Edinburgh Old Town — Uncover the Burke & Hare Murders

Your investigation begins outside Surgeons' Hall Museum, temple of Scottish anatomy since 1832. Here Dr. Robert Knox bought freshly killed bodies from Burke and Hare for £10 each, equivalent to €800 today. Knox ran Edinburgh's most prestigious anatomy school, attracting 500 students per semester. Laws of the time only allowed dissection of executed criminals' bodies, creating dramatic shortages for medical teaching. Burke and Hare exploited this legal loophole to build their macabre business.

Greyfriars Kirkyard reveals the tragic irony of this case: this historic Edinburgh cemetery, where John Gray and his dog Bobby rest since 1858, was one of the rare places Burke and Hare never took bodies from. They preferred luring living victims to sordid lodgings in West Port, near Grassmarket. Helen McDougal, Burke's companion, later testified that the two men suffocated victims with pillows to leave no trace of violence. This technique, dubbed 'burking' by the press, entered English criminal vocabulary.

Edinburgh University's Old College preserves the amphitheaters where Knox publicly dissected Burke and Hare's victims before hundreds of students. Built between 1789 and 1834 by Robert Adam, this neoclassical building housed Europe's most renowned medical faculty. The scandal broke on October 31, 1828 when Hare's neighbors discovered Marjory Campbell Docherty's body in a chest. Knox, despite suspicions, continued his lectures until both accomplices' arrest on November 1, 1828.

Grassmarket, Edinburgh's former cattle market, became the scene of Burke and Hare's final crimes in autumn 1828. In this cobbled square, dominated by Edinburgh Castle, they spotted victims among travelers and indigents. James Wilson, their penultimate victim, was approached here on October 12, 1828 before being taken to Hare's lodging at Tanner's Close. Burke's trial, held December 23-25, 1828, revealed the two men murdered at least sixteen people in ten months, turning Grassmarket into a hunting ground.

Your journey ends before Joseph Lister's statue, father of modern antisepsis, erected in 1927. This investigation through Burke and Hare's Edinburgh has led you from medieval alleys to university amphitheaters, revealing how a criminal scandal paradoxically accelerated Scottish medical progress. Burke, hanged January 28, 1829 before 25,000 spectators, was ironically publicly dissected by his former clients. His skeleton is still displayed at Surgeons' Hall Museum, ultimate witness to this case that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson for 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' in 1886.