William Burke And William Hare

A pair of Irish labourers, William Burke & William Hare lived in a grim district of Edinburgh. Life was not easy, and they lived with a pair of prostitutes who ran a type of boarding-house. When one of the prostitute’s lodgers died, Burke & Hare saw the opportunity to make some money. In those days medical schools required corpses for anatomy classes, but there was never enough of a supply to feed the demand. Burke & Hare handed over the corpse and were paid a good amount of money.

After this, the duo seemed to have found a career. But instead of waiting for corpses to drop dead, they helped them along a little. Most of the bodies they sold to the medical schools were drunken down-and-outs who they found on the streets and finished off. Burke & Hare were making a lot of money now, and in the space of 9 months they had sold 16 bodies.

However sooner of later their greed got the better of them, and they went ‘up market’. Burke & Hare began disposing of people whose disappearance was noticed, and it wasn’t long before the pair were arrested. Hare was not punished like Burke was, who was hanged on 28th January 1829.