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

This work by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, a professor of English, provides a cultural tour of the artists and writers whose imaginative creativity responded to the early nineteenth-century crimes of William Burke and William Hare who, in their desire to satisfy the need of corpses for medical study, became professional murderers providing "warm bodies" for Edinburgh's famous and reviled anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. The author explains how, while resurrection scandals were legion at the time, the combination of the murders and Knox's refusal (as well as the medical profession's) to speak publicly on the matter traumatized the Scottish people by "becoming a tale and a wonder that would not die" (16). Forced to live with its gothic horror, each generation has seemed impelled to retell the story as a means of challenging the nation's collective memory; examining the scientific and cultural authority of medicine, including ethics and professional etiquette; reviewing the uneasiness of the body politic with the uncertainties of death and dissection; exposing the snobbishness of Whiggish behavior; realigning the relationship of medicine and the legal profession; and dredging up the formidable boundaries of class.

This explains why the scandal quickly became a plot device plumbed by artists and writers who, to this day, continue to assemble and reassemble the data, analyze and categorize it, and reduce it to different modes of artistic expression. This includes nineteenth-century writer and national hero, Sir Walter Scott, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, whose private letters used the crime as a metaphor to highlight the uneasy relationship between Scotland and the British union. There was also Alexander Leighton's Court of Cacus; The Story of Burke and Hare (1861); David Pae's Mary Paterson; Or, the Fatal Error (1864-65); Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); James Bridie's The Anatomist (1930); Dylan Thomas's The Doctor and the Devils (1953); Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992); and a host of others down to the present day whose medium and message continue in fiction, film, and video.

If readers wish a straightforward recounting of the story about Burke, Hare, and Knox, they had best look elsewhere, for the telling of this tale comes only in dribs and drabs between long-winded quotes, repetitive titles, and cute phrases. This is a tortured telling of an equally tortured story that could better have been explained in the American Quarterly. The author's superfluity with words is an object lesson in itself as the several pages of acknowledgments attest. That this is a book instead of an article is to the credit of the author but not the publisher.