The Edinburgh Dead Read Online Free PDF

I.”
    “Well, let us hope the truth will out. It does on occasion.”
    Christison closed the box in which his implements were now once more safely nestled. It clicked solidly shut and he turned a tiny golden catch to secure it.
    “Tell me, did you see a porter loitering out there in the corridor when you arrived?” he asked Quire.
    “No one, sir.”
    Christison gave an irritated grunt.
    “Would you care to walk with me, then? I must find one of myassistants to close this poor fellow up, make him fit for the grave. And a porter to take him on his way.”
    Quire fell into step at the professor’s side. He was not sorry to leave that place.
    “At least if I put a name and a family to him, he’ll not find his way on to a slab in a lecture theatre,” Quire said.
    “My anatomical colleagues would have little use for such a damaged cadaver, in truth. But you would be surprised, I suspect, at how many families are willing to sell the deceased for that very purpose.”
    “Not those as have a house in the New Town, though. Takes a deal more poverty than that, I should think.”
    “No doubt.”
    Christison glanced sideways at Quire, and read something there in his face.
    “You disapprove, Sergeant. Surely you would rather the schools find their supplies through such legitimate channels, rather than line the pockets of the resurrectionists?”
    “It’s none of it legitimate, to my way of thinking. Any man would hope for a bit more dignity in his ending,” Quire muttered, and at once regretted his gruff candour.
    “Ah,” said Christison, pressing his box of instruments a little more firmly into the crook of his arm. “Well, we can agree upon the distastefulness of the enterprise, if not on the question of its necessity. We live in enlightened times, with the inquisitive intellect as our guide. That its discoveries come at a price is undeniable. Neither the city fathers nor my anatomical colleagues are quite so sentimental, however. To learn the secrets of the human body—and our city’s fine reputation was built in part upon the excavation of such secrets, let us not forget—a man must have a body in which to delve; anatomy can be taught without a cadaver, but it cannot be taught well. If we relied solely upon the produce of the gallows, our students would have the most meagre of fare, for all the sterling efforts of you and your fellow officers.”
    Quire held his tongue. He liked Christison well enough and had no desire to dispute the practicalities of medical education with him. And there was, in any case, substance to what the man said: an understanding existed—never directly expressed, but present in the air like a flavour—that the police did not enquire too deeply into the means by which the dead reached Edinburgh’s famed, and lucrative, medical schools.
    Whatever those means, Quire reflected silently, it was never the wealthy, or the powerful, who found themselves, after departing this life, displayed and dismembered for the edification of the students. Dignity in death was, like all else, unequally shared.

New Town
     
    The New Town was another place, another world; not wholly separate from the Old, connected to it by threads both tangible and intangible, but as unlike to it as an ordered farm of cultivated fields was to the wilderness that preceded it.
    The Old Town had taken centuries to form itself, a haphazard growth thickening along the High Street, knotting itself into ever tighter and more crowded patterns. The New was the product of a singular and potent vision, and had sprung up in barely fifty years. It had been laid out in stern grids and graceful curves across the slopes and open fields to the north of the Old, beyond what had once been a thin, marshy loch and was now elegant gardens that divided the two Edinburghs one from the other.
    For all its grandeur there were places in the New Town, Quire knew, where life’s cruder urgencies held sway, but today it presented its most gracious face