The story
As you stand here on Nicolson Street, look up at the imposing, soot-stained grandeur of the Royal College of Surgeons. This neoclassical masterpiece, designed by William Playfair in the 1830s, stands as a testament to Edinburgh’s reign as the world’s leading center for medical education. But behind these elegant columns and the quiet dignity of the museum galleries lies a history that is as gruesome as it is fascinating.
During the early 19th century, the city’s surgeons were desperate. To teach anatomy effectively, they needed bodies, and the law only provided them with the remains of executed criminals. This scarcity birthed a dark trade.
While the famous resurrection men were busy robbing graves in the dead of night, two men named William Burke and William Hare decided that waiting for people to die was simply too slow. In a series of boarding houses just a short walk from where you are now, they murdered at least sixteen victims, selling the fresh corpses to the brilliant but ethically questionable Dr. Robert Knox.
When the crimes were finally discovered in 1828, the city was paralyzed by horror. Hare turned King’s Evidence to save his own neck, but Burke was sent to the gallows. In a twist of legal and poetic justice, the judge decreed that Burke’s own body be publicly dissected so that his remains might serve the very science his crimes had fed.
Thousands of people queued for hours just to catch a glimpse of his corpse on the slab at the University of Edinburgh. If you step inside the museum today and head up to the Wohl Pathology Gallery, you will find a small, unremarkable-looking object in a glass case. It is a pocketbook, a small wallet, dark and textured.
To the casual observer, it looks like old, tanned leather. However, the inscription on it tells a different story. It is bound in the skin of William Burke himself.
It is a chilling relic of a time when the boundaries between medical progress and madness were paper-thin. As you walk through the collection, surrounded by thousands of anatomical specimens and surgical tools, the pocketbook serves as a bridge between the clinical world of science and the visceral, dark folklore of old Edinburgh. It is a reminder that the path to modern medicine was often paved with blood, and that sometimes, the monsters of history never truly leave the city; they just become part of the archive.
Take a moment to appreciate the silence of the museum today; it is a far cry from the chaotic, fearful streets of Burke’s day. When you are ready, let’s continue our journey through the shadows of the Old Town.