A Modest Proposal

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The anatomized skeleton of William Burke, on display at the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh University.

I think that mass murderers should be publicly dissected and put on display.  Maybe a few of these reptiles will have the vanity to forgo their crimes if they knew they would become a source of amusement for the public they so hate.  Burke, of course, at least had a financial reason for killing 16 people.  His partner, William Hare, turned Queen's Evidence against him and escaped legal retribution.  I read somewhere that workers threw him into a lime pit and blinded him.  Wait - that's not true.  The man in question was William Ware and he carried an affidavit stating that he was not William Hare.
William Hare vanished from history.


Facial reconstruction of William Burke.


That's Billy Burke, not Billie.


The verb "burke" is slang for killing someone for money.  That is the name given to one of film's slimier villains, Carter Burke of Aliens.  Good choice.


Deathmask, William Burke, and to the right a life casting of William Hare.


Wellington and Robert Peel do away with the Catholic Relief Act.  This is Mrs. Docherty as the Act, her body was found in Dr. Knox's school.  William Heath, 1829.


Dr. Robert Knox, brilliant surgeon and teacher. Saw nothing unusual about the fresh bodies he bought.

Doon the close, and up the stair-

Butt and ben with Burke and Hare.

Burke's the butcher and Hare's the thief,

Knox is the boy that buys the beef.

A close is an alley.  A "Butt and ben" is a two roomed cottage associated with poverty, a partition wall separating the rooms.  My house in the country is a butt and ben of 3 rooms, known down South as a 'shotgun'.  Fire a shotgun at the front door and it will blow all the other doors out the back.
Scotland is not the only source of strange-o expressions, not by a long chalk!


I hope this essay has been revealing.


Comments

  1. chaosfive55May 4, 2020 at 5:20 PM

    My favorite dramatization of the lives and crimes of these rogues is The Flesh And The Fiends starring Peter Cushing as Dr. Knox, Donald Pleasence as Hare, and George Rose as Burke...ironically, Rose was himself brutally murdered in 1988.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Rose_(actor)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Billy D BunnyJanuary 23, 2021 at 4:39 PM

      I read about that murder, shocking. That country was no place for a guy like Rose.

      Delete

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