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Burke and Hare murders
The Burke and Hare murders, or West Port murders, were a series of murders committed in Edinburgh, Scotland, over a period of about ten months in 1828. The killings were attributed to Northern Irish immigrants William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses of their 16 victims to Doctor Robert Knox as dissection material for his well-attended anatomy lectures. Burke and Hare's alleged accomplices were Burke's mistress, Helen McDougal, and Hare's wife, Margaret Laird. From their acts came the now archaic British word "burking", originally meaning to smother a victim or to commit an anatomy murder but which later passed into general use as a word for any suppression or cover-up.〔''Oxford English Dictionary'', 1st ed. "burke, ''v''. Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1888.〕
==Historical background==
(詳細はcadavers legitimately available for the study and teaching of anatomy in Britain's medical schools. As medical science began to flourish in the early nineteenth century, the demand for cadavers rose sharply, but at the same time the legal supply failed to keep pace. One of the main sources—the bodies of executed criminals—had begun to dry up owing to a reduction in the number of executions being carried out in the early nineteenth century.〔W Roughead, ed., Burke And Hare, Notable British Trials Series, William Hodge and Company Limited 1948, p.3: In Scotland's case, the categories of deceased persons made legally available for dissection were "those bodies that dye in the correction-house; the bodies of fundlings who dye betwixt the tyme that they are weaned and thir being put to schools or trades; also the dead bodies of such as are stiflet in the birth, which are exposed, and have none to owne them; as also the dead bodies of such as are ''felo de se''; likewayes the bodies of such as are put to death by sentence of the magistrat."〕 The situation of too few corpses being available to doctors for demonstrating anatomical dissection to growing numbers of students attracted criminal elements willing to obtain specimens by any means. As at similar institutions, doctors teaching at the Edinburgh Medical School, which was universally renowned for medical sciences, relied increasingly on body-snatchers for a steady supply of "anatomical subjects". The activities of these so-called "resurrectionists" gave rise to particular public fear and revulsion,〔W Roughead, ed., Burke And Hare, Notable British Trials Series, William Hodge and Company Limited 1948, p.3: "Belief in the resurrection of the body had ever been held in a strictly literal and material way by the Scots, who, regarding with superstitious veneration the mortal remains of their kindred, were apt to take summary vengeance on the disturbers of their repose. Thus the natural repugnance to dissections of the human body, fortified by religious sentiment, opposed for centuries an insuperable barrier to anatomical research."〕 but, such were the financial inducements, the illegal trade continued to grow. It was a short step from grave-robbing to anatomy murder.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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