So-called experts held talks across the country using casts of the heads of infamous criminals to illustrate their point.Ī life mask is known to have been made of Hare during the trial, and Burke's shaven head was cast after his execution in front of 25,000 people on 28 January 1829.Īlthough a handful of masks are known to still exist, with at least one in the United States, one in a museum in Swansea and copies at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, they are very rare. At the time, phrenology was a popular "new science" that claimed that the shape and contours of a person's head could dictate their personality traits.
The activities of the former navvies, who had originally moved to Edinburgh to work on the Union Canal, repelled and fascinated the public.
His skeleton is still kept under lock and key at Edinburgh University. Hare turned King's evidence and escaped the gallows, while Burke was publicly executed and his body exhibited before being flayed and dissected.Ī number of ghoulish souvenirs were kept of Burke, including a book and a snuff box bound in pieces of his skin. It is believed that Burke and Hare murdered at least 16 people, possibly as many as 30, before their crimes were discovered. However as the need to train medical students increased, the number of executed criminals fell, so Knox was only too glad to receive the Irishmen's wares. Until the 1832 Anatomy Act, the only legal sources of corpses for anatomical purposes in the UK were those of people condemned to death and dissection by the courts.
Although they supplied bodies for dissection to the anatomist Robert Knox, at Surgeon's Square in Edinburgh, the pair found it easier to kill rather than exhume their victims. William Burke and William Hare are among the most notorious of Scotland's criminals but, contrary to popular belief, the two Irish labourers were not grave robbers. Unfortunately very little is known about either head, or for that matter the hangman's noose, and how they came to be here." A death mask of Burke and a life mask of Hare. "Initially we thought it was just Burke, but it turns out we've got two heads. "We found the masks during a clean-out of one of our store rooms, it was quite a surprise," said Gavin Dick, the general manager of the jail, which is now a museum.
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