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

Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s innovative, bold, pacy, perky and quirky study not only provides a completely new modern analysis of the Burke and Hare murders but also seeks to place them within the context of Scottish cultural anxieties, a topic which has never left the agenda of cultural criticism, from the age of Gregory Smith to that of Carol Craig. The central argument is that Scottish culture has never quite ‘got over’ Burke and Hare. In McCracken’s view, the authors of canonical and popular literature from the 1820s to the age of Ian Rankin have acted as a procession of ‘resurrection men’, forever disinterring a grisly, but apparently transient episode, in order once again to interrogate a trope that never dies but continues to fascinate the culture that cannot stop revisiting it. In this study, Burke and Hare are truly ‘buried men’ ‘thrust […] Back in the human mind again’.

McCracken-Flesher’s study is not quite literary criticism, not quite history of ideas and not quite cultural theory. This expresses no reservation about it: its interdisciplinarity is a major, welcome and rare strength. The book’s depth of primary research in archives and newspapers is absolutely first rate, and it is on one level a serious historical study. But it also discusses books, ideas and cultural anxieties fully, effectively and with a delightfully light tone.

The accounts of the scientific/pseudoscientific context and the aftermath of the Burke and Hare murders are well done, and McCracken-Flesher shrewdly sets out the history of nineteenth-century medicine and twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism as these developed alongside revisitations of the Burke and Hare trope. Stevenson, Bridie and the usual suspects all receive excellent coverage. The dissection of Byron even gets a look-in on page 12.

There are, however, one or two issues that one could raise. While The Doctor Dissected is a strongly interdisciplinary study, its theoretical underpinnings are very much those of literary criticism alone. Nora’s theories of cultural memory, to give only one example, might provide a very fruitful way of extending the readings provided here. Film renditions are covered but might have received more space. At the same time, it is questionable whether the book is rooted enough in either Edinburgh or the Scotland of the late 1820s. The disappointing pressures brought to bear on Scottish society in peacetime (such as those addressed by Scott in the Malagrowther Letters or those consequent on the removal of Scottish business to the Home Office) were surely fertile ground for cultural anxiety to grow in, while not only Deacon Brodie but also Major Weir (revisited of course by James Robertson in The Fanatic) provide exemplars of Edinburgh – not Scottish – double life, which Knox merely reiterated. Although anti-Irish racism (or sectarianism, through the conflation of Catholicism with foreignness) is considered, there could have been more acknowledgement of just how enduring a feature of Scottish society it has been. In a literary context, of course, the hybridisation of the National Tale with a national Gothic in the 1820s (not least in the work of James Hogg) could also be seen as highly relevant to McCracken-Flesher’s arguments. In fairness, McCracken-Flesher does address the historical context of the Malagrowther letters, and some of these other issues, but can be seen as leaving more to be said.

That is the point of course. The great virtue of this book is that it really gets you thinking about things you have not stopped to think about before. If, for the present writer, Scotland’s cultural anxieties have got more to do with banal repressions (such as the longstanding absence of the study of the country, its history and its culture from school curriculae) than the Gothic exotica of Knox, Burke and Hare, McCracken-Flesher certainly presents her case with a profundity and detail that her subject has...