Irish word of the day
The Irish word of the day is:
Arm (body):
sciathán
Pronunciation [shkihaan]
On this day in 1829 the “West Port Murderer” William Burke was hanged. Burke killed, then sold the corpses of his 17 victims to medical schools for dissection; it was a lucrative market as there were insufficient cadavers available for teaching. The only legal supply of cadavers was the bodies of executed criminals and there had been a sharp reduction in the execution rate in the early 19th century, creating a lucrative sellers’ market.
On this day in 1852 Louis Brennan was born. A mechanical engineer by trade, at 22 he invented a torpedo that could be retrieved if it missed it’s mark.
On this day in 1939 William Butler Yeats dies. He was the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.
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