The celebrated story of Burke and Hare and Doctor Knox “cut a gash in Scottish literature” (4). The seventeen murders of 1828, and the fact that they were committed for profit arising from the need for anatomical specimens at the surgery schools, continue to provide a compelling tale well outside their Edinburgh setting. Yet Caroline McCracken-Flesher argues that it has always been a story of Scotland, one that has caused lasting, and at times productive, distress for Scottish writers. The story itself fought resolution, she contends, and as a result Scots have been compelled to “pick at their own horrible past—an old injury that should long ago have healed itself” (9). Individually, while William Burke and William Hare were more or less instantly fixed within cultural memory, Doctor Robert Knox was the key figure destined to receive a “slow dissection in literature” (29). Collectively, the scandal “trenched its way into the national psyche, cutting a wound so damaging it continues to weep within Scottish culture” (9). This sample of McCracken-Flesher’s prose is fairly representative of the book’s voice. It not only takes every opportunity to find ironic metaphors (some of which become quickly tiresome or forced) but also deliberately weaves them into the central theoretical concern. McCracken-Flesher shows that for nearly two centuries the murderers and complicit doctor have been “anatomized,”or laid open in order to conduct a study of natural structure. Scottish identity has been mostly frustrated in the results.

The anatomy murders scandal initiated a shock that has persistently irritated Scottish literature and popular culture, The Doctor Dissected contends. Seven mostly thematic chapters trace the story’s iterations alongside “Scotland’s shifting responses to and uses for the trauma that was Burke and Hare” (16). McCracken-Flesher draws on an academic literature of trauma that stresses integration and resolution, as well as a parallel literature that places difficult narratives within the creation of memory, community, and history. Two opening chapters lay out why, in the author’s view, the scandal remained culturally unresolved during the nineteenth century: Knox was allowed to maintain his silence about the affair, and Sir Walter Scott refused to write about it (even as he was tangentially involved through his position at the Royal Society). The tale “needed instant retelling if it was to be integrated in Scottish culture and the nation to be healed” (40). Instead, the murder story entered a long history of compulsive repetition, as seen in Alexander Leighton’s The Court of Cacus (1861) and David Pae’s melodramatic fictionalizations of the tale in the late 1850s–early 1860s. A lengthy chapter is then devoted to probing the veiled excoriation of Knox in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher” (1884) and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Attention is then directed to James Bridie’s successful play of 1930, “The Anatomist,” and the subsequent explosion in representations of Burke and Hare in popular film. Bridie, McCracken-Flesher argues, challenged Scots to forgo enjoying the scandal as mere entertainment or as moralizing melodrama and instead demonstrated the ability of theater to cast an accusatory eye at its audience. The book then considers late twentieth-century anxieties that found expression in history writing and fiction about the case. New themes emerge, such as the Irish background of Burke and Hare, the female gender of the majority of the victims, and the ability of Knox’s opportunism to convey a critique of Thatcher-era economic exploitation. Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) is at the center of this analysis, although the connection to Burke, Hare, and Knox becomes more tenuous and increasingly given over to discussions of how giving voice to victims structured debates over the devolved Parliament and Scottish identity. A final chapter surveys a dizzying array of new Burke and Hare expressions: in everything from TV to a wave of contemporary fiction, video games, anime, and children’s literature. The perennial popularity of Burke and Hare at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe comes under the author’s scrutiny as evidence that the scandal has become a floating fragment of history that does little other than to service the economics of uncomplicated entertainment. However, the recurrent passing interest to the story in Ian Rankin’s fiction is taken as one way that Scots are negotiating irony and ambivalently approaching their past as a guide to a national future.

Some readers will find issue with McCracken-Flesher’s use of trauma as a structuring concept. Narrative-as-healing skirts close to a reductive tool for explaining the persistency of the Burke-Hare-Knox myth in Scottish culture, especially as this discussion of trauma explicitly draws on a clinical and philosophical literature of Holocaust and torture victims. (One might remember that the scandal involved seventeen grisly murders, not the killing fields.) Indeed, it is not made clear why this admittedly powerful cultural touchstone should be elevated into a compulsive pathological obsession for “Scots” broadly conceived or for the writers here made to interpret Scottishness. It is improbable that Scots of either the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries would have considered themselves “survivors of 1828” (155), as McCracken-Flesher glibly suggests, but that does not mean that they could not find innovative ways to tell the tale that spoke to new concerns. Another potential criticism is the selective Victorian Burke-Hare-Knox canon that this book creates. Melodrama, in both its nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms, is practically disparaged. McCracken-Flesher’s approach manufactures an archive in which responsible writers must grope toward “integration” of the horror. Did “Scotland” have to wait for Stevenson to finally affix guilt to Knox? The Doctor Dissected is a grand narrative in the traditional sense in which contestation is simply an irksome obstacle to proper resolution. Not so much a history of Burke, Hare, and Knox in the Scottish imagination, it is a criticism of how that story has figured in a national narrative of Scottishness—a narrative assumed to exhibit an essential pathology that calls forth remediation through story.