The Museum of Forensic Medicine at Wrocław Medical University (UMW) has added casts of William Burke and William Hare to its collection, saying the objects fill an important gap in its section on violent asphyxia, or deaths caused by external factors that suddenly prevent breathing.
Burke and Hare murdered at least 16 people in Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828.
Their victims were often lonely, elderly, ill, or poor. The men offered them lodging at Hare’s boarding house, gave them alcohol, and killed them. The bodies were then sold to doctors for anatomy teaching.
Dr. Jędrzej Siuta, curator of the museum and a forensic medicine specialist at UMW, said Burke’s case remains important because it gave forensic medicine the term “burking.”
The word describes a particular form of homicidal suffocation in which the attacker compresses the victim’s chest and abdomen, preventing the movements needed to breathe.
“The lungs do not perform breathing movements by themselves,” Siuta said. “The work of the respiratory muscles, the chest, abdomen, and diaphragm, is needed. If those movements are blocked, a person can suffocate even when there is no typical closure of the airways.”
Burke was convicted and executed. Hare avoided hanging after agreeing to cooperate with investigators and testify against his accomplice.
For that reason, Burke’s mask is a postmortem mask, while Hare’s likeness was preserved while he was still alive.
Siuta said postmortem masks were made by placing material, usually plaster, over the face of a dead person to create a mold.
Further casts could then be made from it. Such masks were often used to commemorate famous people, including criminals whose cases drew public attention.
“Burke’s mask is just such an object, at once a historical keepsake and an exhibit important for forensic medicine,” Siuta said.
The original Burke mask is in Edinburgh. The casts acquired by the Wrocław museum were bought in France and were made from the earlier masks in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Siuta described them as unique objects, made as single examples.
The museum’s section on violent asphyxia presents different ways in which an external factor can cause acute respiratory failure and death. These include hanging, ligature strangulation, manual strangulation, drowning, and choking, including cases in which objects block the throat, larynx or bronchi.
Siuta said the museum had lacked objects showing two types of suffocation that are difficult to demonstrate with tissue specimens: burking and positional asphyxia, in which body position prevents normal breathing.
The second new exhibit is a window frame from a recent case in which a woman locked in a basement tried to escape through a window but became trapped in a metal frame in a position that made breathing impossible. Her body was sent to the Department of Forensic Medicine together with the window.
“There were no noose, no immersion in water, and no classic blocking of the mouth and nose,” Siuta said, explaining positional asphyxia. “The decisive factor is the position of the body.”
He said the two acquisitions complete the museum’s account of violent asphyxia.
“Now the violent asphyxia section is complete,” Siuta said. “The new objects are the missing links in the full story of mechanisms of death caused by violent asphyxia.”
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP