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

In the final paragraph of this thoughtful study of the cultural legacy of the Burke and Hare murders, Caroline McCracken-Flesher concludes that “Doctor Knox will continue to pound on Scotland’s memory, victims will beseech an audience, Burke and Hare will walk. On such a past the Scots can never quite shut the door” (p. 232). Not just Scots, one might suggest, for together with Lisa Rosner’s The Anatomy Murders (2009), The Doctor Dissected marks an upsurge of academic interest in the Burke and Hare case within the United States. This international dimension is part of McCracken-Flesher’s own story, for, as she observes, it was through the dissemination of James Bridie’s play The Anatomist (1931) and later through the influence of Hollywood that Burke and Hare’s grisly crimes became the stock-in-trade of schlock horror or a cautionary tale of scientific hubris. And yet McCracken-Flesher’s focus in this book is not so much the transcultural reiteration of the West Port Murders as their particular meaning and significance within Scottish literature, culture, and politics. Indeed, this is very much a work of Scottish literary studies, as the author’s pedigree would suggest. Anyone expecting a work of medical history is therefore liable to be disappointed. This book adds little to our understandings of the murders themselves or to the wider issues surrounding anatomical dissection in the early nineteenth century. What it does do, however, is to attune its readers to the peculiarly Scottish qualities of this story. While some, such as John Landis, have seen darkly comedic potential in the case, the Scots, McCracken-Flesher argues, have always been troubled by it, and have found themselves generally incapable of expiating it from the collective national psyche. The origins of this national neurosis, she suggests in chapter 2, can be located in the conspicuous silences that accompanied Burke’s trial and execution in 1829. The first of these silences was Robert Knox’s, the “doctor” of the title and the surgeon–anatomist who purchased the dubiously sourced cadavers offered by the Irish duo. By failing to account for his actions, to apologize or even to justify them, he left the story fundamentally unresolved. The second silence was Sir Walter Scott’s, who, despite personal involvement and the pleas of friends and colleagues, declined to use his literary talents to sublimate national tragedy into collective mythology as he had done so effectively with his Jacobite-era novels.

In the succeeding chapters, McCracken-Flesher charts the sometimes direct, but often oblique efforts of Scottish authors to address this cultural and psychological lacuna. In chapter 3, for example, she considers Alexander Leighton’s Court of Cacus (1861) and David Pae’s Lucy, The Factory Girl (1858–59), demonstrating how these authors reinterpreted events within the dualistic mid-Victorian frameworks of evangelical moralism and populist sensationalism. Chapter 4, meanwhile, turns its attention to the mediated representation of Dr. Knox in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and his lesser-known Pall Mall Gazette story, “The Body Snatcher” (1884). Chapter 5 moves into the twentieth century and begins by showing how the Glasgow doctor-tuned-playwright James Bridie’s play The Anatomist became embroiled in a debate about the essence of Scottish literature at a time of increasing cultural transnationalism, before proceeding to demonstrate the ways in which the melodramatic mode was instantiated through sensationalist plays and, later, through film. If, by the 1970s and 1980s, Burke and Hare had “gone global,” then chapter 6 demonstrates how the case continued to have particular resonance within Scottish political culture. At a time of deep divisions and tensions, culminating in the devolution referendum of 1979 and the vexed political climate of the Thatcher era, Burke, Hare, and Knox were once again brought to the forefront of Scottish cultural self-examination, first in...