Caroline McCracken-Flesher. The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke & Hare Murders. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-19-976682-6. Price: US$65.00/£40.00

The task of this book, its author explains at the outset, is to wonder why the world continues to seek out the tale of William Burke, William Hare and Doctor Robert Knox, and why Scots cannot leave it behind (4). But her emphasis is clearly on the second part of this task: how the scandal of 1828—in which two Irishmen living in Edinburgh “burked” (or killed by smothering) sixteen people and sold their bodies to Knox for his classes in anatomy—became alternately, “the tale of Knox’s blame, of Burke and Hare’s underclass inevitability, a community’s guilt, a victim’s need, or a society’s self-critique,” but always functioned as “a story of Scotland” (10). Caroline McCracken-Flesher accordingly poses it as a peculiarly Scottish trauma—a story that must be told and re-told in an attempt to integrate an event that cannot be accommodated within previous schemes of meaning. She furthermore argues that Scotland’s peculiar trauma is ongoing, for out of it “comes a productive irony that resists the lure of coherent memory and manages to critique the very notion of remembering” (23). As in her previous book, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford University Press, 2005), McCracken-Flesher develops a complex, intensively documented view of multiple narrations that produce multiple imagined communities. But here those repetitions of a single tale dissect any stable or coherent image of the nation into monstrous fragments. The violence of Burke’s execution and of the huge (estimated at 20,000) Edinburgh crowd’s reaction to it, vividly described in the opening of the second chapter, certainly suggests that the crime was received as a shocking, traumatizing event. Hanged to “cries of ‘Burke him, Burke him, give him no rope,’ and ‘Wash blood from the land!’ and dissected in front of large audiences,” Burke’s skin was then tanned and converted into “portable property” by using pieces of it to make various souvenirs such as wallets, one of which can be seen today in the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh (28-29). The trial and conviction of Burke—Hare got off by testifying against Burke—was supposed to “‘tranquillize the public mind’” (30), but it did nothing of the sort. The newspapers were full of the story, or what they could get of it. Hare was gone, having fled the country, his wife had been stoned out of town, and Burke’s Scottish mistress was also “harried” from Edinburgh (32). McCracken-Flesher emphasizes the public’s fervent need to know, and yet at the same time, to have the scandal shut down, for it was recognized as a “moment of national embarrassment” (40). But Knox could not be made to speak about his part in the scandal—he simply continued his career as a popular teacher of anatomy in Edinburgh for some years—and so rumor flourished. Walter Scott also declined to speak publically to the issue. Instead, in his 1826 “Malachi Malagrowther” letters, he made use of the Burke and Hare scandal to represent his country under English legislation with the “painfully ugly” metaphor of “a subject in a common dissecting-room, left to the scalpel of the junior students, with the degrading inscription,—Fiat experimentum in corpore vili [Experiment on this vile body/body of little worth]” (47). This was the beginning, McCracken-Flesher observes, of “the compulsion of repetition that is both symptom and site of trauma” (39). In succeeding chapters, McCracken-Flesher focuses on moments in which the story of Burke and Hare became particularly alive in Scotland in literature and culture in general, considering the cultural anxieties or critiques that could be articulated through the tale (25). She begins with the analysis of three novels …