Edinburgh has a long history for the study and practice of medicine. Edinburgh University’s Medical School continues to be an important centre of teaching today. The first professional organisation in the city was the Guild of Surgeons and Barbers, established in 1505. This body still exists today as the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

In the nineteenth century, Edinburgh earned itself a reputation as being a global centre of learning and teaching about human anatomy. At the time, no one understood how the body’s internal systems worked. The legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to call for more evidence-based scientific enquiry. However, there was a shortage of corpses that might be used for such research. The cultural and religious norms of the time meant that practitioners could only obtain – through legal channels – the bodies of executed criminals. And there were insufficient bodies for true research to take place.

As a result, a demand for cadavers developed at the medical school, which in turn led to a sinister black-market trade in corpses. The school lecturers secretly went to ‘resurrection men’ to purchase bodies. Today we might call them ‘body snatchers’ or ‘grave robbers.’
The ‘resurrection men’ frequented the city’s kirkyards after a recent burial and dug up cadavers to be sold. Clearly, bodies decompose quickly post-mortem, and there were no contemporary means by which to refrigerate a body. This fact, as well as the high demand, led to the proliferation of the late night trade. Local communities were alarmed and families had to resort to security measures to protect the integrity of their deceased loved ones. It is still possible today to see the metal cages, or ‘mort-safes,’ that were attached to sealed graves as a type of lock to keep out the resurrection men. Many families also paid guards to provide security from kirkyard watchtowers.

Burke and Hare

In 1828, two men, William Burke and William Hare, moved to Edinburgh from Ireland to work as labourers. Hare took a job running a lodging house, and soon both men lived at the same address in the West Port together with their wives. Soon, one of the lodgers died leaving behind a rent debt. To recoup the monies, Burke and Hare sold his body to Dr. Robert Knox at the Medical School for dissection. They were paid £7 10s, a sum equivalent to over £1,000 today. It is said that the professor’s assistant told them that they would be welcome to sell any other bodies they came upon.
Given that the lodging house attracted many people who were destitute, those whom society had already forgotten, Burke and Hare took the opportunity to invite lodgers to drink with them. When the lodgers were drunk, the two men would suffocate them. The pair increasingly enjoyed this easy money knowing that Dr. Knox never asked any questions.

However, the men began to take unnecessary risks. Their penultimate victim was Jamie Wilson, a local man who lived on the streets and was well-known in the neighbourhood. He had a foot deformity that gave him a noticeable limp. Rumours began to swirl after Jamie appeared on the slab.

The final victim was Margaret Docherty. Burke and Hare had invited the lodgers away to another house for the night and used the opportunity to get Docherty drunk. Unfortunately for the men, later that evening the other lodgers returned unexpectedly to collect some belongings, and quickly discovered the corpse and contacted the police.

The authorities convinced Hare to testify in exchange for immunity. Burke was convicted and hanged. As part of his sentence, he was publicly dissected at the medical school. Dr. Knox faced no legal charges after claiming he had thought the men brought him the bodies of people who had died naturally. In 1832, Scotland passed the Anatomy Act, which provided that anatomists and universities must legally acquire donated cadavers. The Act wiped out the resurrection men’s trade.

James Young Simpson

James Young Simpson studied at Edinburgh Medical School from 1827, gaining his MD in 1832. He became a specialist in obstetric medicine. In 1848 he developed an improved forceps design for use in deliveries which is still used today.
Simpson lived at 52 Queen Street. He and his friends spent their free-time experimenting with different chemical substances to try and find new types of anaesthetic. In November 1847, they tried chloroform. They discovered that it could knock someone out without harming them. The use of chloroform quickly became standard practice for surgery.

In 1869, Simpson again proved he was ahead of his time by writing a letter of support for Sophia Jex-Blake who was campaigning for the admittance of women to the Medical School. As a former President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, his word held sway and Jex-Blake and six other women were permitted to matriculate.

You can visit Simpson’s grave in Warriston Cemetery here in Edinburgh.

The Surgeons’ Hall Museums (there is a fee to enter) is located at the Surgeons’ Hall bus stop, fifteen minutes away from the Scot Townhouse.