'Round the Town with Burke and Hare, the Original Body Snatchers
In Val Lewton's 1945 The Body Snatcher (which the old-movie cable stations have been showing a bit lately for obvious reasons) there's a scene in which Boris Karloff tells Bela Lugosi the story of the mass murderers William Burke and William Hare who, between November 1827 and November 1828, sold the bodies of 16 of Edinburgh's least prominent citizens to Robert Knox, the most popular anatomy professor of his day.
In the movie, which is loosely based on an early short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, Karloff plays the sinister cabman Gray, who moonlights as a grave-robber and does business with a certain Dr. MacFarlane. Gray has a way with children (in an early scene he wins big smiles from a little crippled girl whose mother has brought her to see the great doctor) and less of a way with dogs (some time later he dispatches Greyfriar's Bobby with a shovel to gain access to the grave the loyal terrier is guarding); it is arguably Karloff's swellest film performance, one of the few in which he was left to look as he looked and speak as he spoke, albeit with the tell-tale training of a prewar Shakespearean actor.
Lugosi's is only a bit role. He plays Joseph, the lurking porter in Dr. MacFarlane's dissecting rooms. In the scene I'm thinking of he has come to call with blackmail in mind, having figured out that Gray is not only stealing corpses but manufacturing them as well. Under the circumstances, Gray improvises, plying Joseph with drink (much as the real-life Burke and Hare did their victims) and leading him to believe that he wants the porter to come in with him as a partner.
"We can do that," Lugosi chimes in enthusiastically. "But when we get them there, then what?"
Again, Karloff sings:
"I'll show you how they did it, Joseph," says Karloff, reaching out his hand. "I'll show you how they 'burked' them." And he does.
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No one knows exactly how many people Burke and Hare killed in reality. The estimate is somewhere between 15 and 30. William Roughead, the ghoulish dean of pre-contemporary true-crime, who edited the Burke and Hare volume in the Notable British Trials series?and whose account is included in Classic Crimes, the Roughead anthology New York Review Books reissued in September?puts the total at 16. This is the number Burke gave in his two jailhouse confessions, but the general feeling seems to be that he was lowballing.
According to Roughead, the price for a body at Knox's establishment depended on the season: 10 pounds in winter, eight in summer. There actually were contemporary rhymes about Burke and Hare, the most common of which is quoted in James Bridie's 1930 play The Anatomist:
I know of at least two other versions of that rhyme. One of them anglicizes the second line to: "'Round the town with Burke and Hare." The Scottish versions are better, though. They work like a tracking shot filmed from the point of view of the person about to be murdered.
The Body Snatcher isn't the scariest movie about Burke and Hare I know of, but it's probably the best. The scariest is probably one I saw as a child and was never able to find again until recently. It stars Peter Cushing as Knox and George Rose and Donald Pleasance (respectively) as Burke and Hare, and is sometimes called Mania and sometimes called The Flesh and the Fiends and sometimes called The Psycho Killers and sometimes called The Fiendish Ghouls. There are a handful of others, some of which substitute fictional names for those of the real people: a 1948 chiller, The Greed of William Hart, starring a once-famous British stage actor named Tod Slaughter (the working title was The Crimes of Burke and Hare); The Doctor and the Devils (1985), based on Dylan Thomas' unproduced 1944 screenplay; and there's also a 1971 movie called simply Burke and Hare.
It's curious that the Peter Cushing movie is always given such garish alternative titles. There's nothing frenzied about it. This is, after all, a story about murder as business, not mania. No one who tells it ever tries to make out that Burke and Hare were mentally unbalanced or impaired. But neither does anyone suggest that Burke and Hare were murdering for profit?they didn't take their ill-gotten gains and go off somewhere to live the high life, they went on living the low life in the Edinburgh slum of West Port, until the day after Halloween 1828, when they were finally apprehended. These were subsistence killings: Burke and Hare seem to have drunk their way through the proceeds of their crimes, which was all there was to do anyway in the Edinburgh slums.
Tradition has it that they were grave-robbers before they were mass murderers. In fact, it seems unlikely that they were ever real "resurrectionists." Burke worked on and off as a cobbler and Hare lived off the proceeds of the lodging house that his common-law wife ran. (Both were "navvies," Irish immigrants who had come over to Scotland to work on the Union Canal.) The first body Burke and Hare sold to Knox belonged to someone they knew who had died of natural causes: a longtime tenant of "Mrs." Hare's, an old soldier who died owing them four pounds within a few days of collecting his pension. (Their second victim was probably another of "Mrs." Hare's lodgers, a fever victim whom Burke and Hare smothered with a pillow, probably from mixed motives, both greed and fear of contagion.) After that it was simply a matter of luring off to Mrs. Hare's boarding house anyone who wouldn't be missed.
In one view, Burke and Hare were simply doing their part for the industrial revolution, supplying a product for which there was a demand. Any surplus seems to have been spent on throwing the sort of parties that would keep a steady supply of interlopers coming through and account for a level of noise and activity that might include the odd scream or blow.
For a long time, it seems, stories about Knox and Burke and Hare had to be disguised as stories about someone else?because Knox, who was never prosecuted and never called as a witness at Burke's trial, had a career and reputation to protect?particularly after he was publicly exonerated by a committee of distinguished citizens. It accounts for the fact that Dr. Knox in Dylan Thomas' script appears as Dr. Rock and Burke and Hare appear as "Fallon" and "Broome." It's why Stevenson's "The Body-Snatcher" is about a doctor named Toddy MacFarlane.
Hardly anyone ever reads the Stevenson story now. Written in 1881 and not published until 1884, it's a bizarre piece of writing. Stevenson hated it. He left it out of the spooky trio he'd written for Leslie Stephen's Cornhill magazine, and only allowed it to be published three years later because he found himself in a bind, having promised a story to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stevenson sent "The Body-Snatcher," commenting that it was "blood-curdling enough?and ugly enough?to chill the blood of a grenadier." (The editor not only snapped it up but used it to advertise a special Christmas issue, having sandwich boards made up that were so gruesome that the police had to be called in to interfere.) On the grounds that the story was old and not any good anyway, Stevenson refused full payment. "What are we, artists or City men?" he is supposed to have replied when W.E. Henley tut-tutted. "I will be damned if I will steal with my eyes open."
Henry James, who was an ardent admirer and friend of Stevenson's, almost certainly used "The Body-Snatcher" as a model for his own ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw." "The Body-Snatcher" isn't a traditional ghost story, if by that we mean something about someone haunted by the spirits of the dead. The medical student in "The Body-Snatcher" who kills his own "resurrection man" and dissects the body so as to do away with the evidence is haunted not by his victim's ghost but by its corpse. Every body he subsequently digs up turns out to be that body?or so we are presumably to infer. It's not really clear, but then very little in the story actually is. One of the things James seems to have learned from Stevenson was to leave things ambiguous.
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Knox, by all accounts, had 500 students, a number that required him to give his lecture three times a day. He needed subjects for each one. ("Arrangements have been made to secure as usual an ample supply of anatomical subject," read the handbill advertising his 1828 course of lectures.) Everybody's favorite irony about Burke and Hare is that they weren't heading for Knox's establishment with their first body; they were on their way to see his bitter rival Alexander Monro, a third-generation medical professor with a reputation as something of a charlatan, whom Knox had been publicly mocking for years, and who occupied the Chair of Anatomy at the University. On the way, they stopped and asked directions of a student of Knox's. Could what happened to Knox have happened to any teacher of anatomy, or was his fate self-imposed?
No scholarly or impartial account of him seems to exist. Henry Lonsdale's 1870 A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox, the Anatomist is by all accounts part apologia and part hagiography. (A former student who became his partner in the lean years after the scandal, Londsale is characterized by the Scottish playwright Bridie as "a frank Knoxophile.") Isobel Rae's sympathetic Knox: The Anatomist (1964) was written before a time when it was considered part of the biographer's task to put the events in someone's life within a social context.
In Dylan Thomas' screenplay we first see Knox "From a long way off," on "a deserted road winding downwards from a hill-top: A small black figure with another darkness billowing around it." The script makes him out a saint and a hero?tall, handsome, relentlessly high-minded. In fact, Knox seems to have been more interesting than that. He does appear to have been high-minded to the point of folly (the sort of man who would impale himself on his own integrity), but he was also trivial and narcissistic enough to wear heaps of jewelry and be always dressed in the height of fashion, and to rehearse his teaching performance alone in the lecture hall at night?a thing so unheard of, evidently, that nearly everyone remarks on it.
Still more intriguing, he seems to have been that curious phenomenon: a man of repulsive appearance who was wildly attractive to women. He had, owing to a childhood bout with smallpox, a withered face and only one eye.
Playwright Bridie: "He turned his blind eye to the methods by which he was supplied with corpses for dissection, and this, for a time, clouded his reputation and threatened his safety." Actually, it destroyed him, albeit by degrees. He went on lecturing for a while in Edinburgh while his classes dwindled, and finally gave up and went on the lecture circuit, publishing a few books but never really amounting to anything. He died in comparative obscurity.
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Revisiting Mania, I was surprised to find that a mere movie could shock me?particularly an old black-and-white shrieker. I wanted to try to figure out what it was that I found so unpleasant and was so hard to watch.
An American version released in 1961 had 10 minutes cut out of it. (The original ran 97 minutes.) There's also a 74-minute version. I think I can guess what gets left out of these shorter versions. A few of the murders are agonizingly drawn-out. It's not that they're gory; the movie is in black and white, and besides, Burke and Hare smothered their victims. Tradition has it that Burke covered the victims' faces, with his hand or a pillow, while Hare held them down, so that "burking" came to mean "to murder by suffocation" or just "murdering in such a way as to leave no evidence of violence on the body."
As depicted in Mania it's a messy business, though. The victims realize what is happening to them and resist. They struggle and struggle and try to make a run for it and are recaptured and struggle some more. It's quite horrible. This is, in fact, how several of the murders were carried out?badly, chaotically?according to Burke's description, no doubt one of the reasons that William Rae, the Lord Advocate, saw to it that Burke's confessions were suppressed until after Hare (who had turned King's evidence) had escaped into England; Rae feared the anger of the mob?and not just for Hare's sake. It's not clear whether one meaning of "burke," in the sense of "stifle or suppress" (as in "burke an issue or a question"), derives from metaphor or the Lord Advocate's interference.
In 1832 the Anatomy Act was passed. All stories about the West Port murders end with this fact, pointing out how influential the new law was in regulating the study of medicine. And no doubt it was. Condemned criminals were no longer to be the anatomists' only source or even a routine source for materiel; from that point on, bodies were obtainable from anyone in legal possession of a corpse. Felons, meanwhile?who, it was said, had feared death a good deal less than they feared not dying, surviving a hanging only to wake up clear-eyed and conscious on someone's dissecting table?would now have the alternative of being hung in chains or buried discreetly within the prison walls. The Act also assured that no anatomist could be prosecuted simply for being in possession of a body.
By the same token, however, the law added to the ritual of death a requirement that would have made the career of Burke and Hare impossible: it stipulated that a death certificate stating the cause of death and signed by a physician, surgeon or apothecary was required, as was a 48-hour waiting period, before anything of any nature, religious or scientific, could be done to a corpse.