Category: Victorian Panic

• The "Burking" Epidemic

  This theory held that after the Burke and Hare murders, London and other British cities were filled with “burkers” who were not only robbing graves but murdering the poor, homeless, sick, and friendless in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools and hospitals. In its strongest form, the theory claimed that medical institutions themselves either tolerated or quietly encouraged the trade because their need for cadavers outpaced legal supply. The documented record clearly shows that the fear of burking became widespread in the early 1830s and that public debate around the Anatomy Act reflected exactly such anxieties. What remains far harder to prove is a centrally organized hospital program of harvesting the homeless. The panic was real; the full hidden-system claim remains more uncertain.