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The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes
Up the close and down the stair,
Up and down with Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the man who buys the beef.
--anonymous children's song
On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation into the "Anatomy Murders" raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder.
Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention, yet The Anatomy Murders is the first book to situate their story against the social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press.
The Anatomy Murders resurrects a tale of murder and medicine in a city whose grand Georgian squares and crescents stood beside a maze of slums, a place in which a dead body was far more valuable than a living laborer.
Up and down with Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the man who buys the beef.
--anonymous children's song
On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation into the "Anatomy Murders" raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder.
Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention, yet The Anatomy Murders is the first book to situate their story against the social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press.
The Anatomy Murders resurrects a tale of murder and medicine in a city whose grand Georgian squares and crescents stood beside a maze of slums, a place in which a dead body was far more valuable than a living laborer.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published October 5, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
July 2, 2024
This is an in depth account of the crimes of Burke and Hare, the surgeon who abetted them, and more.
Burke and Hare are notorious in the 19th Century for being grave robbers, or "resurrectionists" as they were called at the time. Unfortunately, they decided it was quicker to speed things up, and cut out the funeral and all the digging! Perhaps Knox, who bought cadavers from Burke and Hare, gets lost in most discussions of these murders? It was good to learn more about him, and the effect the arrests and subsequent trial had on him. I normally give the benefit of the doubt, but it is hard to believe that Knox was not even suspicious about what was going on, especially given his medical knowledge. I always get the impression that committed scientists are supremely focused on their goals, therefore it is easy to see how Knox maybe did not even consider the provenance of the cadavers too much.
There was a huge lack of corpses for medical dissection, which was the only way for medical students to learn about the human body and its internal structure, hence the appearance of the resurrectionist. It was a grisly business, and struck fear in the recently bereaved that their deceased relative might be removed from their final resting place and sold to (very high paying) surgeons for the purpose of dissection.
A very interesting read, but it was strange to have an American narrator, given the location is in Scotland, UK 🤔
Burke and Hare are notorious in the 19th Century for being grave robbers, or "resurrectionists" as they were called at the time. Unfortunately, they decided it was quicker to speed things up, and cut out the funeral and all the digging! Perhaps Knox, who bought cadavers from Burke and Hare, gets lost in most discussions of these murders? It was good to learn more about him, and the effect the arrests and subsequent trial had on him. I normally give the benefit of the doubt, but it is hard to believe that Knox was not even suspicious about what was going on, especially given his medical knowledge. I always get the impression that committed scientists are supremely focused on their goals, therefore it is easy to see how Knox maybe did not even consider the provenance of the cadavers too much.
There was a huge lack of corpses for medical dissection, which was the only way for medical students to learn about the human body and its internal structure, hence the appearance of the resurrectionist. It was a grisly business, and struck fear in the recently bereaved that their deceased relative might be removed from their final resting place and sold to (very high paying) surgeons for the purpose of dissection.
A very interesting read, but it was strange to have an American narrator, given the location is in Scotland, UK 🤔
September 13, 2017
[library]
Up the close & down the stair / But & ben wi' Burke & Hare / Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief / And Knox the boy that buys the beef.
--Anonymous doggerel
Like anyone who's interested in criminological historiography (such a mouthful, but it means what I want to mean), I am fascinated by Burke & Hare. Serial killers (16 victims) for the profit to be made by selling their bodies to anatomical lecturers in Edinburgh's cutthroat anatomy class market. (No, really.) Stranger murder (why, no, 20th century America, you did NOT invent it), but not for sex or anger or any deep psychological motive at all. It was just the easiest way to make money they'd ever found.
I had read Roughead, and I knew that, while entertaining, he wasn't very accurate. This is an excellent corrective, well-written, interested in exploring everyone's side of the story without in any way soft-pedaling or condoning what was going on. She's not as explicitly and programmatically interested in the lives of the urban poor as Sarah Wise is in The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London, but the story of Burke & Hare is saturated in the realities of the lives and deaths of the destitute in Edinburgh in the 1820s.
And one of the ways that those realities impact the story is that there's so little of it left. We know almost nothing about Hare, not very much more about Burke or Helen M'Dougal or Margaret Hare. Nobody was interested in their biographies; nobody asked Burke to explain himself, only to confess. And after he was hanged, the other three just vanish. They leave no trace of themselves in the historical record, only some rumors and urban legends and outright folktales. (The idea that Hare ended up a blind beggar in London, having been blinded by his co-workers at a lime pit when they discovered who he was . . . that's a folktale. You can see the structure of it.) Burke & Hare didn't even know the names of some of the people they killed, and of course there's nowhere to file a missing persons report, and really no one to file it. All of the working class people in this story are transient, following jobs (the Irish were migrant workers in Scotland, a tide that ebbed and flowed with the harvest; both Burke & Hare probably ended up Edinburgh that way themselves), staying with family or friends or friends of friends or people they met in the street while they tried to find employment or get back to Ireland. It would be difficult for anyone to be sure that any of them had actually disappeared. And even the people who had families . . . there was just no structure in place to find people.
And Knox and his students did such a beautiful job of destroying the evidence.
(Knox had to know. Or he had to have made a deliberate choice to not know. Given what a consummate self-absorbed asshole he was, it's not surprising that he made that choice.)
This was fascinating for me as someone interested in Burke & Hare, but it was also fascinating for the context it gave them.
Up the close & down the stair / But & ben wi' Burke & Hare / Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief / And Knox the boy that buys the beef.
--Anonymous doggerel
Like anyone who's interested in criminological historiography (such a mouthful, but it means what I want to mean), I am fascinated by Burke & Hare. Serial killers (16 victims) for the profit to be made by selling their bodies to anatomical lecturers in Edinburgh's cutthroat anatomy class market. (No, really.) Stranger murder (why, no, 20th century America, you did NOT invent it), but not for sex or anger or any deep psychological motive at all. It was just the easiest way to make money they'd ever found.
I had read Roughead, and I knew that, while entertaining, he wasn't very accurate. This is an excellent corrective, well-written, interested in exploring everyone's side of the story without in any way soft-pedaling or condoning what was going on. She's not as explicitly and programmatically interested in the lives of the urban poor as Sarah Wise is in The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London, but the story of Burke & Hare is saturated in the realities of the lives and deaths of the destitute in Edinburgh in the 1820s.
And one of the ways that those realities impact the story is that there's so little of it left. We know almost nothing about Hare, not very much more about Burke or Helen M'Dougal or Margaret Hare. Nobody was interested in their biographies; nobody asked Burke to explain himself, only to confess. And after he was hanged, the other three just vanish. They leave no trace of themselves in the historical record, only some rumors and urban legends and outright folktales. (The idea that Hare ended up a blind beggar in London, having been blinded by his co-workers at a lime pit when they discovered who he was . . . that's a folktale. You can see the structure of it.) Burke & Hare didn't even know the names of some of the people they killed, and of course there's nowhere to file a missing persons report, and really no one to file it. All of the working class people in this story are transient, following jobs (the Irish were migrant workers in Scotland, a tide that ebbed and flowed with the harvest; both Burke & Hare probably ended up Edinburgh that way themselves), staying with family or friends or friends of friends or people they met in the street while they tried to find employment or get back to Ireland. It would be difficult for anyone to be sure that any of them had actually disappeared. And even the people who had families . . . there was just no structure in place to find people.
And Knox and his students did such a beautiful job of destroying the evidence.
(Knox had to know. Or he had to have made a deliberate choice to not know. Given what a consummate self-absorbed asshole he was, it's not surprising that he made that choice.)
This was fascinating for me as someone interested in Burke & Hare, but it was also fascinating for the context it gave them.
January 4, 2013
It was a little to dense to enjoy as a story. The coverage of Burke & Hare seemed quite secondary or minor and was used as a jumping off to discuss resurrectionists, medical history and Scottish/UK criminal justice history as a whole. Burke & Hare were lost in all the facts and details. I feel its necessary for me to pick up a different book to get a good view of this tale.
March 21, 2021
An engaging and in-depth analysis of the famous Burke and Hare murders that highlights the cultural, social, economic, political, and medical context that allowed for a flourishing illegal body trade via grave robbing, for a high demand for cadavers for anatomical study, and for Burke and Hare to take advantage of victims to sell their corpses.
March 30, 2018
This book sounded interesting to me since I enjoy True Crime and medical history. I had come across Burke and Hare in a few books that I had read, but never knew a great deal about their crimes or what happened to them after the crimes were discovered. This book was a great mix of true crime, medical history, and social history. Rosner shows how the social disparity of the day contributed to the crimes, as well as how the moral restrictions on dissecting bodies affected medical research and caused doctors to seek out cadavers with few questions. The author also discusses the uniqueness of the Scottish court system in depth. I learned a lot from this book and would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about two of Scotland's most prolific serial killers.
July 10, 2015
Characters brought to life quite well, some excellent insight into 19th Century English social, poverty and political issues. Gets bogged down in some peripheral primary sources on the "similar" cases and details from an early guide to criminal forensic pathology.
October 22, 2019
There were multiple chapters in this that were clearly there to provide "context" but were in reality totally unnecessary. They only barely connected to the book by a questionable loop back to Burke and Hare in the last sentence of the chapter.
July 25, 2023
Exquisitely researched and compiled - while being a comfortable read. Great detail given to the complexity of the judicial and medical worlds in Edinburgh for the early 19th century.
December 31, 2025
Overall: 3.5 stars
This is an interesting, if clunky and dense, history of the Burke and Hare Murders and a grab bag of historical facts. This is a very scholarly book and reads a bit like a dissertation, dense with citations and quotations. The author is quoting everyone and everything to "show her sources. Diaries, maps, textbooks, newspaper articles, letters: all are quoted profusely and at length. If reading lots of big ole quotes of early Victorian English isn't your jam, then I wouldn't recommend this book.
The author also meanders a fair bit, wandering off from discussing a Burke and Hare victim to examining various histories of other topics. Everything from the history of Edinburg architecture to Irish farm migrant labor patterns to anatomical dissection to 1820s forensic pathology to alcoholism in the Victorian period to medical education is covered in these random asides. Yes, it is all interesting stuff, but sometimes the side tangent is so long that you might forget which victim she's talking about by the time the author loops back to discussing them. To be fair, lots of true crime stories cover the history of their place and time and other relevant facts, but this book's particular rambling style stood out to me because it just felt a little inelegant and tacked on.
In other words, it's not a bad book: just one with dense, clunky prose that could've used some streamlining or reorganization.
This is an interesting, if clunky and dense, history of the Burke and Hare Murders and a grab bag of historical facts. This is a very scholarly book and reads a bit like a dissertation, dense with citations and quotations. The author is quoting everyone and everything to "show her sources. Diaries, maps, textbooks, newspaper articles, letters: all are quoted profusely and at length. If reading lots of big ole quotes of early Victorian English isn't your jam, then I wouldn't recommend this book.
The author also meanders a fair bit, wandering off from discussing a Burke and Hare victim to examining various histories of other topics. Everything from the history of Edinburg architecture to Irish farm migrant labor patterns to anatomical dissection to 1820s forensic pathology to alcoholism in the Victorian period to medical education is covered in these random asides. Yes, it is all interesting stuff, but sometimes the side tangent is so long that you might forget which victim she's talking about by the time the author loops back to discussing them. To be fair, lots of true crime stories cover the history of their place and time and other relevant facts, but this book's particular rambling style stood out to me because it just felt a little inelegant and tacked on.
In other words, it's not a bad book: just one with dense, clunky prose that could've used some streamlining or reorganization.
April 13, 2018
I liked the book for the most part. Mainly, because it made me think about what/how I feel about what the medical community needs and should get away with. Yes, cadavers are needed for learning the art of surgery, but at would I donate my body to science?! No! That freaks me out.
I don't know that this was as interesting as I thought it was going to be. Just because there was so much information and I had to really slow down to understand some of what was being said. I couldn't just read it to relax. I wish we had actually learned more about some of the people who died. But, I also understand that it is a completely different time period where people could just show up and then disappear and sometimes no one was the wiser.
I'm glad I read the book and I really liked how I got to learn how medical colleges operated in history.
I think the actual murders were down the list of things that this book was about.
I don't know that this was as interesting as I thought it was going to be. Just because there was so much information and I had to really slow down to understand some of what was being said. I couldn't just read it to relax. I wish we had actually learned more about some of the people who died. But, I also understand that it is a completely different time period where people could just show up and then disappear and sometimes no one was the wiser.
I'm glad I read the book and I really liked how I got to learn how medical colleges operated in history.
I think the actual murders were down the list of things that this book was about.
October 19, 2017
I felt this often strayed from the main topic of the murders and the murderers. Great detail is sometimes given on the victims but sometimes I was confused about why those details were being presented and how they fit in with the murders.
I also wanted more information about Hare managed to get out of being hung when he was just as guilty as Burke and what became of him after he was released. The details on Burke are fairly clear and gory--but even with giving evidence against Burke why was he even released?
I'd also have liked more delving into why Knox was so blithely accepting of the bodies brought by his resurrectionists--and why as a man of science he missed what should have been some exceedingly suspicious details of the bodies.
I also wanted more information about Hare managed to get out of being hung when he was just as guilty as Burke and what became of him after he was released. The details on Burke are fairly clear and gory--but even with giving evidence against Burke why was he even released?
I'd also have liked more delving into why Knox was so blithely accepting of the bodies brought by his resurrectionists--and why as a man of science he missed what should have been some exceedingly suspicious details of the bodies.
November 12, 2024
Super interesting case. 16 people murdered, to be sold to surgeons to teach anatomy to students in the early 1800s. But the author tends to go on tangents each chapter that makes it a boring read. I wasn't interested in the work of certain anatomists or the lives of doctors or the murderers way before this year, that have nothing to do with how they ended up doing what they did. It is interesting to see murder as a form of enterprise and makes you wonder if organ sales or something could make it still applicable.
June 25, 2024
I am afraid I gave up on this half way through. Much was interesting but there were some very strange tangents with little connection to Burke and Hare. I listened to this on audible and found the choice of a reader with a strong American accent inexplicable given the book was about British crimes. It was particularly irritating as she managed to completely mispronounce almost all Edinburgh place names.
June 17, 2024
Having listened to this book, I do not feel I know much more than I did before. It was a meandering, unfocused book, telling too many stories without a clear focus. Whilst I understand the author wanted to place the story within the social setting so as to give the murders context, I feel this objective was not met. I struggled to remain engaged and focused.
September 21, 2022
I tried very hard to get through this, even downloaded the audiobook from my library hoping that would help….sadly it didn’t. Much too dense, needed much heavier editing. Abandoned
April 16, 2023
True crime at its worst. Sixteen murders in twelve months. William Burke and William Hare squeezed the breath out of their victims then sold the corpses for medical butchery.
January 10, 2019
I think a lot of people have heard of Burke and Hare without knowing a lot of detail about their murder spree. The general gist that people know is that Burke and Hare were grave robbers who turned to murdering people as an easier means of selling bodies to medical schools to dissect and were executed when they were caught. Several of those facts are untrue. Burke and Hare never worked as grave robbers. They SAID they were, but they went straight for murder after realizing how easy it was to get rid of an unwanted body (apparently the first sale was just a lodger in Hare's house who died). Another forgotten fact is that Burke and Hare's common law wives also were heavily involved in helping with the murders (particularly Hare's...the information about how informed Burke's was is a bit sketchy). It's always just assumed both men paid for their crimes, but Hare turned king's evidence and was eventually set free. No one knows what happened to him in the end.
The fact remains that somehow there was a atmosphere that allowed for these two men to kill quite a few people (getting more and more sloppy with each kill) and sell their bodies without "more educated" men ever questioning where the bodies, which were all in pristine condition, came from. This book looks into the culture of the time that allowed for the whole system to be set up that created this circumstance. It also deals with Knox, the anatomist who ruined his career by not bothering to check into where all these bodies were coming from. The question remains, "how did he not know?" I think the best answer for that is possibly that he simply didn't care. These were much lower class people compared to him, after all, leading to what I simply assume was a case of "that's not my problem" when it came to the body's questionable provenance.
The book gets a little dry in a few places, but shows a fascinating time period and case that ended up changing how medical dissection was done from then on. It also shows a bit of the puzzle that Burke and Hare were. There is no explanation about how they justified what they were doing to themselves. These were simply men who killed for profit and didn't think much of it.
The fact remains that somehow there was a atmosphere that allowed for these two men to kill quite a few people (getting more and more sloppy with each kill) and sell their bodies without "more educated" men ever questioning where the bodies, which were all in pristine condition, came from. This book looks into the culture of the time that allowed for the whole system to be set up that created this circumstance. It also deals with Knox, the anatomist who ruined his career by not bothering to check into where all these bodies were coming from. The question remains, "how did he not know?" I think the best answer for that is possibly that he simply didn't care. These were much lower class people compared to him, after all, leading to what I simply assume was a case of "that's not my problem" when it came to the body's questionable provenance.
The book gets a little dry in a few places, but shows a fascinating time period and case that ended up changing how medical dissection was done from then on. It also shows a bit of the puzzle that Burke and Hare were. There is no explanation about how they justified what they were doing to themselves. These were simply men who killed for profit and didn't think much of it.
July 30, 2013
There are several excellent studies of Burke & Hare to be had, but this one probably offers the greatest understanding of the people involved. Its success is not in biography, but in context. Each murder or event in the well-worn tale is used as a jumping off point to discuss aspects of 19th Century Edinburgh that lay behind the events, be it the state of medical science and its students, the economics of graverobbing, poverty and the Irish immigration, the criminal justice system, or other critical factors that almost inevitably led to an unprecedented murder spree. Through such careful framing, Rosner vividly lays out the world in which so many killings were conducted over so short a time as a year, and even uses it to question several points previously considered fact. A fascinating and immersive book.
September 9, 2010
This is a thoughtful and thorough examination of the murderers Burke and Hare, their relationship with the anatomist Knox, and the Edinburgh in which they lived. It is well-written and clearly well researched.
I was a little confused by the citation system used by the author: there are not footnotes or endnotes indicated in the text itself, instead the notes at the end are preceded by a page number and the beginning of the sentence. This may make the text more accessible to the non-scholarly reader, but it requires effort to determine what the author is basing on sources and what is inferred or otherwise the results of her own thoughts.
Still, an enjoyable read and worthwhile for fans of Edinburgh's grisly history or crime history in general.
I was a little confused by the citation system used by the author: there are not footnotes or endnotes indicated in the text itself, instead the notes at the end are preceded by a page number and the beginning of the sentence. This may make the text more accessible to the non-scholarly reader, but it requires effort to determine what the author is basing on sources and what is inferred or otherwise the results of her own thoughts.
Still, an enjoyable read and worthwhile for fans of Edinburgh's grisly history or crime history in general.
December 16, 2010
Rather than a titillating true-crime thriller about the crimes committed by Edinburgh bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, this book presents an examination of the murders from a socioeconomic perspective. The deaths are presented briefly in the beginning of each chapter, and the subsequent pages are devoted to explaining the socioeconomic aspects that led to a)Burke and Hare committing the crimes, b)the victims being reported missing or not depending on how friendless they were, and c)why the anatomist who purchased their corpses was so quick to buy with no questions asked about the provenance of the bodies delivered to him by the two. It's a thought-provoking read on how often in history the poorer classes are treated as disposable in society.
March 14, 2012
A fascinating snapshot of a time in history when a person was literally worth more dead than alive. This book provides an in-depth look at early anatomical research, forensics, and politics at the same time that it provides all of the details of one of the most notorious criminal teams in world history.
December 18, 2012
Dissection (tee-hee) of the crimes of the notorious Burke and Hare. I know I don't need to explain who they are. This puts the murders in the social history context and tells us about the infamous duo, the medical professionals and the victims. I found it mostly interesting but it did drag in parts
November 7, 2013
This is a reference book for a novel I am writing and is very helpful in presenting an authentic and historically accurate picture if the topic .
February 1, 2012
A little tedious but some intersting look at this crime.
February 10, 2014
Gives additional insight into the early 19th Century anatomy situation. As with Diary of a Resurrectionist, and Buried Alive, this book is invaluable for it's historical information.
December 12, 2015
Recommended by Elizabeth, Emerson R. Miller Library (West Newark)
November 13, 2016
Excellent history
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews