Episode 2 - Edinburgh's Slums - The Hunting Grounds of Burke and Hare

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Actual Education Interactive Guided Tours History Podcast

Miscellaneous


Our second podcast looks at the conditions for Edinburgh's poor in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Life was cheap amongst the capital's teeming tenements and high mortality rates meant there was a constant supply of bodies for graves...and where there were freshly dug graves, there were often going to be bodysnatchers... Some bodysnatchers didn't necessarily dug up bodies, they were murderers instead. Last week we found how two women took advantage of Edinburgh's anatomists need for fresh corpses by murdering a young boy, this week we learn about life for the poverty stricken areas of the Old Town, the hunting grounds of Burke and Hare.