The Doctor Dissected A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders

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 Dissectedshows 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.

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.