Robert Louis Stevenson as Philosophical Anatomist: The Body Snatcher

On 31 October 1828, William Burke and William Hare invited an elderly beggar to their lodgings. That night they strangled Margaret Docherty, stuffing her body into a tea chest and taking it to the dissecting rooms of the famed anatomy teacher, Robert Knox. It became the scandalous "Burking Affair." The criticism of Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher," one of its most famous retellings, emphasizes Stevenson's negative representations of anatomists. But it is more complicated. A close look at Stevenson's essays on fiction reveal a nuanced contemplation of Knox's "philosophical" anatomy. After years of reconsidering the import of Knox's ideas, Stevenson reworked aspects of the Knoxian narrative in writing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In rethinking and revising the story of philosophical anatomy and Knox in his novella, Stevenson develops a way of writing that evokes the best aspects of the philosophical anatomist's theories. [146 words]