Author: R. Michael Gordon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786454563
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Body snatchers and grave robbers were the stuff of Victorian lore, but two real-life culprits took the crimes out of shadowy cemeteries and into criminal court. William Burke and William Hare aided Scottish surgeons competing for anatomical breakthroughs by experimenting on human corpses. As the duo evolved from petty theft to premeditated murder, they unwittingly brought attention to the medical practices of the era, leading to Burke's death by hanging. This account not only explores the work of the resurrectionists, it reflects the nature of serial killers, 1820s criminal law, and Edinburgh's early role as a seat of European medical research. Readers interested in the legal aspects of these crimes will find the trial testimony included to be a valuable resource.
Author: George Mac Gregor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anatomy
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
Author: Lisa Rosner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203550
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Up the close and down the stair, Up and down with Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the man who buys the beef. —anonymous children's song On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation into the "Anatomy Murders" raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder. Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention, yet The Anatomy Murders is the first book to situate their story against the social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press. The Anatomy Murders resurrects a tale of murder and medicine in a city whose grand Georgian squares and crescents stood beside a maze of slums, a place in which a dead body was far more valuable than a living laborer.
Author: Hugh Douglas
Publisher: Robert Hale
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : zh-CN
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Author: Owen Dudley-Edwards
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857907530
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
In a boarding house in West Port, an old army pensioner dies of natural causes. He owes the landlord rent. Instead of burying the body, the landlord, William Hare, and his friend, William Burke, fill the coffin with bark and sell the corpse to Dr. Robert Knox, an ambitious Edinburgh anatomist. They make a profit of GBP3 and 10 shillings. After this encouraging outcome, Burke and Hare decide to suffocate another sickly tenant. So begins the criminal career of the most notorious double act in serial killing. Here is the unvarnished, human story behind the infamous Burke and Hare murders. We delve into their past, their personalities and the circumstances that made them resort to murder as a money-making scheme. It's a tale of desperation and greed, of outsiders, ambition, corruption and betrayal. And it's all true!
Author: Tim Marshall
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719045431
Category : Body snatching
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
When Frankenstein appeared in 1818 it was well known that the medical profession lent silent support to the grave-robbing gangs who regulary sold the surgeons newly-buried bodies for dissection. This resurection trade led to the sensational Burke and Hare case, which revealed that the bodies of murder victims had been pased to the Edinburgh surgeon Dr Robert Knox with his connivance.
Author: Helen Patricia MacDonald
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300116991
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Until 1832, when an Act of Parliament began to regulate the use of bodies for anatomy in Britain, public dissection was regularlyand legallycarried out on the bodies of murderers, and a shortage of cadavers gave rise to the infamous murders committed by Burke and Hare to supply dissection subjects to Dr. Robert Knox, the anatomist. This book tells the scandalous story of how medical men obtained the corpses upon which they worked before the use of human remains was regulated. Helen MacDonald looks particularly at the activities of British surgeons in nineteenth-century Van Diemens Land, a penal colony in which a ready supply of bodies was available. Not only convicted murderers, but also Aborigines and the unfortunate poor who died in hospitals were routinely turned over to the surgeons. This sensitive but searing account shows how abuses happen even within the conventions adopted by civilized societies. It reveals how, from Burke and Hare to todays televised dissections by German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens, some peoples bodies become other peoples entertainment.
Author: Jan Bondeson
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1800467818
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
Which of Edinburgh’s most gruesome murders has happened in your street? And were they committed by Burke and Hare, by the Stockbridge Baby-Farmer, by the Demon Frenchman of George Street, by the Triple Killer of Falcon Avenue, or perhaps by one of the Capital’s many faceless, spectral slayers
Author: E. Burke Rochford
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814775799
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Most widely known for its adherents chanting “Hare Krishna” and distributing religious literature on the streets of American cities, the Hare Krishna movement was founded in New York City in 1965 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Formally known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, it is based on the Hindu Vedic scriptures and is a Western outgrowth of a popular yoga tradition which began in the 16th century. In its first generation ISKCON actively deterred marriage and the nuclear family, denigrated women, and viewed the raising of children as a distraction from devotees' spiritual responsibilities. Yet since the death of its founder in 1977, there has been a growing women’s rights movement and also a highly publicized child abuse scandal. Most strikingly, this movement has transformed into one that now embraces the nuclear family and is more accepting of both women and children, steps taken out of necessity to sustain itself as a religious movement into the next generation. At the same time, it is now struggling to contend with the consequences of its recent outreach into the India-born American Hindu community. Based on three decades of in-depth research and participant observation, Hare Krishna Transformed explores dramatic changes in this new religious movement over the course of two generations from its founding.
Author: Nicola Morgan
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1444932284
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
It is Edinburgh, 1822, and young Robbie is eight years old when he witnesses his mother's pain and subsequent death from an operation - without anaesthetic - to remove a tumour from her breast at the hands of Dr Knox. Haunted by this terrible event, Robbie, his hapless father and baby sister Essie attempt to move on with their lives. But when Robbie's father loses all their money and disappears, Robbie is left to look after himself and his sister in the Edinburgh slums. Somehow he falls in with Burke and Hare, the two men whom Knox employs to 'collect' bodies for medical research. Robbie sees a way to avenge his mother's death. Convincing himself that Knox is having people killed for him to experiment on, Robbie eventually confronts him. But Robbie comes to realise that for all his hard-heartedness and corrupt methods, Knox's motives are ultimately for the good: to improve surgical conditions, and operate on patients with the greatest speed and therefore minimum risk. Robbie eventually trains to be a surgeon, finally giving meaning to his mother's tragic death.
