What are tiny corpses, each nestled inside a little wooden coffin, doing in an exhibition about the art and science of anatomy? They are, after all, crudely carved artefacts without any pretensions to medical accuracy. But these exhibits are part of one of the most notorious episodes in the history of anatomy, for they seem to have been made and buried outside Edinburgh as a folk art memorial to the victims of William Burke and William Hare.
Burke and Hare, this exhibition shows with clinical precision, were monsters produced by science. They killed 16 poor, marginalised people in just a few months to provide bodies for the city’s competitive anatomy teachers. Edinburgh was the capital of the Scottish Enlightenment, a centre of medical research and teaching renowned across Europe. One anatomy student at Edinburgh University in the early 1800s was Charles Darwin. His damning verdict on his teacher is recorded here: “Dr Munro made his lectures on human anatomy as dull as he was himself, and the subject disgusted me.”
