Over at the National Library of Scotland website there's a fascinating collection of more than 1800 scanned and transcribed broadsides called The Word on the Street. It covers more than two and a half centuries of events from the 1650s right up to the 1910s.
More than half of the broadsides are ballads on topics of every kind, accidents, wars, crime and criminals, and so on, but the one that caught my eye today was this one, on the execution of David Myles, hanged in Edinburgh for the crime of incest on 27th November 1702.
The content isn't especially unusual for broadsides of this kind, consisting mostly of Myles confessing his sins from the scaffold and giving 'satisfaction' to the onlookers, unlike his sister, hanged the previous week for incest and infanticide. The interest lies in something rather more gruesome. David Myles was to be the subject of Edinburgh's Incorporation of Surgeons' first public dissection.
To advance the science of anatomy and the study of medicine, the Incorporation had constructed a new anatomy theatre in 1697 and secured an agreement from the Town Council to supply them with the corpse of one executed criminal each year for the purposes of public dissection. Over the course of a week, Myles' body was dissected by a series of experts on surgery and anatomy, concluding on the 8th day with an epilogue delivered by Archibald Pitcairne, one of the great physicians of the day, and who had been professor of medicine at Leiden before returning to Edinburgh. This public dissection was quite important for the teaching of anatomy in Edinburgh, and so the Incorporation didn't dispose of Myles's corpse in the usual fashion, but retained it in the form of an anatomical preparation. And so it is that over three centuries on, he can still be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.