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The professional credibility that the Hunters, among others, managed to establish for surgeons in the 18th century was destroyed in the early 19th century. Grave robbing continued apace. The trade in backstreet corpses thrived in Edinburgh, then the epicentre of surgical training. Two particular suppliers – William Burke and William Hare – gained a reputation for themselves as suppliers of the freshest corpses available. Their corpses had never been buried – in fact, they had never left the guesthouse which the two men ran, and where they were smothered.
The murderers supplied corpses to, among others, Robert Knox, a celebrated anatomist and the most popular lecturer at the city's Medical School, who attracted as many as 500 students per class. Experts believe that Knox must have known that the corpses he was receiving had met a sticky end, but that he turned a blind eye. Ruth Richardson says: 'If Knox was as brilliant an anatomist as everybody said, he should have had some knowledge that these bodies had been killed.'
For this reason, once the murderers were found out (Hare eventually informed on his partner), the fact that Knox went unpunished, without so much as making an apology, caused outrage. Demonstrations against him turned to rioting. His effigy was ripped apart – an indication of what the public thought surgeons did to the dead.
Parliament was forced to act, and the Anatomy Act of 1832 put an end to grave robbing and murder. Unclaimed bodies from the poor house were made available for anatomists to practice on.
www.channel4.com/science/microsites/A/anatomists/medicine4.h tml
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