimney. The rioters proceeded to drag all the medical equipment out to the street to smash it. They also burned anatomical specimens and reburied several bodies in various states of decay.

  Trashing the building didn’t slake the mob’s anger, however. Their numbers only swelled overnight, and the next day they marched on another medical building, at Columbia University. Alexander Hamilton himself had to stand on the steps and plead with them to stop. In the meantime, New York’s mayor had jailed several medical scientists for their own safety. Undeterred, the mob—five thousand people by then—gathered before the prison. They proceeded to smash its windows and tear down a fence, howling, “Bring out yer doctors!” At dusk, the terrified mayor finally called in the militia. He also begged local political leaders to come by and help restore order.