Book Review: The Doctor Dissected, Caroline McCracken-Flesher

It begins with an observation that requires elucidation: the crimes of Burke and Hare were not unique but the way in which they became engrained, or even scarred, into Scottish mythology was. Why should this be so?

She charts the evolution of the story from Walter Scott’s reaction to the murders and trial, through the minor 19th century serial novelist David Pae, who used it as a vehicle to promote abstinence from alcohol, to Robert Louis Stevenson’s multiple debts to it, and the variations of the theme provided by James Bridie, Alasdair Gray, Ian Rankin and even Smallville and manga.

The arc that she traces is one of trauma: Scott, though privately obsessed with it, did not novelise it for the public. Nobody quite seemed to be able to determine what the story meant, or how it should be narrated, and the focus moves through various ill-starred attempts to find a “moral”, realisation of complicity (particularly in Bridie’s The Anatomist), victimology (in Gray’s Poor Things) and finally the camp catharsis of various Fringe musicals. The crucial aspect, for Scottish writers and readers, was one that Owen Dudley Edwards pinned down. Burke and Hare were Irish. Dr Robert Knox – the dashing and famous surgeon who, in the words of the old rhyme “bought the beef” – was Scottish.

The story resisted pat explanations because it raised issues of ethnicity, class, gender and ethical sophistication that had the capacity to disturb. One of the English accounts is almost Freudian: Burke and Hare are depicted as the Irish id, Knox is the Scottish superego. The unfortunate coincidence of his surname with that of the Reformer no doubt itched into the problem as well.

The Doctor Dissected is a neat supplement to The Invention Of Murder by Judith Flanders, a remarkable and elegant book published this time last year: Flanders did not discuss the Burke and Hare case, but conversely, McCracken-Flesher does not analyse material culture in the way that Flanders has proved can be so revealing.

It raises a question: was there the same trade in objects – porcelain models, playing cards and such like – about the Burke and Hare case? If not, why not? It certainly inspired more literary responses than the cases that Flanders examined. It may be that the simple facts of the case – that Burke was hanged but Hare disappears from the historical record – exacerbated the anxiety. Justice was not seen to be done: it was a crime novel with the final pages missing.

Although I find arguments about things being “uniquely Scottish” both naive and disquieting, it is striking that there are very few literary novels about the Ripper case that one might set alongside The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, Poor Things and The Anatomist as genuine aesthetic responses to a shocking crime. Marie Belloc Lowndes attempted a “Ripper” novel in The Lodger in 1911, but the story would only enter literature with Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair at the end of the century.

The more comparative elements are sometimes downplayed – a problem inherent in a work self-consciously within “Scottish Studies” – and there is, for example, little on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a precursor for the demonic doctor (it would be interesting to chart the novel’s simultaneous rise in popular dramatic forms with the fears provoked by Dr Knox).

Likewise, the arc of trauma occludes as well as reveals: Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, as much as it “gives the victim a voice” could be read as a woman refusing to be cast as the victim (an interpretation suggested by Bella herself in the novel: the whole Burke and Hare and Frankenstein story might be a male backlash against an independent woman).

Neverthless, this is a fine example of how erudition and careful analysis can reveal untold depths in a story, and raises the possibility that whatever happens next in Scotland, someone will summon the ghosts of Burke and Hare.

The Doctor Dissected

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

Oxford University Press, £40

Stuart Kelly