DR. ROBERT KNOX AND THE RESURRECTIONISTS

DR. HARKNESS
JANUARY 8, 1974

            (          ) chauvinist pig and at every turn I try and show the superiority of the Scots, so naturally tonight I’m going to talk about a Scotsman, but I talk about this man with a special reverence because my family have been undertakers or body snatchers for more than a hundred years, in fact, something like a hundred and sixty years in Edinburgh, and I have a feeling of affection for graveyards, and anatomies, and such matters, so tonight I thought I’d talk about a case which set Edinburgh by the ears in the 1820’s, and to give a little local color, I thought I’d talk about Edinburgh as it was in the 1820’s.  Now you’ve got to remember in 1815 there was the end of the French wars, and the period of prosperity, which Scotland had enjoyed, had come to an end.  There was widespread idleness, people were starving, the cost of everything was more than most people could sustain, and, as a result people sought refuge in such things as whiskey and even some of them chewed opium.  Now, I don’t want you to confuse anything with the present day but I think there are some similarities.  Now, may we douse the lights for just a minute.  Now, to sort or orient you to the geography of Edinburgh, because this has something to do with what I’m going to say, cause Edinburgh started off as a royal residence and this castle which you see on the top of the (                  ) and on the north side and the south side of this castle, there are being gouged out two great valleys by the glaciers as they passed through during the Ice Age, and on this hill which runs down from the castle, the town area and all of the nobles that came to the king’s court built houses there, and the land from a mile from the castle to the east, we come to the bottom of this, this royal mile, and at the bottom you can see the (          ) palace.  I took this recently, it was cleaned out, but it used to look like this when I was a boy, all dirty and smoky, and this of course was the royal residency of Scotland.  Now, the elite of the town lived in apartments like these.  This is looking from the so-called Princess Street Gardens, and these are the Ramsey apartments where people with a great deal of money live now, because it’s the thing to do to live in a very old house, but, as you walk down the street you see things like St. John’s Cathedral, where there’s a series of tenements or (  ) as they are called.  These are the high-rise apartments of Medieval Edinburgh, and this is where the famous or infamous John Knox used to live depending on whether you’re Episcopalian or a Presbyterian.  This is the Toll group, also part of the Canongate and it is in these dismal places that lots of our story takes place.  These are the tenements of Edinburgh but these are recent pictures.  These have been recently refurbished.  These old houses are now the “in” places to live just like in Charleston and Savannah and many other old places.  This place here is call the White Horse Inn, and those of you who drink Scotch Whiskey will recognize this because this is where White Horse Whiskey came from, but although this looks pretty solubrious in this picture, this is how it was when I was a boy, and you can see that this was a dismal slum, and all of these places that I showed you in the 1820’s were dismal slums because the people with money had moved out from these places fifty years before into the so-called New Town.  The houses in the Canongate and the other places in the royal mile are entered by means of horses, and these were made small so that drunken highlanders couldn’t cross the way into your house, one man with a sword could defend his place against a hundred.  Here’s another one, here’s a close and in this close Adam Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations lived, but as you can see it’s not a very solubrious place there.  Now here’s the new town.  This is the Georgian Edinburgh, which was built in the late 1700’s, and where you see the gardens now used to be a loch called the (      )Loch, a body of water, and that became a dismal swamp that bred insects and all sorts of things.  Well, when they built this new town, and you see this is Princess Street and the new town extending towards the fork there was a guy called Georgie Boy who used to walk across and see these new houses being built, but so that he didn’t get his feet wet, he placed a series of stepping stones across so that he could walk to the new town and see what was going on, and it was called Georgie Boy’s Muck Bridge, so that was a bridge made of muck, and that became the mound... this street running up from the old town to the new town, and as you can see, these then are solubrious gardens and the new town was centered around George Street for the (         ) and at each end there was a square, this was Charlotte Square named for it’s queen, and St. George’s Episcopal Church, so these then were the places that the elite lived in the new town.  Here again are the gardens which are the (                 ).  Now as well as the buildings and the Royal Mile, in the valley to the south of the castle is this place here called The Grass Market, and it was in the Grass Market that the farmers brought their stock to be sold in the old days, but it was a very popular place for hangings too, and it was here that the (      ) riots took place that Sir Walter Scott talks about...they...a smuggler called (P        ) was being hanged and kept in (    ) and the guards treated them roughly, started a riot, and the people looking from these windows there were shot by the militia and it caused Captain P to be (       ).  Now running from this place is a horrible little street, and this little street is called the West Port, and it’s called the West Port...that sign above the western bar...it says West Port, and the West Port was the western entrance to the city, because there was a wall built around the city, and here’s about the only vestage of that wall.  That’s the Floodin Wall, and that was built after James IV was killed in the Battle of Floodin.  The English unfortunately did it to him and it killed off most of the nobility of Scotland.  As all (    ) lovers know, this is the origins of the (   ) of the forests which is a funeral.  Alright, now as you walk around the old graveyards in Edinburgh you see edifices like this, and this looks like a little tower, and the reason for it’s being isn’t quite obvious from this point of view, but if you look from the other side of it, you see there’s tombstones there.  Now the reason for this was, that in the 1820’s you couldn’t bury your people in the graveyard without worrying about somebody digging them up at night and taking them off to the dissection room, so that if you wanted to make sure that your wife’s bones would lie where you put them, you hired some people to sit in this tower with muskets and shotguns to keep watch until the body was well decomposed.  And here’s Duddingston Churchyard, you see the same sort of structure so that people could sit up there at night and shoot the resurrectionists as they came to dig up the bodies.  Now if you couldn’t afford to hire people to do it, then you had to get some other sort of devise, and this is Gravefires Churchyard which was a very popular place to bury people in those days.  This is a famous church because this is where the (     ) Covenant was signed, you know of the Scottish Covenanters, but you can see that the Scots had a light-hearted attitude to death by the decorations, but they had these mortsafes, if you wanted to make sure that nobody dug up your loved ones, then you built an edifice over it with a lock on the gates, and all over these churchyards you see these mortsafes so that nobody can dig them up.  Okay, may I have the lights for just a minute.  Now, the Resurrectionists were an interesting group of people.  They were the scrapings of society, but they weren’t without some dash, and the outstanding resurrectionists in the 1820’s was a fellow called Merry Andrew Merrilees.  He was a large man who was about 6 ft. 3 or 6 ft. 4 and he was skinny so that his clothes sort of hung loose on him, but he, although he looked kind of dumb, was really kind of smart, and one of the things that he would do rather than dig up the bodies from the graveyards, was to find somebody who was dying who had no relatives, and after the person would die, he would present themself with a lodging house as their son or some relative and look very sad and he had an associate who was called...now what the hell was it...no, not praying mantas, no praying Howard who would be dressed up as a minister and say a few words over the body and along would come the undertaker also confederates for the coffin and then they would take the body off to the anatomy room.  Now, there was another resurrectionist who was a rival of Merry Andrew’s, and his name was Moudiewarp which is (           ) as you all know for the morgue, and when Merry Andrew’s sister died, he thought it would be a great tweeze if he could dig up Merry Andrew’s sister, and sell her to the university to be dissected.  Now, somehow or other Andrew got word of this, so he lay in wait while his brother resurrectionists started digging up his sister’s body and when they got it, he suddenly appeared from behind the tombstone with a sheet over his head and went “Whoooooooooo” and these guys, hardened as they were took off and left the body there, and then Andrew put his sister’s body on a tract, and drove her to Edinburgh, where he sold her for ten pounds.  Now, at the height of the fame of the Edinburgh school, you just couldn’t keep the school in subjects for dissection, so they had to import them from other places, and there was a thriving trade in sending bodies from Ireland, for instance, to Edinburgh.  There was an ex-naval surgeon who had a sort of agency and if you wanted some bodies you wrote to him and he would package them as furniture or some other thing like that.  Wilson Rea was his name, but only sometimes the people who were supposed to pick up these packages didn’t come for them, the smell would get so bad that they would open up the boxes and there was a lot of inquests held on people who were found in boxes and they were just signed out as dead in a box and that was the last that was heard of them, but at any rate, in order to get enough material, you had to invest large sums of money with these resurrectionists.  Now, let’s put out the lights for a minute, and let’s introduce you to some of the characters in this play...Now, this is Robert Knox, and he was the outstanding teacher of anatomy in Edinburgh, in his day.  Now, he did not hold a university appointment.  He was what was called an extra-mural teacher of anatomy, which meant that people could go to his classes and pay him money to be taught, because the standard of teaching at the University of Edinburgh, was so damn bad, and there were several schools of anatomy, most of the professors at the medical school used to moonlight with their own schools of anatomy so that people like John Lizars, and John Aitken, and James Syne, they all had schools of anatomy, but none so well attended as those of Robert Knox.  Now, what about Robert Knox?  He was born in 1793 and he was the eighth child of Robert Knox who was a teacher of natural philosophy and mathematics at this school here, and the only reason that I put this in,...This is George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh where his father taught.  It also happens to be the school that I went to, and I thought it would be nice to show it, so I could show off a little.  This school was founded by this man called Robert Heriot who was the jeweler and money lender to James I, and when James I went to England and his fortune, George Heriot went with him, and he made a fortune in his own private way too, and so built this school for the fatherless boys of Edinburgh.  Now, the Scots are a very canny group of people, if something is good enough for the poor, than it’s good enough for the rich, too, so in a very short time, this school was subverted, so the sons of substantial citizens in Edinburgh were allowed to go here too, but the foundation still remains that any boy in Edinburgh without a father, who passes the entrance exam, can go to this school.  Now, Robert Knox, when he was young, contracted the smallpox, and so he was very delicate for a while and the smallpox left him with one eye completely destroyed, so that he was known to his students as Dr. Cyclops, and he was very delicate at that time, but by the time he was 12 years old he had recovered enough so that he went to Royal High School in Edinburgh two or three years behind Sir Walter Scott, and he proved to be such an excellent student, that by the time he graduated in 1912, he was the dux of the school and the gold medalist, and he...sorry, 1810 he graduated, and then he went straight from there to the University of Edinburgh.  Now, although he did well as a medical student, when he sat his final examinations, he failed anatomy, and this was no wonder because he was taught anatomy by Alexander Monro Tertious.  Now, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh was held by one family from 1705 until 1846, and so there was Alexander primus, secondus, and tertious.  Now, the first two were great, but the third wasn’t worth a toot and he lectured from his grandfather’s notes and he didn’t know very much anatomy, and as a result...may I relax for a minute...poor old Knox had to redo his anatomy course in order to take his final exams, and he went to one of the better extra-mural teachers of anatomy, a man called John Barclay, who was a scintillating teacher, and after a course with Barclay, he passed his examinations without any difficulty.  From there Knox went down to London as most good Scotsmen do.  I think it was Dr. Johnson who said “The finest sight a Scotsman sees is the highroad to England” and he went down and studied in St. Barthomer’s Hospital with John Abernathy.  He remained there until 1815 when the war broke out afresh with France and he was gazetted as a hospital assistant two days before the battle of Waterloo.  Now, he got to Brussels in time to deal with the wounded there.  There were horrendous numbers of people with amputations, and horrible wounds and he stayed there for several weeks, and then he was transferred from Brussels and was sent to the Cape Colony where the British were fighting against the poor old indigenous natives, the so-called Kaffir wars, and he was assigned to the Boer irregulars, the farmers there who were also...didn’t like the colored people very much, and were shooting them in large numbers.  Now, he wasn’t content just to be a medical officer there.  He became a crackshot himself, and actually became a soldier as well as a medical officer which gave rise to the canard that when he wanted to examine a few Kaffir bodies, he just went out and shot a few, so that he could have a good look at them.  At any rate, he kind of left South Africa in disgrace, because there was some sort of scrape that he got into with a Boer officer, who was the son of the commander of the Boer Troops, and I don’t know exactly what the problem was, but a court of inquiry looked into it and censured our friend Dr. Knox, and this was followed up by one of the English settlers horsewhipping him, and he was sent back to Edinburgh in disgrace.  Now, I couldn’t find anywhere just exactly what the problem was, but apparently the business of horsewhipping wasn’t a one-sided affair because the English settler also had a saber cut across his face.  At any rate, he went back to Edinburgh in 1820 and didn’t tarry there long, he went back to Paris where he became very friendly with Baron (L          ), who you remember was the senior medical officer in Napoleon’s army, and the genius who devised the system of flying ambulances, so that the wounded could be taken from the front lines expeditiously to a hospital and be treated.  He also became a very, very close friend of Baron Couvier, who you know was an embryologist and also extremely interested in fossil remains, and I think perhaps antedated Darwin in his ideas about evolutional species and so on.  At any rate he becomes a confidante to all of the leading figures in medicine and anatomy while he was in France, and he was a Francophile of the first order, and I think this probably did it from the time when he was in Brussels he learned the language and he became more French than Sartre, and a real dandy.  He was an immaculate dresser and perhaps it was because he was so damned ugly that he had to compensate in some ways, and he had very fancy waistcoats, gold watch fobs, immaculate linen, and he used to take his sister’s curling tongs and curl the wisps of hair that he had in the back of his bald head, and he was really quite an immaculate figure.  He had three precepts which he thought were important for leading the good life, to avoid strong liquor, to get up early in the morning, and have a fresh change of linen every day.  Now this was not, I might add, the common thing for a Scotsman to do either then or now.  Alright after he returned to Edinburgh in 1822, he returned to the dissecting rooms of his old tutor John Barclay at 10 Surgeons Square, right in the center of Edinburgh, and he worked so well that in 1825 Barclay made him his partner, and then the next year, in 1826, poor old John Barclay corked off, and there was Dr. Knox with the most popular school of anatomy in Edinburgh left in his lap.  Now, Barclay had a tremendous following and at the peak of his fame he had 300 students and he lectured twice a day, but after Knox took over, he was so good that he had 500 students and he couldn’t accommodate them in two sessions, so that he would lecture three times a day, and he had a lovely melodious voice and presence and would come in there and lay his gold watch on the desk, and then he would lecture.  He used no illustrations of any sort, and you know this is heresy in our days when you must have visual aides, he felt that the only visual aides you needed was the dissected body, and he used to pour derision on the head of his rival Dr. Lizars who used to draw the body with colored chalks, and he said these were crude things that looked like a whale, and he wanted no part of that.  Now, this strikes me as being sort of funny because in my day the most popular lecturer on anatomy in Edinburgh was a man called Jimmeson who was known as the author of a compendium on anatomy know as Wee Jimmy, and Jimmy had a black skull cap and he was the senior demonstrator in anatomy for 54 years in Edinburgh and he lectured exclusively from chalk drawings on blackboards of which he had a large number which are published and are in the library, these illustrations done by an engraver.  He did essay one time to use a blackboard and chalk.  When he got to give a lecture one day, he found that his assistants hadn’t prepared the body and all that he had to talk from was a humerus and while he was enlarging on the attachments to the humerus, he took a piece of chalk and started to draw on the blackboard, and the wind blew the candles out and he thought this was a judgment on him, and he never used the blackboard again.  However, he was a draftsman of the first order because in his notes and in the books that he wrote, the illustrations were by his own hand, and indeed he was quite a connoisseur of art, and he actually wrote a book on anatomy, especially for the use of artists, so it’s very difficult for me to understand why he didn’t use illustrations in his lectures.  Now, in order to satisfy this tremendous demand for bodies, he had to pay 700 pounds per annum to get his subjects, and at the rate of 10 pounds a body, then this meant he used 70 bodies a year, merely to dissect and demonstrate to the students.  Now, politically, he was a radical.  It was fashionable in the old days of the French Revolution for the intellectuals to be on the side of the French revolutionaries.  His father was, Robert Burns was, so that he himself was politically a radical.  He was scientifically advanced, much more so than his colleagues, and religiously, he was a freethinker, and that puts the kiss of death on you in Edinburgh, at least it did in these days.  I think the thing however, that endears Knox to me was his unfailing good humor.  He was just idolized by his students, and he was never at a loss, and a couple of medical students had a bet with each other...one of them said, “I bet you can’t get Knox’s goat” and the other guy said “I’m sure I can” so as Dr. Knox was walking home one day, this medical student confronted him, and he said “Dr. Knox, you’re absolutely the most ugly man I have ever laid my eyes on” and poor old Dr. Knox looked at him and said, “Well, obviously, you’ve never seen my brother.”  But at the same time, he was a man of considerable vanity.  Here’s a man at the age of 25 is the outstanding teacher of anatomy at Edinburgh, so that he wasn’t a shrinking violet.  He had a good conceit of himself, as they say in Scotland, and he didn’t think very highly of his other colleagues.  Syne and he were bitter enemies from day one, and of course Syne was an irascible, nasty man at the best of times who quarreled with everybody, and the only man who could get on with Syne in his entire history it said was his son-in-law who was Liston and that was only, I suppose, because he was a Quaker, and a very nice guy.  You know the leading surgeon of Europe at that time was probably Liston who could whip a stone out of your bladder in a couple of minutes or at the very most in three minutes, but like many surgeons he had a misadventure one day.  He drained an abscess in a man’s chest which turned out to be an anurism of his aorta, and so Knox didn’t think very much of that and he told the class on the particular occasion that “it’s surely unnecessary for me to add that a knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and surgery is neither connected with or dependent on group force, ignorance, and presumption.  Nor has it anything to do with an utter destitution of honor and common honesty,” and that was how he dealt with Liston.  Now, scientifically, he did a great deal of things.  When he was sailing out to the Cape, he didn’t waste his time playing bridge, or things like that, like many of us would do.  He caught fish and dolphins and things and dissected them, and he wrote at that time notes on the kidneys of these animals, and I think that his major anatomical work was on the anatomy of the eye.  He was very interested in the macula of the eye, and even with the primitive microscopes that we had at that time, he wrote a series of articles on the Macula in a large variety of animals and compared them.  Unfortunately, at that time too in Scotland, there weren’t any good textbooks of anatomy, and if you wanted to learn anatomy, you had to go to the French, and being an expert linguist, he translated Cloquer’s system of anatomy in 1829, Beclard’s general anatomy in 1830, DeBlainvilles’s lectures on comparative osteology in 1839, and then later on when he was in disgrace, and we’ll talk about this later, he himself wrote a manual of human anatomy in 1852 which was infinitely the best textbook of anatomy for medical students that there was at that time.  Now, he was a inveterate fisherman, there was nothing he liked to do better than fish, and he wrote a book on all the best places to fish in Scotland, and how to do it and so on...and he did a great deal of research on fish.  He investigated what herrings fed on, and salmon and trout and so on and made a lot of original investigation into the ecology of marine animals, and I was very pleased to read when I was doing the research for this, about the fact that he dissected a couple of whales.  Now, Sundays in Scotland are the most miserable days that you can imagine because you’re not allowed to do anything which is remotely pleasurable.  You go to church in your best clothes and then there is nothing else to do.  You can’t go to the movies, you can’t go to burlesque or anything like that, and as a child it was just a miserable day so the only thing that we could think to do on Sunday afternoons was to go to the Royal Scottish Museum and look at the naked statues there and giggle a little, and then when we were a little older we used to eye the girls, but as well as doing these things I used to look out the roof of the Royal Scottish Museum and there was an enormous skeleton of a whale which must have been forty or fifty feet long with great huge vertebra, and I am pleased to learn this was the first whale that he dissected, and this articulated skeleton he gave to the Royal Scottish Museum.  Now, as a young man, he thought that the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh should have an anatomical museum like the Royal College of Surgeons in England, and as you know this was largely started with a nucleus of John Hunter’s collection, and he made his business to add to the museum that was there, and he was sent down to London to look at the collection of anatomical specimens which Sir Charles Bell had, and he advised the college that they should buy this collection, and he brought this collection home to Edinburgh with him and suitably displayed it, and over the years, he added tremendously to this collection at his own expense, and he had 156 fossil specimens from the Red Stone, from the quarries on about Edinburgh, and this was his particular (           ).  He became the conservator of this museum in 1824.  Much, and I say against the wishes of James Syne, who tried to block his appointment.  May, I have the lights again.  Now, as I say, he needed (         ) specimens for his anatomical laboratory, and this is how he came into contact with Burke and Hare.  Now, here’s a picture of William Hare, and he was an Irishman born in Newry, and by all accounts he was a repulsive looking man.  One of the contemporary descriptions of his said that he had dull, dead, lackish, reptilian eyes, set wide apart, and one higher than the other, a course-lipped mouth and high broad cheekbones.  Now this man came from Ireland to work on the Union Canal which we were digging between Edinburgh and Glasgow so that goods could be transported, and there were large numbers of Irishmen that came to Scotland in these days, and indeed still do.  It was better living in poverty in Scotland than starving to death in Ireland, and I think it’s true to say that the ghettos of Scotland were filled with the poor Irish Catholics rather than with Negroes or Mexicans, and these were the people who came as seasonal workers to work on the farms.  These were the people who were the (         ), and these were the lowest echelons of the 19^th century of Scotland.  This man worked on the canal, and while he was there he met another Irishman called Loque, who had a lodging house in Edinburgh, and this lodging house was a two story building behind an old town land, behind one of these tenements that I showed you, although this one was knocked down, and was approached through a close and down a few stairs, and it was called Tanner’s Close because behind his lodging house, there was a tannery and you know how (        ).  Now he had a few rooms on the ground floor, and one was a very tiny room, a wretched cupboard somebody described it as, with a window looking out on a pigsty, and a blind wall, and the other two larger rooms had nothing but beds in them, beds everywhere, and this is what we used to call a (          ) in Scotland in the old days where the poorest of the poor could spend the night for thrawpence a night and three in a bed.  Now while he was there, he met Mrs. Loque and he was having him some hanky panky with Mrs. Loque, so her husband kicked him out, never to darken their doors again, but he died pretty soon afterwards so when Hare got to hear about it, he came back and he...Lucky Hare, as she was called, Lucky Loque rather, took off where they left off and as you can see they had a child as a result of this alliance.  And they, then, had a common law marriage, and Lucky Loque was said to be a hard-featured, tight-lipped, tough and far from an attractive woman, and she would wear a man’s clothes.  She would wear a harry’s jacket and she was quite an expert wheeling barrels of dirt from the canal as any of the men, and she was an absolute debauched woman, constantly drunk, constantly fighting, and she and Hare always were fighting with each other in the street, but stuck together, cause there must have been something about each other that they liked.  I think probably the idea was that they were both so repulsive that nobody else would have anything to do with them.  However, while he was working on the canal, my other picture of Burke unfortunately, has gone missing, this is his death mask made by a medical student, but we’ll come to that later.  This was another man who was a higher type than Hare because he had some pretensions to learning.  He could read and write, and this man was born in the county Tyrone in 1872, and he served as a soldier of sorts in the Donegal Militia, but after he came home, he deserted his wife and his children, and came to Scotland, again, to work on the Union Canal, and where he met Hare, and he settled in a little town called Maddiston where he met Helen MacDougal, who was a black Protestant.  Now she was no gem either.  She had left her original husband and she lived for a few years with a sawyer called MacDougal by whom she had two children, but she was charmed by this man who had a real lot of Irish blarney, and although she was a dour, large-boned woman, she and he hit it off right from the first, so she left MacDougal and went off with him.  Now, it’s at this point then that our story takes off in 1828 with Hare and his wife running this house with the poor people living there, and Helen MacDougal and our friend Burke went to live there with the Hares.  Now, may I have the lights, please, just for a minute.  At this time there was a poor old pensioner called himself Old Donald, and Old Donald wasn’t very well, and he was four pounds behind in his rent, but all was well because he was a pensioner, and in a few weeks time he was due to get his check.  The only thing is the poor old fellow corked off before his check arrived and Hare, he was kind of honked off because the guy died and there was no profit for him.  But somewhere along the line they had heard you could get money for bodies, so than what happened was, that when the undertaker came to get the body, he was (          ) as they say in Scotland, he was put in the coffin and it was screwed down, and as soon as the undertaker left, he unscrewed the coffin, put tanner’s bark from the tannery behind in the coffin and made off with his body.  Now they were greenhorns at this game, they didn’t know quite where to go, so they went to the university and said to a medical school “Now where would you sell a body if you had one?  We would like to see Professor Monroe” and the medical schools said “you don’t want to go to him, the very best place to go to is Dr. Knox, and if you take the body to Dr. Knox, he’ll buy it from you.  Now, they weren’t very smart, because they only got 7 pound 10 for Old Donald’s body instead of the usual 10 pounds, but this was the start.  It was easy money and they went off and got drunk on it, so after a small interval, there was another old guy came to spend the night there who was a miller and his name was Joseph, and he was kind of poorly too, so they put a pillow over his face, and he promptly expired and so they took the body to the dissection rooms again, but this time they did much better.  They got 10 pounds for this body.  Now, this seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, and their next victim was a nice old lady called Abigail Simpson and she was a salt vendor.  She would go around “We want salt.  We want salt” and she was a pensioner of Sir John Hope, and she used to have to walk 14 miles into town to get her weekly allotment which was 1/6 pence or 18 pence, and she also bought a can of broth, and one day when she was in picking up her allotment she met our friend Burke and went and had a few drinks with him, and that was the last time she ever drank anything, cause they smothered her too, and put her in a tea chest, and took her to see Dr. Knox.  This was shortly followed by another fellow, who was an Englishman, so he really doesn’t count, but this poor guy was an (       ) match seller, and when he was there, he developed the jaundice.  Now, if you have a rooming house, and you have somebody with the jaundice, that puts the other customers off.  You don’t mind their lice, and you don’t mind their B.O. under these circumstances, but if he’s got the jaundice, that’s not very good.  So in order to prevent the other customers being run off, they killed him too, but this time they found a new method.  Burke held this poor old man’s nose in the nostrils between the fingers of one hand, and covered up his mouth with the other hand, while Hare lay across his chest, and he quickly expired too without a mark on the body, and this of course has come down in the ages as Burking after Burke who invented it, and this seemed like a very good way, and they put him into a box too, and they took him off, and this time, for the first time, they actually met Dr. Knox himself.  The previous people they had dealt with were his assistants, and these were very distinguished people.  His principle assistant this time was a man called Ferguson who later became the president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and his friend until his dying day, and Willy, as Knox called him, and Dr. Knox had a marvelous friendship their entire life.  Now, the story becomes much more interesting at this point, because flushed with excitement they looked around for more people for the dissection rooms.  And everything had gone so well, they got quite courageous, they started taking a few risks.  Their next victim...may I have the lights for a minute...was this girl...oh I’m sorry, here’s Helen MacDougal, you see quite unlike other Scotsgirls she was no beaute.  She had a face like a horse, and the place where this hotel used to be was at the West Port.  Now I showed you a sign saying the West Port.  On the opposite corner there’s also a pub, and you can see what it’s called so gone, but not forgotten.  Now, here is Mary Patterson and this doesn’t really do her justice because she was 18 years old, and she was probably the best-looking whore in Edinburgh at the time.  And she and her friend Janet, Janet Brown picked up Burke in one of these pubs in the Canongate, and he invited them to come and have a wee drink in his brother’s house.  He had a brother called Constantine, which seems rather a grandiose name, so when they were drinking at Constantine’s house, Janet Brown was making time with Burke, cause you know he was a real sociopath.  He had a great deal of charm, and unfortunately this very happy, drunken party was interrupted by the appearance by Helen MacDougal or Nellie MacDougal, who raised all kinds of nonsense and kicked Janet Brown out of the house, but left poor Mary in there, also in her house, and in a very short time, they made away with Mary Patterson too, and she finished up in the dissection rooms.  Now, she was so good looking that all of the medical students there came to ogle her, because you know there’s nothing that interests a typical medical student more than a good-looking girl, and even when she was dead she was worthwhile looking at, and she was so good-looking that Dr. Knox himself hired an artist to make a picture of this girl, and instead of dissecting her right away they put her in a barrel of whiskey, so that she could be used for a special presentation on his lecture on muscles.  Now, before you get the wrong idea, I worried about this whiskey too, but I’m quite sure...I’m quite sure this whiskey is what’s called lowland whiskey.  There’s two kinds of whiskey, there’s Highland Whiskey, which is made of(           ), and there’s Lowland Whiskey which is used to diluteness, and it’s kind of like Vodka, and I’m  quite sure a man of sentiment and feeling like Dr. Knox would have never used Highland Whiskey to pickle this poor girl’s body.  But there was sort of a complication because Ferguson had spent the night before with Mary Patterson and he became unglued when he saw her.  He did make some investigations and it was said that she had died in a drunken stupor, and that was not uncommon in Edinburgh at that time.  May, I have the lights please.  Now, Burke amongst these other jobs, when he wasn’t working on farms and digging in canals and things like that...fifty minutes nearly up...okay, I’ll hurry very quickly...May I have the lights so I can hear myself talk.  He had this woman who would go around the ashcans and get leather so that when he was in the shoe repair business, he would have something to repair shoes with.  Now, there was a succession of other victims...alright...let’s have the lights for just a minute...there was Daft Jamie, who you see here, and Daft Jamie was a fellow of high grade mental defective, but everybody liked him, he was very friendly guy and he would have (      ) he would ask, “what month of the year do the women talk least”, and of course the answer was February because there was fewer days in that, and he was a big strong fellow, and a local workman, and Mrs. Hare got him drunk in the lodging house and they did away with him too.  Okay, let’s talk just a little bit more.  There was another poor old lady who came to town with her grandson who was a deaf mute, and not content with doing away with the old lady, they did away with the child too, and at last something got to Burke because from that time on, he could never sleep with the lights out.  He always slept with a candle and a bottle of whiskey by his bed to try to banish the ghost of this child that always came to haunt him.  Now they were eventually rumpled because they murdered off a poor old Irish lady who came from the same place as Burke himself, and so because they came from the same part of Ireland, he took her home on Halloween, and again they smothered her, and unfortunately, he hid the body under a pile of snow, and indeed one of his friends uncovered the foot of the body ( ) and he told her not to interfere with that, and you know when you tell a woman not to interfere with something, then you know what she’s going to do.  She discovered the cadaver there.  She called the police, but meanwhile Burke and Hare got wind of this, so they put the body in a box and got a porter to carry it to Dr. Knox’s dissecting rooms, so that the corpus delicti was removed.  However, the police got on the job very quickly.  They found the body and they had it examined by three of the eminent physicians of the time who said well, they couldn’t really find any cause of death.  They suspected that she had been done away with, but there was no real proof, and the great virtue of burking somebody is that you don’t leave any marks.  (     ) bone is in tact, and I don’t know of the significance of subca(     ) hemorrhages in the lungs was entertained...was known at that time.  At any rate all together as far as we know, they did away with about 16 people during this time, and you know when you get a lot of money, you’ve got to explain it away sometime and Mrs. Hare allowed as she had come into an inheritance, and every time they were going to do away with somebody, she would announce that she was going to send off letters to her lawyer to get another part of her inheritance, and indeed they did very well.  May I have the lights please, just for a minute.  Now, there are very many other fascinating things about this whole story, but it was very difficult for the prosecutor at that time to make a case against these people, because nobody could really prove that these people had been murdered.  There was no good medical evidence.  So, the populace of Edinburgh at that time, they wanted to get some action on this, because they were absolutely incensed so that Sir William Roe was the prosecutor at that time, he thought, “I’ve got to get one of these people and get them to confess” so he talked to Hare who was the dumbest of the four of these people, and said, “Now, we know that you’ve done it but if you’ll only fess up to it, we’ll make you a witness for the crown, so that you will get off with it, and this will convict the rest.”  So he turns king’s evidence and they started the trial on Christmas Eve of 1828 which seems an incredible time to do it, and of course Burke was found guilty, and he was kept...he and Hare and the two women(         )...show the slides for just a minute...were kept in the (        ) jail.  Now the (       ) jail has got to make room for administration offices, but these (    ) and towers there are the only remains of them, and in this (     ) jail, these people were kept.  Now the two women, they were let off too, because there was no real case against them, so that the only one who had to suffer was Burke, but he really didn’t care because he had a carcinoma of the scrotum anyways and his days were probably numbered.  And indeed Dr. Knox was treating him for this, but he was hanged and here’s the artist’s conception of the hanging.  Everybody turned up for this, and they were paying 10 pounds for a seat (     ) get a good view and it’s not a very good place, but here’s the exact spot here with St.(           ) Cathedral in the background where Burke was hanged.  But that wasn’t the worst of him.  He was also sentenced to be anatomized, and at that time 40,000 people from Edinburgh came out to view the remains, but it started off a riot, because when the medical students came to see this demonstration all the seats were taken, by the people in town, so they raised all kinds of hell.  There was a riot, and it was only quelled when Sir Robert Christianson came.  He said to the students (               ) so that we can see the body and it wasn’t a very good dissection because Monro couldn’t dissect worth a damn.  It looked like an (            ) anyway.  When you opened the head, there was blood spattered everywhere, and it was not really a very neat job.  But one of the things that I discovered when I was in Edinburgh last time was that some of the medical students took the skin of Burke’s shoulder and had it tanned, and it was made into a wallet, and that wallet is to be seen today in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and indeed his anatomized skeleton was hanging in the museum of the medical school at that time.  Now, can I have the lights please.  Now, this episode completely ruined Dr. Knox.  From that time on it was downhill.  He was nickeled and dimed to death by the faculty of the University of Edinburgh.  He eventually was prevented from teaching medical students.  They kicked him off the royal society of Edinburgh rolls.  He was prev... he was struck off the rolls of the Royal College of Surgeons.  And even his old schools, in the history of the schools never mention the fact that he was Dux.  One of the postscripts which I think is heartwarming was that I talked to the present curator of the museum who gave me the photographs, which you might pass around here of these people and he himself located Knox’s grave in London where he died.  He finished off as the pathologist of the Cancer Hospital there and Dr. M        , or Professor M          himself put up the headstone on Knox’s grave where it was unmarked before with the years that he had lived.  He died at the age of 69.  Now, one of the fruits of this case was that for the first time, there was legislation passed to provide schools of anatomy with legitimate subjects, and this case was largely responsible for the Anatomy Act which was passed in 1832, but it took another horrible crime before this eventually came to pass.  There was another couple of fellows in England, who got this idea of murdering people for the dissecting rooms, and they had a very neat trick.  What they did was to drop people with opium, and then suspend them by the ankles by a rope in a well, and so that they got water on their head, as it is said, and died unconscious in this position, and they were rumbled when they had a 14 year old Italian boy, who made his living by showing white mice, which seems an interesting occupation.  They were rumbled and the popular outcry was responsible for the anatomy acts in Britain, which said that medical schools could get bodies provided they were given to the schools by the executors of the body after they had been dead for 48 hours, having been properly certified as dead, and after notice was given to the inspector of anatomy.  An interesting sidelight on this, just so that these poor subjects wouldn’t be in bad company, they said that no longer will convicted or hanged felons be anatomically dissected, but instead they will hang in chains or be suitably disposed of without dissection.  Now, I’m sure there are many more things that I could say about this fascinating man and this fascinating story, but our president says it’s time I shut my big mouth, and thank you very much for your attention.