It remains to say a word about a few of the unlooked-for by-products of the care. One is struck first by the excellence of Dr. Christison's medicolegal report on the body of the final victim. Forensic medicine had been and has remained a great specialty of Scottish science. In this case, the differentiation of pre- and post-mortem bruising and lividity was important, as it so often is, and Christison took pains to makes "express trial" to demonstrate effects. He could not prove that murder had been done, but he raised a strong presumption that proved sufficient, and his example encouraged further research.
Nor were men of science done with Burke after the trial. They kept up a fierce polemic—it is exemplified in the present volume—over the significance of his cranial configuration. Phrenology was a lively new discipline and criminologists had things to prove, by statistics as well as argument. Fortunately for science, though not for phrenology, Burke's bumps refused to conform to prediction.
The original difficulty of getting subjects for dissection was of course not settled by the murders, either in theory of in practice. Two of Dr. Knox's fellow-anatomists had risen to his defense by citing the "inevitable and necessary" measures used to obtain bodies. They did not mean murder; they meant the deviousness that tempted to it. Here indeed is a prime instance of the way bad laws and confused public sentiment incite to crime. The remedy at law came three years after Burke's trial, in Lord Warburton's Anatomy Act of 1832 (2nd & 3rd William IV, Cap. 75), which authorized the legal custodians of the dead body to allow its delivery to a medical school. These custodians are usually the relatives of the deceased; but failing them, various public officials are named in the Act as having the power. Yet late as 1921 the state of feeling among officials and laity still denied an adequate supply of subjects for dissection; for the Act of 1832 was only permissive and not mandatory as to the disposal of unclaimed bodies [3].
In the history of law, the trial about Hare's immunity is important as a review of the law governing the liability of a participant in crime who testifies against his accomplices. Both the Edinburgh trials display in full the scrupulous fair play of British criminal law at its best, to say nothing of the intellectual powers of the lawyers and judges involved.
This publicly sold pamphlet was written by “The Echo of Surgeon’s Square,” later identified as David Paterson, employee of Dr. Robert Knox. In it Paterson relates his observations of the goings on between Knox and the murderers Burke and Hare.
But perhaps it is literature that has gained most from the emotional upheaval at Edinburgh in 1828. At the time, as this volume shows, the journalists and balled-mongers were fully employed. Even Knox's janitor became a literary man under the name of The Echo of Surgeons' Square, and was bold enough to offer himself as collaborator to Walter Scott. And among the crowd a true genius arose, fired in the forge of public stress, who epitomized the ghastly saga in a definitive quatrain:
Up the Close and doun the stair; But and ben wi' Burke and Hare: Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, And Knox the boy who buys the beef [4].
Meantime, Sir Walter Scott had produced a first-rate paragraph of armchair detection to prove that Joe the miller was Burke's first victim, a point in which the witnesses disagreed [5]. More important still, Thomas De Quincey, at the very time Burke and Hare were joining forces, was composing 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," an epoch-making essay that lifted the tale of crime out of the street vendor's hands to deposit it in the more manicured but not less feverish ones of the novelist, the psychologist, and the criminologist.
From the words of DeQuincey's twice-revised thesis that murder deserves to be judged and admired by connoisseurs, one gathers that the Edinburgh killings did not fulfill his definition of art. He cheers "the Burke-and-hare revolution," no doubt for its attention-getting value which benefited his views, but he disapproves the taking advantage of the sick and feeble—they are not really able to stand murder. Besides, he wants one performer, whose risk is always the greater, surrounded as he is by honest men. Hence our critic prefers the Williams murders of 1812.His sardonic mirth and fanciful point are but a mask for the horror he expresses at the end.
Still, DeQuincey's root idea helped create a new literary genre. It begins with Poe and has end by filling libraries with accounts true and fictional of great crimes and great trials. On Burke and Hare themselves you may read Stevenson's Body-Snatcher, you may consult William Roughead in Classic Crimes, or you may chance to see James Bridie's The Anatomist, where all our character play out their parts. The vulgar pruriency which impelled 30,000 to see Burke dissected has been transmuted into an informed intellectual interest which explains, no doubt, the presence of this book, at this moment in the reader's hands.
Jacques Barzun, Columbia University, January 1974
Jacques Barzun's "Murder for Profit and for Science" originally appeared as the introduction to the New York Academy of Medicine's History of Medicine Series No. 43, Burke and Hare: The Resurrection Men; A Collection of Contemporary Documents Including Broadsides, Occasional Verses, Illustrations, Polemics, and a Complete Transcript of the Testimony at Trial. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1974.
[3] See the letter from Professor Arthur Robinson in William Roughead, Burke and Hare, Edinburgh 1921, 279-81. The shortage of bodies for medical study continues in the United States today, an indirect result of welfare programs that defray burial expenses. See the P & S Quarterly, Columbia University Medical School, Fall 1973, p.26.
[4] "But and ben": in and out. The English language was also enriched, at least for a time, with the new verb to burke, meaning to murder by strangling or suffocation. According to report, when the crowd caught sight of Hare after his release, the shout went up: "Burke, the b_____"! The word in blank offers two choices to the philohgist.
[5] See West Port murders