The truth, as is usually the case, seems to have been somewhere between the two extremes. Paterson had no medical qualifications but was rather more than a mere janitor. He was employed by Knox to keep his dissecting-room in good order, making it ready for demonstrations and cleaning it up afterwards, and he had some responsibility for accepting and storing the corpses ready for use when needed. He was authorised by Knox to receive bodies on his behalf when they were delivered, and was, at a later stage at least, Knox’s go-between with the various suppliers.
There has been much confusion about the sequence of events in Paterson’s brief appearance on the stage of judicial history. He did not reveal during Burke’s trial, as some authors have said, that he had been attempting to sell to another anatomist, for a profit, a body intended for Dr Knox. Paterson wrote a letter to the Caledonian Mercury, published on 15 January, in which he claimed that he had been shamefully wronged as a result of his evidence during the trial, and denied that he had been dismissed from Dr Knox’s service after absconding. He had a letter from Knox, in fact, asking him to go back. Addressed to ‘Dear David’, it acknowledged that ‘the public clamour is of course much against you’, but assured him that ‘all such matters as these subside in a short period, provided the individuals themselves do not adopt false steps’. Paterson protested his innocence of any wrongdoing and challenged the authorities to bring him to trial if they could prove him guilty of any.
It was then that the Mercury, instead of offering him any crumbs of comfort, let it be known that the paper had information that Paterson had attempted to sell a body, intended for Dr Knox, to one of the doctor’s rivals, and alleged that the body in question was that of Mrs Docherty, the last victim of Burke and Hare. Paterson admitted that he had attempted to profit from the sale of a body, and offered an explanation. James Syme, one of Knox’s rival private lecturers in anatomy, was desperately short of subjects, and had asked Paterson if he had a surplus. On the same night that Burke and Hare had made it known to him that they had another subject for sale, a message dated 29 October had reached 10 Surgeons’ Square from a well-known local body-snatcher named Andrew Merrilees, nicknamed ‘Merry Andrew’. It read:
Doctor am in the east, and has been doin little busnis, an short of siller [silver, or cash] send out abot aught and twenty shilins way the carer the thing will bee in abot 4 on Saturday mornin its a shusa [female corpse] hae the plase open. And. M-s.
Paterson, with two bodies due for delivery together, saw his opportunity for a little profit, and offered to Syme for £15 the one Merry Andrew was bringing in the early hours of the morning. Merrilees would not expect more than £10 or £12 from Knox. Paterson could pocket the difference. In the event, Merrilees failed to turn up with the corpse, but Paterson’s admission got him into further trouble. It looked as if he could have been soliciting corpses in advance and inviting anatomists to bid against one another for them. He admitted that the coincidence of the two corpses looked ‘rather suspicious’, but maintained that these were the facts. The newspaper, however, stuck to its story, and in the end Paterson’s letters to the editor had done him more harm than good. The general belief is that he then wrote the open letter in self-justification.
The open Letter to the Lord Advocate has been given short shrift by many previous writers on Burke and Hare, and Lonsdale, in his biography of Knox, only mentions Paterson in a brief and dismissive footnote. Isobel Rae, likewise, barely discusses the Letter at all. But the document raises some significant questions which have been largely ignored.
According to the author, ‘when a just suspicion fell upon Burke about the beginning of October last, a policeman was stationed at his door, but even then, he eluded their vigilance, and the body was safely deposited in the Lecture Room’. Whose body was this? According to Burke’s first confession, ‘about the beginning of October’ could have been before the murders of Mrs Ostler, Ann McDougal and Daft Jamie. But is it likely that Burke murdered four more victims (including Docherty) after he had come under suspicion and knew the police were watching him? And if someone had gone to the police with a suspicion about Burke, and Knox knew about it, would this not have alerted even the arrogant Knox to the danger he was in?
Later in the letter, the ‘Echo’ represents Paterson as saying that Burke had reported to him that he had a subject, but dare not bring it because a neighbour suspected that he had a body in his possession and a policeman ‘seldom left the corner of the house’. On hearing of this, Knox said that ‘John’ was a coward and he (Knox) would write to the authorities and procure a protection for John to carry ‘any packages safe to his Lecture Room’. Speaking later to Burke himself, Knox reportedly said that if he should be stopped on the street, he should go quietly to the police office until Knox could get him released and the package delivered. Burke allegedly replied that if he were once taken to the police office, he would not so easily get out again! This story, if true, suggests either that Knox really did believe that Burke was merely purchasing dead bodies or that, if he did have any suspicions, he was confident that no one could prove anything against him.
The body in question was not Daft Jamie’s, because he was murdered at Hare’s place in Tanner’s Close. If it was Mrs Ostler’s, Burke and Hare murdered two more people later, in the very house that the police were supposed to be watching. But it is more likely that the body was that of Ann McDougal, if it was during the early part of October, as they got £10 for her corpse, but only £8 for the washer-woman’s. Nevertheless, Burke and Hare murdered at least two more people, and possibly three, after the police had been alerted by neighbours’ suspicions and posted a man outside Burke’s house. But these murders were not all committed there.
This part of the ‘Echo’s’ argument tends, if anything, to absolve Knox of any knowledge or suspicion of murder, rather than implicate him, and thus does the opposite of what commentators have assumed to be the pamphlet’s purpose – to achieve Paterson’s revenge on Knox for sacking him.
If Paterson’s claim that it was his own decision to leave Knox’s employment is true, that would suggest that Paterson had some other employment lined up, so perhaps the rumour that he was about to go into partnership with Burke and Hare had some basis in fact. The idea (in Paterson’s mind, at least) was not, presumably, to commit murder, but to obtain subjects from Ireland or elsewhere for the anatomy lecturers in Edinburgh. Paterson would have been aware of the possibilities of a lucrative living. He had already been approached by Syme, and knew well enough what prices corpses fetched.
Burke mentioned in the Courant confession that ‘Hare and him had a plan made up, that Burke and a man were to go to Glasgow or Ireland, and try the same there, and to forward them to Hare, and he was to give them to Dr Knox.’ Burke did not say who ‘the man’ was to be, but if it was Paterson, that would explain why he refused Knox’s request for him to resume work as his doorkeeper. He could earn a lot more than seven shillings a week in partnership with Burke and Hare. In nine months they had earned about £150 between them – that is nearly £2 each a week on average.
The ‘Echo’ goes on to pose a pertinent question. If the police had been alerted to a suspicion that Burke had a corpse in his house, whether obtained by body-snatching or any other means, why did they not obtain a warrant to search the premises, rather than merely posting an officer outside to keep watch? The probable reason is that the local police had instructions to look the other way, to some extent, when faced with body-snatching, which is what they thought they were dealing with. The officer outside was merely a token show of law and order to pacify the neighbours because one of them had voiced a suspicion. If the police had raided every house where body-snatchers lived, the reputation of the Edinburgh medical school would have evaporated in no time at all and the training of surgeons there would have come to a complete stop.
It was a common practice for the authorities to turn a blind eye on the purchase of corpses for anatomical study, whether bought from body-snat
chers or persons who had corpses in their possession legally. In London, Sir Astley Cooper felt morally bound to intercede on behalf of any of his regular suppliers who fell foul of the law. When Joshua Naples, then a gravedigger, was sentenced to imprisonment in 1802, Cooper had gone directly to the Home Secretary and got him released. And Sir Astley’s accounts for May 1828 include this item:
6th. Paid Vaughan’s wife 6s.
29th. Paid Vaughan for 26 weeks confinement, at 10s per week, £13.
Tom Vaughan was a member of a gang of body-snatchers operating from Southwark, and one of Cooper’s regular suppliers. Sir Robert Peel also quietly acquiesced, largely at Cooper’s urging, in the importation of bodies from France and Ireland.1
Knox himself had been in the act of drafting a letter to the Home Secretary to complain about the difficulties in which teachers like himself were having to work in the present state of the law. He explained how shipments of corpses from Ireland were obstructed by Irish anatomists jealous of Scotland’s reputation, and how packages intended for him had been seized and opened in places such as Liverpool and Carlisle by zealous Customs men, who only succeeded in occasioning pointless inquests and provoking local disturbances. ‘There is one subject in particular,’ Knox’s letter continued, ‘on which I beg most respectfully your attention.’
Anatomists generally are most anxious to avoid public scenes such as these, and for this purpose they are careful to select subjects which are claimed by no relative or friend, and thus often avoid the painful necessity of violating the burial grounds and by doing so inflicting a shock on the most sacred feelings of human nature. Now, when anatomical subjects procured under such circumstances are nevertheless seized on their way to the schools, very alarming reprisals are made in the burying grounds of the place where the seizure has been made, often without the smallest regard to risk or circumstances . . .
Permit me most respectfully to remark to you, that I have ever been an advocate for the making of these matters as little public as possible, but now that the anatomical enquiry is patent to all, I therefore thought it my duty to state to you the obstacles which impede the progress of anatomy in Great Britain.2
Just as Knox was about to despatch this letter to London, however, Burke and Hare and their women were arrested, and Knox wisely thought better of it.
What is clear in all this is that there was a conspiracy of silence among Edinburgh’s elite. The chief reasons were almost certainly that, first, they wanted to hide the truth about the extent of body-snatching and the practices of the anatomists from the public, and, second, they were anxious to protect the reputation of Edinburgh as the leading medical school in Europe.
The author of the Letter to the Lord Advocate, whoever he was, was a man of education and had some formal literary style and sophistication. He adopted a high moral tone, betraying a Calvinistic severity, quoted Shakespeare and, if it was Paterson trying to disguise his own authorship, switched very skilfully from first to third person throughout the thirty-six-page document in reporting his own words as if they were being quoted in support of a carefully argued case.
We are asked to believe that this was the work of a mere janitor, earning seven shillings a week and living in a poor lodging with his mother and sister. One, moreover, who bore his former employer a grudge and had tried to cheat him. The same man who was believed to be about to go into a lucrative enterprise with Burke and Hare to supply the Edinburgh anatomists with corpses shipped over from Ireland. And was this anonymous author, posing persuasively as a man of conscience and integrity, the same irresponsible young man who had sent his fifteen-year-old sister, alone, to a gloomy back-alley to call on a man he already suspected of being a murderer of women, or at the very least, a drunken body-snatcher? I, for one, do not think so!
If Paterson had a sister who was fifteen years old, it is not very likely that he was more than, say, nineteen. He was a single young man, still living with his mother and uncertain of his direction in life. He had joined the army, but returned to Knox’s employment after a couple of years. Is it conceivable that he would have possessed the self-assurance to address the Lord Advocate of Scotland in such confident formal tones?
And even if Paterson did write the pamphlet, who financed its printing? Was this low-paid whippersnapper so altruistic as to dig deep into his own pockets to publish an exhortation to the experienced Lord Advocate to ‘strain every nerve, and sift this dreadful plot to its very core’? I think not!
The pamphlet was printed by Menzies and advertised as being for sale at 132 High Street on 29 January. The only clue to occupancy of property in Edinburgh at that time is the record of the local property tax, called the ‘extent’. It appears probable from the extent roll in the Edinburgh City Archives that the ground-floor tenant of 132 High Street was James Stillie, a bookseller, stationer and proprietor of a circulating library. But there is no suggestion that he was a publisher – merely a retailer – and the person who paid for the printing and publishing of the pamphlet was most likely the man who wrote it.
The text of this obscure pamphlet is given as Appendix V, and reproduced in its entirety for the first time in any book about the Burke and Hare case, so that readers may judge its contents for themselves. My own impression is that the letter has something of the self-righteousness of a Puritan about it. But it is most likely the work of another medical man, probably one of Knox’s jealous rivals. There is more than a hint that he frequented Surgeons’ Square. Could the author have been Liston, who had good reason to hold a grudge against Knox? Or Syme, who was forced to give up lecturing on anatomy because he could not compete with Knox in keeping up a regular supply of subjects for his students to work on? Syme is known to have been an ill-tempered man who had good reason to want revenge on Knox, having suffered from his acid tongue. Syme became as eminent in the field of clinical surgery as Knox in anatomy, but jealous rivalry was ever-present in the relations of the medical men, as we have already noticed. That between Knox, Syme and Liston – all native Scotsmen – is particularly relevant to our present enquiry.
Robert Liston, born at Ecclesmachan, was three years younger than Knox, but like him, had gone to Barclay after failing anatomy under Monro. Liston was a tall, well-built man and a noted athlete of formidable strength. He was involved in almost legendary exploits as a body-snatcher before the advent of the professionals, and is reputed on one occasion to have carried two bodies away together, one under each arm. He was Barclay’s assistant for five years, and subsequently taught anatomy in partnership with Syme, gaining a reputation as both a fine teacher and a great pioneering surgeon. He was particularly noted for the speed of his operations when speed was of the essence, in the days before anaesthetics. He could amputate a leg at the thigh, without assistance, in half a minute, including sutures.
Liston was also arrogant and quarrelsome, however, and he had good reason to dislike Knox, as we have seen. He was expelled from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1822, after a dispute with the authorities, and some years later, when the Professorship of Clinical Surgery became vacant at the university, Syme, a younger man, got the post in preference to Liston, who then left Edinburgh for London, where he died in 1847 aged fifty-three.
James Syme, born in Edinburgh, was Liston’s junior by five years. He was a demonstrator in Liston’s dissecting-room until 1823, when Liston decided to concentrate more on his practice, and Syme then took over the teaching role. Syme lectured on anatomy for five years, but gave up at the beginning of the 1828–29 season, abandoning anatomy for surgery because he could not compete with Knox in maintaining a large class. Syme had approached David Paterson at one point to ask where Knox’s suppliers lived. Paterson is said to have replied that he did not know, but would mention Syme’s interest when he saw them again, provided Dr Knox’s supply was maintained.
Syme became Knox’s implacable enemy. He first became a thorn in Knox’s side by seconding a motion in May 1826 to defer electing Knox as Conservator of the new
museum of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons. Then in September 1829 he was elected a Curator of the museum. He was a signatory to a proposal to institute a minute examination of all preparations in the museum to ascertain their condition, which was something of an insult to Knox, who had already declared them to be in good order. Syme crossed swords with Knox over one preparation, and complained formally to the College Committee, which admonished Knox for his ‘incivility’ to Syme.
Syme was by this time running his own surgical hospital, having been refused a post as surgeon at the Royal Infirmary, lest he should quarrel openly with Liston. Syme’s enmity towards Knox continued when he seconded a Royal College motion which forbade Knox to hold teaching courses anywhere, informing twenty-two licensing boards throughout Britain of this decision.
Liston was not noted for the clarity of his literary style. He might have realised that he could do himself more harm than good by any public attack on Knox, if his authorship were to be discovered. Syme seems to have been more reckless and impulsive.
Whoever did write the Letter to the Lord Advocate scored a palpable hit. The publication incensed the Edinburgh public even more against a man whom they already held to be the patron and criminal accomplice of Burke and Hare. The execution of Burke and the escape of Hare and the two women from justice focused the attention of the populace on the one remaining participant, and Knox was eventually forced to heed the advice of his friends and take action to clear his name.
Burke and Hare Page 16
