ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Other Anatomy Murders

• In Event: Contested Anatomy

English Abstract

On 28 January 1829, William Burke was hanged in Edinburgh for the murder of Marjory McGonegal or Campbell. She was an Irish woman, estimated to be in her 40s, who had come from Glasgow to Edinburgh to find her son, Michael Campbell, who abandoned her before she encountered William Burke. Over the previous year, he and his accomplices William Hare, Margaret Laird and Helen McDougal had sold (at least) 17 bodies to the anatomist Robert Knox. The revelation that people had been murdered in Edinburgh’s West Port area purely for the price anatomists were prepared to pay for their bodies caused outrage. However, despite the publicity this case attracted and its continuing notoriety, it was not unique, even in Edinburgh. The tension between the anatomists’ demand for bodies for dissection and the widespread public desire for peaceful burial had led to a financial value placed on bodies, most of which were acquired by the anatomists or their sources through various nefarious activities.

In 1752, Helen Torrance and Jean Waldie were hanged for the murder of the eight or nine year old John Dallas and selling his body to an anatomy student. In 1807, Mathew Smith was found guilty of the murder of a baby girl, whose body had been passed to an apprentice surgeon, without mention of payment. These incidents give added context to the frequently told story of the West Port murders and the conflict between developing anatomical teaching and the resources it required.

Author

• Tacye Phillipson, National Museums Scotland