Polly Morph Roaming: Edinburgh Body Snatchers

I cannot recommend seeing a city by bike tour enough! Biking gets you around quickly, and you learn and see things that you may have missed on your own. That was my experience in Edinburgh.

The tour started off by coasting down the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace. I think this is where Mary, Queen of Scots' witnessed the murder of her friend, David Rizzio, by her jealous husband.

The unicorn (the national animal of Scotland)

We didn't go in, though. Instead, we kept biking through Holyrood Park, around Arthur's Seat, which is actually an extinct volcano.

On the other side of the park, we stopped at the Sheep Heid Pub in Duddingston. We stopped for a drink, and then walked over to Duddingston Kirk.

That's when the tour guide really started to get into his storytelling groove. He told the story of Burke and Hare, who were Edinburgh resurrection men (body snatchers, who sold corpses for the study of anatomy) who sold corpses to Robert Knox, who was an anatomist and a very ugly character. Dissection of human corpses was only legal in certain cases, so legal cadavers were rare...the only bodies that could be dissected were those of criminals. Burke and Hare went on a killing spree in Edinburgh, murdering 16 people and selling the bodies to Knox before they finally got caught—their final victim was one that the physicians and anatomy students recognized. The tour guide said that it was because she was a prostitute, but I am pretty sure he embellished for comedic effect. The internet says she was elderly and that her body was discovered before it could be delivered to Knox.

Burke's the butcher,
Hare's the thief,
Knox the boy who buys the beef!

...the saying goes.

Anyway, Burke was publicly hanged and his body was then...drumroll...dissected! His skeleton is still on display in the Anatomical Museum at the University of Edinburgh...

So don't you know where this ultra-fan of the Mütter Museum headed after the tour was over? To check out the medical museums in Edinburgh, of course! The one I had time to visit was the Surgeons' Hall Museums. Understandably, there was no photography allowed, but the collection is spectacular. Everything from historical specimens to donated robotic surgical equipment is on display.