Throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century, doctors and medical schools across Europe struggled to find adequate supplies of bodies that could be used for the purposes of teaching in a medical theater. The outsized demand for fresh cadavers led to the rise of “resurrection men", AKA Graverobbers. Disgusting duo William Burke and William Har ... Show More
Nov 20
Listener Tales 104: Your Grandparents Might Be Criminals!
<p>We COULDN"T skip Listener Tales this month, so we HAD to give it to you one week early, so prepare for a batch of tales that are brought to you BY you, FOR you, FROM you and ALLLLL about you! Today we have stories of parents visiting from beyond the grave, a bladder that serve ... Show More
56m 9s
Feb 2024
Grave Robbers Turned Murderers: The Sinister Story of Burke and Hare
The Burke and Hare case was a scandalous episode in 19th-century Edinburgh where William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants, resorted to murder to supply fresh corpses to medical schools. Operating in the early 1820s, they targeted vulnerable individuals, including trav ... Show More
35m 34s
Feb 2021
“Killing for Corpses" William Burke and William Hare Pt. 1
In 19th-century Edinburgh, two men on the hunt for money found a lucrative industry: grave robbing. But the infamous Burke and Hare didn’t want to dig up corpses. Instead, they delivered death to the gullible, and brought the bodies to one high-paying professor. Learn more about ... Show More
47m 55s
May 2021
“The Anatomy Murderers” Burke and Hare Pt. 1
When a tenant at their boarding house died in 1827, William Burke and William Hare found a way to make some extra money: selling bodies to a medical school. But to keep it up, they’d need a fresh supply of dead bodies — and those were hard to come by. Naturally, at least. Learn ... Show More
45m 17s