McCulloch One Name Study

One of her friends was a certain Mrs Burke. She was visiting this lady one evening when her husband offered to conduct her home: but Mrs Burke, for no apparent reason that Agnes could discern, most positively refused to allow him to do so. So she went home alone. On another occasion Mrs Burke shewed a most marked impatience for Agnes to depart before the return home of Mr Burke, Agnes, without asking the reason, or, indeed, noticing anything peculiar in Mrs Burke’s conduct, complied with her wishes. Not long afterwards, towards the end of 1828, Edinburgh, and, in fact, the whole country, was shocked by the arrest of Burke and his associate, Hare, and the exposure of their ghastly crimes. For long the medical profession, unable in a legitimate way to procure subjects for dissection, had been in the habit of procuring them, either through the grave raiding activities of their own students, or by purchase from sundry rascals who made the supply of bodies their business. At the beginning of the 19th century, the fame and popularity of the Edinburgh School of Medicine was increasing rapidly. So also, as a necessary consequence, was the need for ‘subjects’; and, correspondingly, the difficulty of procuring them. The almost inevitable result was the activities of Burke and Hare, two degraded Irishmen who hit upon the idea of manufacturing their own corpses, which they effected, mainly in their own wretched hovel in the West Port, by a process of rendering the intended victim insensible with whiskey, and then smothering him, or her, as the case might be. In this way a considerable number of people had mysteriously disappeared and never been heard of again. The horror of Agnes McCulloch can well be imagined when she realised that Burke was no less than her friend’s husband and that she herself had had a remarkably narrow escape from ‘disappearing’ along with many another luckless victim.