eparted relative. If the trick proved successful, as it
often did, the body was taken straight off to one of the schools and sold.
The parish authorities, probably, were not over particular about giving up
the body, if the deceased were a stranger, as by this means they saved the
cost of burial.

Subjects, too, were obtained from cheap undertakers, who kept the bodies
of the poor until the time for burial. The coffin was weighted so as to
conceal the fraud, and the mockery of reading the Burial Service over it
was gone through in the presence of the unsuspecting relatives.

That some bodies were obtained by murder there can be no doubt. The
exposure caused by the trials of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, and Bishop
and Williams in London, proves this.

The facts previously stated, however, go very far to exonerate the
anatomists from the false charge (freely made at the time) of their being
privy to these murders. It has been frequently stated that signs of murder
could be easily seen, and that the fact of the body being fresh, and there
being no evidence of its having been interred, ought to have at once
suggested foul play, and to have caused the teacher to communicate with
the police. But it must be remembered that the murders were generally very
artfully contrived by suffocation, so as to leave no outward signs of
ill-treatment. It was also no uncommon thing, for the reasons just given,
to receive at the schools bodies in quite a fresh state, which had
evidently never received sepulture.

An account of the _post mortem_ on the Italian boy, for whose murder
Bishop and Williams were hanged,[11] has been preserved by Mr.
Clarke.[12] The examination of the body was carried out by Mr.
Wetherfield, of Southampton Street. There were also present Mr. Mayo,
Lecturer on Anatomy at King's College; Mr. Partridge, his demonstrator;
Mr. Beaman, Parish Surgeon; and his Assistant, Mr. D. Edwards, and Mr.
Clarke. The boy's teeth had been removed and sold to a dentist, but beyond
this there were no external marks of violence on any part of the body. The
internal organs were carefully examined, but no trace of injury or poison
could be found. Mr. Mayo, who had a peculiar way of standing very upright
with his hands in his breeches' pockets, said, with a kind of lisp he had,
"By Jove! the boy died a nathral death." Mr. Partridge and Mr. Beaman,
however, suggested that the spine had not been examined, and after a
consultation it was deci