The history of Burke and Hare and of the resurrectionist times : a fragment from the criminal annals of Scotland / by George MacGregor.
- Mac Gregor, George
- Date:
- 1884
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The history of Burke and Hare and of the resurrectionist times : a fragment from the criminal annals of Scotland / by George MacGregor. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
302/328 page 284
![were principally occupied in visiting public houses, though they called upon two lecturers on anatomy and offered them the body, but were refused.] At the Fortune of War we drank something again, and then (about six o'clock) we all three went in the chariot to Nova Scotia Gardens; we went into the wash-house, where I uncorded the trunk, and shewed May the body. He asked, how are the teeth ? I said I had not looked at them. Williams went and fetched a brad-awl from the house, and May took it and forced the teeth out; it is the constant practice to take the teeth out first, because, if the body be lost, the teeth are saved; after the teeth were taken out, we put the body in a bag, and took it to the chariot; May and I carried the body, and Williams got first into the coach, and then assisted in pulling the body in. . . . [The rest of this part of the confession is simply a record of having something to drink, and Arisiting lecturers, who refused to purchase the body. It concludes with an account of the apprehension of the men at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, with the body in their possession.] In an addition to this confession of the murder of the boy, Bishop made this further statement:— I declare that this statement is all true, and that it contains all the facts so far as I can recollect. May knew nothing of the murder, and I do not believe he suspected that I had got the body except in the usual way, and after the death of it. I always told him I got it from the ground, and he never knew to the contrary until I confessed to Mr. Williams [a clergyman] since the trial. I have known May as a body-snatcher for four or five years, but I do not believe he ever obtained a body except in the common course of men in the calling—by steal- ing from the graves. I also confess that I and Williams were concerned in the mm'der of a female—whom I believe to have been since discovered as Fanny Pigburn—on or about the 9th of October last. I and Williams saw her sitting about eleven or twelve o'clock at night on the step of a door in Shoreditch, near the church. She had a child four or five years old on her lap. I asked her why she was sitting there. She said she had no home to go to, for her landlord had turned her out into the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21065251_0302.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
