BURKING SHOP DESTROYED

I spent the afternoon in St Nicholas Church in the middle of Aberdeen, first having lunch with the Friends of St Nicholas and then giving them a talk on the history of grave robbing in 19th Century Scotland.

It was a very appropriate venue for such a talk, as Dr Andrew Moir lies buried outside in the kirk graveyard. Moir was an anatomist of great skill and taught the subject at King's College from 1839-1844. However, earlier in the century he had been the proprietor of a private school of Anatomy. At that time, only people who had been executed for murder could be legally dissected, and there were far too few of these to meet demand. The shortfall was made good by body snatchers who dug up the newly buried, much to the consternation of the local populace.

It was widely rumoured in Aberdeen that Dr Moir and his students were enthusiastic diggers in the local graveyards. Things came to a nasty head in December 1831 when a dog scavenging in the garden of Dr Moir's "Anatomical Theatre" in Hospital Row dug up a human limb. Word of the outrage spread rapidly, a crowd gathered, and the theatre was invaded. Three bodies were discovered in the dissection rooms and were paraded through the streets of Aberdeen to the St Nicholas kirk, to await re-burial. Meanwhile rioting had commenced around Moir's theatre and it was burned to the ground.

Moir fled to his lodgings in the Guestrow, but the mob gathered outside and he was forced to spend the night in the St Nicholas kirkyard, cowering under one of the table-tombs shown in my photograph.

The whole incident was reported in a local broadsheet under the following heading:

BURKING SHOP DESTROYED
A particular account of the extraordinary demolition of an Anatomical Theatre, at Aberdeen, on Monday last, the 19th December 1831, which was burnt and erased to the ground, in consequence of the sagacity of a Dog.

Ironically, when Moir died in 1844, from typhoid caught from a patient, he was buried in the St Nicholas kirkyard, under a table-tomb!