The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders

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A series of bizarre disappearances filled the citizens of early nineteenth-century Scotland with terror. When the perpetrators were finally apprehended in 1828, their motive roiled the nation: William Burke and William Hare had murdered for profit. The cadavers supplied a ready payout, courtesy of Dr. Robert Knox, who was desperate for anatomical subjects. Nearly two hundred years later, these scandalous murders continue to fire imagination in Scotland and beyond.

From the start, the sensational events provoked artists and writers. While Sir Walter Scott resisted public comment, his correspondence gives his trenchant private opinion and shows him working busily behind the scenes and against the doctor. Many more mined the news outright. Serial novelist David Pae exploited the disturbance to lobby for religious belief in an increasingly secular world. A subsequent generation resurrected the grisly drama as fodder for the Victorian gothic-the murders figure prominently in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" and, more obliquely, in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The twentieth century saw the specters of Burke and Hare emerge in James Bridie's play The Anatomist, Hollywood horror films, television programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Frankensteinian retellings from Alasdair Gray. In this century, the story has been picked up by Smallville and Doctor Who. Recent allusions and reenactments range from the somber-in popular detective fiction by Ian Rankin-to the dark, camp comedy of Fringe Festival performances and the slapstick of John Landis's Burke and Hare.

Featuring over thirty images and canvassing a wide range of media-from contemporary newspaper accounts and private correspondence to Japanese comic books and videogames-The Doctor Dissected analyzes the afterlife of this national trauma and considers its singular place in Scottish history.

The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders Review

If the anatomist Dr. Robert Knox (1791 - 1862) were at work today, he would be astonished at the labs in which cadavers are dissected for educational purposes. What might surprise him most is that the bodies under the knife were often volunteers who had before their deaths arranged for their mortal remains to bestow enlightenment. There is no shame now in being on the anatomist's slab; giving your body up to be studied is rather to be commended. Knox had to do things differently. Anatomists and medical students in Edinburgh, even though it was one of the centers of medical education at the time, got their subjects mostly by digging up specimens that had been freshly buried, or paying diggers to do so. The diggers, jauntily called "Resurrection Men," provided cadavers for a fee. And in the famous case of William Burke and William Hare, they not only provided Knox with cadavers, they manufactured fresh specimens by murdering people and then claiming to have dug them up. The infamy of Burke and Hare is probably the only reason Knox is remembered now. The trio were operating almost two centuries ago, and they certainly were not the only ones in the world involved in the cadaver trade, and Burke and Hare were not the only murderers in it. Their crime, however, is the only well-known instance of body snatching, and is also the most famous crime from Scotland; the world will not let it go. Why there should be such permanence is a main theme of _The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural History of the Burke and Hare Murders_ (Oxford University Press) by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, a fascinating look at how the murders have resounded through almost two hundred years of literature and drama.

The author has not told the historical story of the murders themselves at length. Burke was hanged, but Hare had turned state's evidence, so he escaped prosecution and was eventually lost in obscurity. It is perhaps the unfinished punishment that plays a role in the way the crimes continue to gnaw in Scottish mythology. A far more important reason for the far-flung fame of the crimes is that Dr. Knox was never tried in the case. What did Knox know and when did he know it? The question has never been conclusively answered. Knox may have presumed that Scotland would regard him as above any sordid criminality because of his prestige, and claimed the position of victim when his silence was criticized. He did write to the papers complaining of his treatment and insisting that everyone else ought to be quiet about his case. No one else spoke for him, but others spoke about him. One of those was Sir Walter Scott, who McCracken-Flesher says could have shut down the national scandal by writing a "riotous popular retelling into one manageable history, [to] bring all speculation to an end." Scott never did. Most of the story in this book is about how that unresolved trauma worked itself into Scottish and international lore. There were melodramas, but more serious as literature were the efforts of Robert Louis Stevenson, who finally gave a clear implication of Knox's guilt in his Gothic tale "The Body Snatcher." (Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were in the movie.) McCracken-Flesher also makes the case that Knox is a source of the main character in _The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_. Jekyll was a chemist, not an anatomist or physician, but he is closely aligned with the medical profession, and like Knox he refuses to confess any secrets in what he says "is a private matter." Furthermore, the descent into Hyde represents some of the anthropological ideas that Knox was to write about in his later career. Finally, I was surprised and happy to be reminded that there is a body-snatching link to Stevenson's hilarious and neglected black comedy (which he wrote with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne) _The Wrong Box_ of 1889, which has an absurdly complicated plot centering on a misidentified body carted up in different ways and sent from one distressed recipient to another.

It is hard to imagine that there is any literary or cinematic aspect of the crime that McCracken-Flesher has overlooked. James Bridie's play (later film) _The Anatomist_ of 1930 broadened complicity to society as a whole. Alasdair Gray's _Poor Things_ of 1992 concentrated on the victims of the murders telling their stories. Alfred Hitchcock had a go at it, and so did Dylan Thomas. Burke and Hare have turned up in video games, in _Smallville_, and as camp personalities in fringe musicals. The Edinburgh Dungeon has a new exhibit about them. McCracken-Flesher writes, "We have only to think of tartanry with its remnant of Jacobitism, still alive in Princes Street and cannily embraced by skeptical Scots, to realize that the unimaginable horrors of Burke and Hare are likely to continue to lurk alongside more colorful and less threatening cultural imaginations in the making of tomorrow's Scotland." It is funny and bizarre to think that these horrific crimes have been handled in so many different ways. This thorough book even documents that the three men show up in an old nursery rhyme for jumping rope:

Doun the close and up the stair,
But an' ben wi' Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox, the boy that buys the beef.

There is no sign, two centuries on, that interest in the case will diminish. You can't keep the resurrection men down.

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