Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Written with enthusiasm and reach, The Doctor Dissected examines works from three centuries which compulsively imagine and re-imagine one of the nineteenth century's most notorious crimes. Perceptively and tenaciously, Caroline McCracken-Flesher explores an outrage so scandalous that it added a new word to the English language. She shows how this crime has fascinated writers, filmmakers and others in Scotland and far beyond over many generations." --Robert Crawford, author of Scotland's Books
"In The Doctor Dissected, Caroline McCracken-Flesher shows how the sensational, grisly serial killings of 1820s Edinburgh still reverberate through Scottish popular culture. From Sir Walter Scott to Ian Rankin, each generation has resurrected and reimagined the dark secrets lying at the heart of medical progress. This is required reading for anyone on a cultural tour of Scotland." --Lisa Rosner, author of The Anatomy Murders
"Asking why the Burke-Hare-Knox anatomy murders still haunt national consciousness, Caroline McCracken-Flesher argues that Scots use this true Edinburgh horror story to define and refine their self-image, presenting her compelling case with surgical precision and scalpel-sharp wit." --Jamie Davies, Professor of Experimental Anatomy, University of Edinburgh.
"A fascinating look at how the murders have resounded through almost two hundred years of literature and drama." --The Commercial Dispatch
"Never less than engaging and intelligent...This is an immensely valuable work of scholarship that serves to make sense of the imaginative legacy of Burke and Hare and to
place it squarely within a complex and richly textured cultural and political context." --Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Synopsis
In 1828, Robert Knox was Edinburgh's charismatic anatomist--but eager medical students needed corpses to practice on, and Knox was supplied by the murderers Burke and Hare. The Doctor Dissected shows how this local crime became a trauma that echoes down the years as fact and fiction and into modern media--particularly in Scotland. Because Knox refused to speak, and national author Walter Scott would not speak for him, Scottish newspapers filled the silence with speculation. Worse, for a society that worried about the medical uncertainty of death, and whether the dead might arise, Knox's subjects loomed larger the longer their story remained untold. Victorian attempts to end the story only gave it new energy: evangelical writers could not account for the doctor; Robert Louis Stevenson turned him into Jekyll and Hyde. Melodramas tried to demonize Knox, but by the 1930s his scandal had extended to implicate a complicit public in James Bridie's plays. The 1970s could then read villains as victims of society--until Alasdair Gray gave contentious voice to actual victims in Poor Things. Today, Burke and Hare seem harmless, populating detective stories for children; they drive a national economy through Edinburgh Festival frolics--not least those of Gunther von Hagens. With Knox they feature internationally in movies, manga, and video games. Yet canny Scots like Ian Rankin know the value of a dark past as a warning against complacency for twenty-first-century Scotland--they show the use of a negative tale to chasten any too optimistically imagined community.
About the Author
Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. She is the author of
Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
1. Medicine, Murder, and Scottish Story:
Doctor Knox and Burke and Hare
2. The Story Begins:
The Law versus the Press, and the Doctor versus Walter Scott
3. Enlightened System versus Religious Sympathy:
The Sensational Tales of Alexander Leigton and David Pae
4. Dissecting the Doctor:
Mr. Jekyll, Dr. Hyde, and Robert Knox
5. Anatomizing the Audience:
James Bridie, Melodrama, and the Movies
6. Bringing out the Dead:
Silent Victims Speak in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
7. Resting in Pieces?
Present Comforts or Restless Futures in Ian Rankin's Scotland
Notes
Bibliography
Index