Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Death, Dissection & Grave Robbing

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Genital warts fashioned into necklaces, teeth harvested from the battlefield and blood vessels eternalised in wax: these are some of the things that you might find inside Edinburgh’s Surgeons’ Hall Museums.But who did they belong to? Kate is talking to Thomas Elliot, head of learning and interpretation, to find out.*WARNING this episode includes themes of an adult nature*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Lewis Mason.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Pickled penises and floating feet. No, I'm not concocting a witch's brew. These are the jars which line the walls of the pathology museum, a collection that houses body parts from all kinds of people and creatures. But just who and where did these objects come from? Join me, Kate Lister, betwixt the sheets,

as we have a look at the history of anatomy and surgery. What do you look for any man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister.

We didn't want to deny you any of the gory details for this episode, so if you are of a squeamish nature, I don't know what you're doing here, but you have been warned. Today we are looking at cadavers and anatomy. Charlotte and Sophie went back out onto the streets to ask people which body part they would most like to be displayed in a museum. My thumb. Thumbs up to everyone who walks past. My tits, 100%. I need to be seen. I'm just put it out there. My lips. It's nice and juicy. My hand still adorned with all of my jewelry. I'm joined today for this anatomical study by Thomas Elliott,

head of learning and interpretation at Edinburgh's Surgeon Hall Museum. He tells us where the museum's artefacts came from and what it's like to work surrounded by body parts all day. Let's begin. Thomas Elliott, thank you so much for agreeing to speak to me today. It's so nice to have you here. You're very welcome. job, it's like one of those dream jobs that I think about. I've got such a morbid fascination

with this stuff and then you're someone who has a career in this so I feel perfectly at ease to talk to you about all of this stuff. I mean it must be a hell of a conversation starter at dinner parties. It certainly is, yeah. You see the intake of breath initially and then really? Wow. Being a sex historian, I get the same pause. It usually goes like this is what do you do if we're living, I'm a historian, what do you study? And then I've got a couple of seconds of do I tell the truth or do I like a historian of accounting?

How does it go for you? How do you pitch that one? It starts off, oh, what do you do work in a museum? Oh, what museum? Oh, it's an anatomy museum. Really? Things in jars? Yeah. Is that the question? Things in jazz? That's basically it, yeah. We refurbished the museum a few years ago

and we had, you know, Val McDermott, the crime writer in. So she's a big fan. and she came out with this great phrase she said it's a brilliant place for the inordinately curious and I thought that summed up perfectly. There is a morbid fascination around it

but there's so many stories to tell just all around the Surgeons Museum are you just completely used to it now? Is it just that you can just go to work and you've got things in jars and body parts and somebody's foot or eyelash and you can just sit there and eat a sandwich it doesn't even?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean it wasn't always that way you know, I've been here now coming up for 15 years, and certainly when I first started, one in the museum looked very different. It was very old-fashioned. It was all the kind of shades of brown and mucky brown carpet. But you come in in the morning, if you were the first in, and you were switching the lights on and you're checking around for shadows and things like that, whereas now it's just part of furniture. Oh, that's it. They must take a while, though, to get like that. It does, it does, yeah. Although it's a very specialist museum in a lot of regards, you know,

it's quite a technical subject. One of the universal things is we all have a body. We're all fascinated by our own bodies and particularly what happens when things go wrong and how they might be able to be fixed. So in that regard, it is genuinely a universal thing of interest to anyone. And although a lot of people think of us

as there for medical training, nowadays in 21st century, the vast, vast majority of our visitors don't have any background in medicine or surgery or even health-related, it's just people off the street who are curious to hear these stories and find out how we came to be, how we got to where we are now. I bet you got asked this question all the time. But what is, so it's from your favourite specimens in the museum?

Rather than an individual specimen, there was a technique used, particularly in the kind of 19th century, called corrosion casts. What the anatomists would do is they would dissect away, let's say it was a knee joint. They'd dissect away all the flesh and the tissue. because what they were interested in was highlighting the layout of the blood vessels. So they would drain the blood from it, but then they would inject the vessels with a wax. And sometimes it would be coloured or sometimes it would be painted afterwards. So when the wax cools down, it solidifies.

They'll paint it red for arteries, blue for veins, and then they'll varnish over it to preserve it. And so you've got these beautiful things where you've got a section of bone with just the blood vessels. surrounding it. It looks almost like branches on the tree and they're just stunning looking things. You know, they could do it in any part of the body and they just look stunning. I think I've seen a few of those here and there but didn't

fully realise what they were until you've just said that. I mean, do you have any sense of who that person was? It's an interesting one. We're very, very aware because in the museum world you're used to talking about objects and things and everyone

does it. You know, you can't help but slip into it. after a time. But we are very aware of their human remains and we want to treat them with the dignity they deserve. But having said that in terms of individual case histories, very often we've got next to know information about them. When we were doing the refurb, we were referring back to the original manuscript catalogs and we were able to date some of these specimens to the late 1700s. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And it'd be maybe just a section of urethra or something like that. but it was dated from 1780 or something like that. You could just be walking around in the 18th century

thinking that you weren't going to ever make your mark on the world. Unbeknownst, your ureth would be prized possession. Yes, 250 years later. The vast majority of our human remains collection dates from the 19th century. We have got some early 20th century specimens, but in relative terms, it is very much a historic collection. Do you give them names? Not really, no.

I mean, there are certain cases where we do know a bit more background. Okay. You know, sometimes you'll look on the records that we have, and it might simply say elderly male and it's showing cancer of, you know, something. But in other instances, it might be, oh, this was a young 22-year-old sailor who was out in the Baltics and fell off a mast and had a compound fracture of the humorous

or something like that. So you get a bit more. We've all got bodies and you can't help but try and create stories around it and look at your own body. One of the strangest exhibits I ever saw in an anatomical museum was in the mutter museum and it was, it was genital warts, but somebody had collected them and like threaded them onto, I'd sure it wasn't a piece of string, but so the result was almost like a genital wart necklace that was floating away in formaldehyde. And it's just, wow, wow. Do you have more recent exhibits, like more recent acquisitions, more modern day buddies? Not really, no, no.

No. We have lots of modern displays, but it tends to be things like surgical instruments or artworks and things like that, but in terms of the anatomical specimens, now and again, what will happen is, let's say, for example, a hospital pathology department is closing down,

and they're left with, these human remains and obviously nowadays, you know, the legal regulations around it are quite rightly very strict. So it's not something that you can just put in a skip. They're left with this inherited issue of what to do with them. And because we're licensed premises, you know, we fall under the Human Tissue Act, but because of the nature of our institution, we have an exemption that allows us to hold and display these things. So we're sometimes asked on occasion, would you be the guardian of these things, but we're not actively looking for it. We're not actively collecting things.

It's almost we feel the responsibility for helping out in those scenarios. How do people study anatomy today? Is it still dissecting bodies? There is still dissection, and it's a bit of an ongoing debate amongst the kind of medical world and medical schools. Some medical schools have stopped all dissections, and some continue to do it. ones that have stopped it, it's almost like a show and tell in a way where they'll use prosections, things that have already been anatomised and they'll show the students and talk in some detail about

what they're looking at. There are obviously virtual training tools and things now that are sometimes used amongst the medical community and the surgeons themselves, you know, they'll say, you know, you can't ever replace hands-on dissection and then other people will argue it's a bit behind the curve and we need to move with the times. I think it is still a bit of a debate. There are still medical schools, universities that do have the traditional, the first year medics or the second year medics come in and they have a cadaver for a year and they work slowly, you know, throughout the year dissecting down, you know, the various levels, but not every medical school.

So I read Professor Sue Black's book on Nassby. One of the things that she wrote in that, she's fantastic, isn't she? I'm such a fan girl. It's academic fan girls are so weird because... Do you know that she's just the nicest woman as well? She's so down the earth and so grounded. She was telling us stories about how she get into it. She was brought up in Aberdeenshire, I think it was, up in the northeast of Scotland.

And as I think she said, there's a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old. Her dad said, you need to go out and start earning a living. And so she got a job in the local butcher shop. Wow. Honestly, I just think she's amazing. But one of the things she wrote in the book was that when she, meets her first year anatomy students. The thing she tells them is that the person that you will perform a dissection on in your third year is still alive today.

You know, when you get moments when you're reading books and you have to just put it down and kind of go, what's the process? Not necessarily the dissection, but if you wanted to donate your body to a medical facility for dissection, how do you do that? Absolutely. There are forms online. You would basically approach the individual. Now, what I will say is people don't donate bodies to museums nowadays in that way.

It's all done through the universities, which have medical schools attached to them. So the anatomy department there will have procedure in place. People get in touch, say, I would like to donate my body to science when the time comes, and then there's a kind of ongoing discussion about it. I don't know all the details of it, but I do know, for example, the institution, the university, are only allowed to keep that body for a certain period of time. It may be something like two years after following death. And then they're given some kind of memorial service and then cremated.

And the families of the person who's donated their body are invited along to that with the medical students. So I've never been to one, but I believe it's quite a moving, quite a touching thing where recognition is given. and the medical students are there to show their appreciation with the families if they so wish to come along. That feels quite moving, just hearing you say that. But one of the things that, I don't know, I'll do a bit of research around this. And I don't know what, I just had this kind of, like, daft idea that it would be like you'd show up at the university in your old age and you'd dotech

and you'd quietly pass away and then someone would just come and collect you. But there's an industry behind this. Yeah. And I mean, rightly, so because of the kind of well-known organ-retem. attention scandals and things like that. The law was tightened up to try and prevent those things and it's all based around that issue of informed consent, which in our situation didn't apply. You know, the notion of consent to give your body for those kind of reasons, it only really began post-Second World War II. 200 years ago, if you died in hospital or you had something removed,

an arm amputated. It was very much seen as hospital property. It didn't belong to you anymore, which is why we end up with this historic collection. And that's another reason why we're so sensitive to the idea these are human remains that deserve respect. Because we're very well aware of that the specimens we're looking after nowadays, the vast majority of the cases, the patient, the person, wouldn't have had any choice in the matter. Now, I suspect if I was living in the mid-19th century and I had... had a major problem that needed a leg amputated, I wouldn't probably be too worried about what happened to that leg afterwards.

The fact that I survived, hopefully, would probably be good enough for me. The level of respect that I can sort of hear you saying and about how the remains are treated so reverently in the museum, it's lovely to hear that, and especially because that, as you started to touch on there, is not how it's always been. And it's strange how the attitudes around things can change so radically. because the history of anatomy is murky. Yes, to say the least, and there's no getting away from that.

There's no point in pretending otherwise. Because part of our job is to tell the full story in as honest a way as we can. It's always tricky, as you know, in history, to put 21st century values on something that happened 100 years ago or 500 years ago because times do change and moral decision-making changes and ethical values change. Thank goodness. And it's a real tricky one because I'm one half of you looking at the history of anatomy going, oh, that is, hello. But on the other hand, studying the human body has been absolutely vital for scientific advancement. How old is the study of anatomy? When of sort of the earliest records? How far back are we going?

Very earliest, go date back really to Alexandria and places like that in ancient Egypt that they were doing some human dissection as well. as well as doing quite a lot of animal dissection, but I wouldn't have said it was commonplace. And one of the issues was, for example, Galen is revered as, you know, the kind of father of medicine in ancient Greece. But by and large, he was dissecting pigs and some macaque monkeys. He kind of made the assumption that, well, this is what a pig heart looks like. A human heart's bound to be kind of similar. But then because he was on question for centuries, you know, for a thousand years until the Renaissance, then all these mistaken assumptions were made about anatomy and the human body and how it works. And it was only when people start really dissecting it. And I think Italy was probably the beginning of it.

You know, it started maybe the late 13th century, but then gathered a paste during the Renaissance period. And then direct observation of an actual body was taking place. And some of these mistakes were then corrected. But it was very controversial at the time because people, Vesalius would be contradicting the classics, you know, the galens of this world, and people were poo-pooing them, saying, oh, no, you're saying you know more than these Greek deities almost. And he was like, well, I've dissected the body and I can see that the liver has five lobes as opposed to four or whatever it may be. But it was very controversial at the time. When you think that medical facts have a half-life that basically means that when

a student starts their medical degree. By the time they finish, almost half of what they've learnt will have been revised and being taught differently. That's how fast medical's advancing. And yet for hundreds of years, we all just went,

no, no, Galen's got it right. It's like the greatest hits of anatomy and that nobody advanced it further. And it's really controversial. But was it controversial for other reasons apart from challenging Galen? Was the idea of cutting up a body? I think so, yeah.

I mean, there were very definitely societal sensitivities around it, religious sensitivities, absolutely. Did the church ever ban it? Was it ever a... There was a strange thing, but there was a pope in about the 13th century. And it's often kind of written as this was a papal bullishhood that banned human dissection. But it didn't technically ban dissection per se. I think it was more to do with, you know, when you were having these big crusades and people were grabbing relics and saints' fingers and all this kind of stuff.

He issued a decree against that. I think at one point there was like seven different foreskins of Christ being exhibited at various different churches all around the Europe. St. Paul who had 15 fingers or something like that. But there were very definitely religious objections to it and that went carried on right through in the peak of the period we're alluding to where bodies are getting stolen from graveyards and things. know, that was a big part of it.

It was seen that these people were getting denied a Christian burial and therefore wouldn't reach heaven. And that's why it was so feared. And so there was a real terror amongst the population that if my family members dug up, then they somehow wouldn't reach heaven because, you know, the grave had been violated. I've read that artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,

they didn't perform a, like, dissection, but they drew and sketched from buddies that were. Artists were certainly attendant at dissections around that period. Very definitely. Now, I think Leonardo may well have dissected himself. I'm not so sure about Michelangelo, but I think Leonardo may have done a bit of, under some tutoredge, I'm assuming.

But if he didn't, he was very certainly attendant at dissections. And that link between art and anatomy continues through the centuries. When you think about some of his sketches and anatomical, Yeah, he was drawing that from somebody, wasn't he? Oh, absolutely. There was a big exhibition of Leonardo's anatomical sketchbooks. I think it's part of the Royal Collection. It was on display in various parts of the UK,

and it came up to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, and there was a professor speaking as part of the launch event of that. And he was saying it is utterly incredible, just how accurate that is. Even with today's eyes looking at it, he said, you know, his sketch of a heart is, absolutely anatomically accurate. I was reading something the other day,

and it was saying that for centuries, people thought that the heart was what regulated emotion throughout the body. They didn't know it was the brain. And that kind of makes sense in a weird way because you feel your heart beat faster if you're upset or angry or in love. And if you're not dissecting and if you don't know where things go, that's obviously it leads to huge misinformation and error,

so they needed to do this. Absolutely. And I mean, there were all sorts of weird and wonderful theories on the mechanics of the body. And so one prevalent view, for example, and we're going back to before the Renaissance times, and I think this may be originated from Galen, was the idea of blood in the body,

the idea of a heart pumping blood around the body wasn't really understood. The most common use theory at the time was somehow that the liver created blood and then it circulated around the body by some unknown means. But as it circulated around, the blood was getting used up. So the liver was constantly having to regenerate new blood, if you like,

rather than a closed system where it's just recycled constantly. There's usually a weird logic to this stuff. Like when you trace it back and you realise that there's a logic to it, it's just the foundations they're building this on is just complete. Absolutely, yeah. There's been no reason why you would know that until you start dissecting and, you know, William Harvey with these famous experiments that then conclusively proved that, you know, it was the heart that was pumping it around in this closed

circulation system. Now, William Harvey, not only did he quite happily dissect things to find out how a heart worked, but he would go to battles and sit on the battlefield to just get a closer idea, and if he got cold, he would bury himself in the dead bodies? Is that, was that him? I've not heard that. I thought you were going to say something else. I've not heard that one at all. I have heard tale, and I don't know if this is kind of an. anecdotal or urban myth or not that he dissected some members of his own family. Wow. After they died.

Cheers, Dad. Yeah, yeah. That's going to be a frosty family Christmas around the Harvey's house. Yes, absolutely. It wouldn't surprise me because battlefield surgery was often where, I'm maybe overstating it to say big breakthroughs were made. But because, unfortunately, you had lots of practice. There's a famous phrase, I think, from Hippocrates.

in Greece saying he who wants to be a surgeon should go to war, simply because you've got the opportunity to practice, you'll come across more injuries, different injuries, than a lifetime experiencing as a civilian surgeon. We learned a huge amount about doing emergency surgery on blood loss and shock and trauma during Afghanistan, you know, the battles there to the extent that, you know, the field hospitals and some of the field hospitals in those theaters of war, were some of the most advanced in the world. Wow. And I suppose if you want access to severed limbs and bits of people,

that you're going to have a ready supply there, aren't you? The battlefield kept dentists in business for decades. We deal very much with the story of surgery. That's obviously a little niche compartment of the wider medical story. But we have quite a large dental collection. One of the items is set of all sorts. teeth made that are known as waterloo teeth. Oh, no. Because dentists were known to go out and take the teeth from dead bodies and you would have someone else's teeth in your mouth as a set of false teeth.

God. Sorry for anyone who's eating a breakfast as they listen to this one, but, you know. That, it's, I mean, the ingenuity there, waste not want nut, but, oh, wow. You know, this was at a time where false teeth would typically be made of, hippo ivory or walrus ivory or sometimes wood, you know, and they were very crudely crafted and very uncomfortable. Often they were decorative rather than functional, but then they started putting spring attachments to make them a bit more functional and obviously real human teeth would have a better aesthetic appeal. Although I suppose they would be really fancy someone else's teeth in my mouth.

Brush your teeth, ladies and gentlemen, and keep up flossing. I'll be back in a bit with Thomas to examine a few more bodies and hear the truth about the infamous Birken hair. That kind of touches on one of the big issues throughout the history of surgery is supply and demand. So we have a situation where by about the 18th century is now we're in Enlightenment territory and the Industrial Revolution and Scientific Advancement is really racing ahead and there's a real need and a thirst to perform dissection. But what you need is the supply. And people, weren't happy to do this and they weren't, please, I'd like to donate my body to medical science. Maybe they were. So where were in, let's say, the 18th century, the Edinburgh Surgeon Hall in the 18th century, where were they procuring bodies from?

It was very much stolen bodies from graveyards. Yeah. And you're right to put it in such kind of blunt terms. It was a supply and demand issue. The only legal avenue available for an anatomy school at that point was executed criminal. So that was the only legal way you could get hold of a body. Even by the mid-1700s, we were executing less and less people. So there was a real shortage. There was a huge thirst. More and more people were studying anatomy and medicine. And so demand very much outstripped to the legal supply.

And we didn't have refrigerators or anything, did we? Or a morgue. So without being too disgusting, like how long would a body last? If you've managed to, let's just say that you found you executed criminal and they're now there. How long would you be able to work with that? They would tend to do it pretty quickly. You know, as gangs got organised, you know, because there was money to me made in this, you know. In the early days, I have to say, it was quite often it was surgeons with their students going out into the graveyards at night, sourcing their own bodies.

You know, this was an open secret. People knew this was happening and were pretty appalled by it. And so as things develop and more and more medical schools spring up, I guess the surgeons want to take a step back and not be seen to kind of dirty their hands. And so into that gap, organized gangs come along and furnish that supply. So because there's money then to be made, but those gangs were then had people looking out for recently buried bodies. When I say recently, the person might be in the ground buried in the afternoon

and be dug up that same night and then sold to the anatomy school. But because of the lack of refrigeration, that body would have to be dissected, not immediately because you could preserve it in alcohol, you know, in a barrel, and keep it for a certain length of time. But anatomy lessons, interestingly, tended to take place over the winter period where it was colder. So if this is an open secret, and if you have to perform anatomy on a body pretty quickly after you've got it, and there's a huge demand for this stuff,

how were people trying to stop their loved ones being dug up? People must have been aware of it. What was the... Yeah, it depended very much on the individual's personal means, as so often in history. If you're wealthy enough, then they would try and protect the individual graves, so they would put down what were known as mort safes,

which were essentially big iron or metal cage. that would be sunk into the ground over the coffin to deter grave robbers. And then those would stay in place for a certain period of time. But then after, let's say, a month or two months, they could be lifted because that body underneath would be no use to a grave robber. So they were almost leased out and moved around and rented from one grave to the next. If you were a poor person and you didn't have that means at your disposal, there'd be communal watchtowers.

And so people would be employed by the town councils to stand guard over the graveyards and blow a whistle if they saw anything suspicious. And it wasn't unheard of for grave robbers caught in the act to be ceremoniously lynched or at least badly beaten up and then handed over to the authorities.

There are several in Edinburgh where you still see the watchtower. Oh my goodness. Yes. Has anyone ever done any experimental archaeology with this? And do we know how long it would take to get a body out the ground? Because I can't imagine if I'm trying to think if I was digging down six foot, that would take hours. But how fast could these guys do? Because you couldn't be there for hours.

I mean, I think it may have been an hour or two. Some of the, dare I say, skilled grave robbers, the more proficient might be in and out within an hour. because they tend to dig down one end of the coffin and then just slide the body out, often leave the person's clothes. Now, whether it was just the authorities wouldn't have considered it feasible, that you can steal a body or, you know, as supposed philosophically, can you own a body? You know, well, we know, sadly through history, slavery, you know, that's exactly what you were trying to do. But there wasn't a technical offence of stealing a body, but you could steal proper.

property. So jewelry, clothing, rings, so on. So the grave robbers were sometimes careful to take the body, but leave any belongings so that they couldn't get done for. That's some fine print, isn't it? So it's an issue of ownership that you're stealing something that belongs to somebody. But if the person's dead, they don't, their body doesn't belong to them anymore because, wow, okay. It's not undignified enough that you've been hoisted out the grave within an hour of being buried, but you're now going to be carted in the nip to the nearest surgeon's hall. I can't not talk to you about the most infamous case of this, obviously. Who could you be referring to? Who could I be referring to? Absolutely. Because they took it up a notch, didn't they? Birkenhair, the infamous body snatchers.

Absolutely. For people that don't know, in 1820, two men in Edinburgh, William Burke and William Hare, absolutely took up a notch and they decided that they would start killing to service this demand and over a period of a year they killed 16 people that we know about and sold all the bodies to Robert Knox, a Dr Robert Knox who became quite clearly very notorious. He was an anatomist who ran by far in the way the most popular anatomy school in the UK at that time. He had sometimes 500 students in his lectures. He had a huge demand for cadavers.

And when these two characters turn up at his anatomy school in Edinburgh with this ready supply, it's a case of the scientific blinkers go on and ask no questions. You'll hear no lies. How did they get caught? In the end, I guess it was complacency. There were two men that came over from Ireland originally looking for work. And they started on the canal. and things like that. And then they made their way into Edinburgh. One of them repaired shoes for a

part of time, but it was a bit of an itinerant job. So here ran a lodging house where people would come and go and stay for a few nights. And that absolutely played into their hands because these were not well-known characters around the city. They didn't have family and friends around who might notice if they went missing. But the final victim, they had left under a bed, a kind of straw bed, in this lodging house waiting till darkness fell, so because obviously you're not going to transport a murder victim through the streets in broad daylight. They had friends in who noticed they were a bit edgy and a bit nervy.

And they were stupid enough to say, well, we're going out. I don't know if they were going to the pub or going to the shop to buy whiskey or something like that. And they made great play of, but don't go near that bed. Just leave it alone. And of course, human nature, in human nature, someone says, what's behind the door. Oh, nothing. You're going to look behind the door. And so this person, this acquaintance of theirs, discovers this body and raise the alarm. Now, I did a little bit of digging about around this case. And I read that they got paid £7, 10 shillings per cadaver by Knox.

And according to the Bank of England inflation calculator, today's money that's just shy of a thousand pounds. Yeah, something like that. So you can see that's quite lucrative. And if they've bumped off 16 that we know of? For them, they would have seen it as very easy money, because I done that very same thing many years ago trying to work out. Because it's a question you obviously, you always get asked. I think for an average labourer, let's say, someone in their position, one body would have generated the equivalent of maybe six months pay or eight months pay. And that's quite something is, I mean, there must have been a strong motivation. We know about Birkenhek and he because they got caught. Do we know if they were the only ones doing this?

Is there evidence? Because if you're already digging people up, it doesn't seem, maybe I'm revealing more about myself that I want to, but it doesn't seem that much of a leap to kind of go, oh, hang on. Well, I mean, interestingly, with Burke and Heard, their first victim died of natural causes. So they didn't murder. So it was an old lodger who obviously was an ill health.

And he died while he was lodging with hair. They were annoyed because they owed him rent. money of, you know, six pounds or something, and they knew, oh, well, we could get this money that we are owed by selling the body. And that must, that one would assume, have thought, oh, that was easy. Let's just cut out the middleman and take it a step further and start killing. So, but there were other instances. The one infamous case that happened down in London a few years later, and I think it was an Italian poor migrant worker, and they went around and, and they went around, and they killed, I think it was maybe three or four people,

but they ended up getting hung at Newgate, I think it was. But they became known as the London burkers. Burking as a verb entered the vocabulary to burke someone, was to suffocate them, which was burking hair's method of choice. They would get the victims drunk and suffocate them so they weren't leaving obvious marks in the body. You know, in the days before CSI,

it would be almost impossible to tell. As I say, this case in London, and they became known in the press and the penny dreadfuls and all that as the London burkers. Now they weren't both executed, were they burking hair? No. No. No. Yes.

Quite. Justice wasn't served, shall we say. No. The authorities arrest these two. But there was a real pressure to get a conviction because this was a huge, huge news story of the day. The authorities were worried about getting enough evidence to convince. in the court of law because they had one victim under the bed. The rest had already been dissected. One would assume there was no trace of them. No. And so... Circumstantial evidence. That...

So it's circumstantial evidence. How do you absolutely guarantee a conviction? So they put pressure on them and eventually here turned King's evidence against Burke. And in return for a fulsome confession of their activities, he was given immunity from prosecution. So it was Burke that stood trial for murder, was found guilty and was executed. And Hare was held in prison throughout the trial, partly, I guess, for his own safety. And when Burke was safely executed and dispatched of, Hare was told to get out of town, we don't want to see you again. And as far as anyone knows, that's exactly what happened. I don't know if it's still there, but on the, I think it was on the main Street through Edinburgh Centre, there was a police museum there for a while and they had in the

back a wallet that was made, or at least it said it was made out of Burke or Head, that one who's executed skin. Yes, we have one. You have one. We have one in our museum. Several of these, dare I say, mementos were openly on sale at the time. I guess again with human nature, it's the grisly horrible way we are. If there's money to be made out of anything, people will do it. And so these trinkets, these souvenirs, these morbid souvenirs, start appearing for sale in the city, wallets, pocketbook. So what we have is a pocketbook, which is reputedly made from his skin. And inside is just a blank note paper with a pencil. But on the front it says, Burke's skin pocketbook. And on the back, it says executed 1829. It's grisly anyway,

isn't it? But when you look really closely, you can see like the human hairs and like where the pores were in the skin. Is that, sorry, 21 listening, is that what your notebook looks like? Or is it a bit, is it done better than that? It certainly looks like, I mean, it's been tanned. So it essentially looks like leather. So I'm not aware of any hairs surviving. But I guess, yeah, looking closely, you can maybe make out some pores and such like. So he was dissected then, wasn't he? So he was dissected, yeah. And that was part of the standard punishment.

It all kind of comes full circle in a way. The only legal avenue for obtaining a cadaver for dissection was through the courts. So in some of the accounts of this case, it's almost seen as poetic justice on the judge's part that he sentences Burke to dissection. But that was a standard sentence for a serious crime like murder that you were executed and then handed over for dissection. So Burke was executed at Edinburgh University, which is just across the road from us. And because of the notoriety of this case, there were people at the door demanding to be let in.

And eventually it sounds to me almost like a body lying in state. So following the dissection, because they were worried about a riot on their hands, they allowed these people to file past this dissected body to have a little gop at him. Oh, my goodness. And his skeleton still exists in the Edinburgh University Anatomical Museum, which is part of their medical school. And the moral of the story here is don't bump off your house guests and try and take the bodies to Edinburgh Museum because it's just, don't do that. No, please. Don't, don't. Please. Imagine if somebody just showed up in the middle of the night at your museum.

Really? We'd have some forms to fill in for that one. The paperwork's ridiculous. It don't, it's not even worth it. Now, we like to think that we are a million miles away from scandal when it comes to cadavers and bodies and things today because it's so well regulated. But I was reading about a lawsuit against the Biological Resources Centre in Arizona. I mean, these things do still spring up because there are unscrupulous people all over the world making money where they can. I think this funeral home was selling body parts or organs or something, but without telling the family. So, you know, it was, again, this issue of consent.

But they made quite a considerable amount of money before they were discovered. I think the Biological Resource Centre in Arizona, it was that people had donated their bodies to medical science and they were being used in explosion tests. So they were sort of donating their body thinking that it was going to be treated reverently like you were describing the students and a nice send-off. And they were basically, Grandma was being strapped to a cannon and blown into, yeah. Interestingly, I read a book, the title of the book you'll love, it was called Stiff, The Curious Life of Human Codaver's or something like that. That's a great title. And I found it fascinating because it was things I wasn't aware of.

And it's related to what you're saying in that I think quite legitimately sometimes you can donate your body to medical science, but they may not specify exactly how it's used. So it's not necessarily anatomical teaching. So one of the things, for example, is things since CSI has all blown up in popularity, has become quite well known as these body farms. They'll basically put bodies around in this facility under different conditions. So one might be left in the open. One might be hidden in a bin or covered over.

And as grisly as it sounds, there's legitimate scientific knowledge to begin from that in terms of how quickly the decomposer and things like that, which then helps in criminal cases, you know, so if a body is found in a certain condition, it will help date the time of death and things like that. So there are other ways that cadavers, I suppose, are legitimately useful if we want to put it in that way. But I suppose the issue is, if you're donating your body, do you know what you're signing up for? And I think bodies previously were used in seat belt testing and cars and things like that, you know, for road safety. There's something to be, I suppose, said for like, well, you're not using it anymore and

that's where the ethics kick in. But I don't want to finish this by people listening who may have thought about donating the body to medical science and are now just going to have themselves buried and make sure that the relatives put a steel cage over the top. What would be the good reasons to donate your body to medical science? And if anybody wanted to do it, how do you do that? There's obviously the organ donation scheme personally, I think is a great thing. You know, I'm signed up for the organ donor registration. But in terms of donating your whole body, it would very much have to be through the University Medical School, whichever local university medical school.

It's a case of getting in touch with them. They will talk you through the whole process of what it involves, what it doesn't involve, and do it completely openly and transparently with you. But you know your body will be used for dissection by medical students. So you can stipulate that to a certain, or at least put a note on your post-it note on your cadaver that says no rockets, explosions. At the very, very least, no, they will explain all the various ways

that your body may be used. Just before I let you go, final question, is it something that you would consider doing? There's a good question. In principle, yes. I would see no reason not to, whether I actually got round to her or not. It's so true, isn't it?

For most people, it's like, yeah, but there's forms. And it's not the kind of thing that occupies my thoughts, you know, generally speaking day to day. But if you are going to do it, fill out the forms and do it properly, don't just have your buddy bequeath to a further education art college. It's just going to show up on a Tuesday. They've got plenty of fake skulls that they can draw from. They don't need you.

Model skulls and things like that. Absolutely, absolutely. Or, you know, at least try to sell it to an anatomist. Thomas Elliott, thank you so much. You have been an absolute pleasure to talk to. You're very welcome. I've enjoyed it. I hope you've been enlightened by this medical examination today.

Thank you so much to our guest, Thomas Elliott. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Head to our channel to check out some previous episodes on shoes, Tudor Sex and all kinds of historical smut. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.