Overview

"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."

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9780199766826

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<br> 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<p><br> 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<p><br> Asking why the Burke-Hare-Knox anatomy murders still ha

Professor McCracken-Flesher is one of the most ingenious - and readable - academics working in the field of Scottish culture, and this volume... shows her skill at teasing out a story and its implications to its best advantage. Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

Author Information

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.

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