The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh’s Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes

(University of Pennsylvania Press) Famous among crime aficionados, William Burke and William Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention. Residents of Edinburgh, Scotland, they were arrested in November 1828 for killing 16 people over the course of 12 months in order to sell the corpses as cadavers for dissection. Rosner contextualizes the story of Burke and Hare within the social and cultural forces bringing early 19th-century Britain into modernity. The criminal investigations, she argues, raised troubling questions about the ways in which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh’s back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from murder. Rosner is a professor of history at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Man in Existence: The Scandalous Life of Alexander Lesassier.