The Anatomy Murders

The title says it all. Professor Rosner has ostentatiously steeped herself in primary research, radiating atmosphere and actuality shaken from commission evidence, juridical archives, medical controversies, pamphlet wars, trial reports and spin-offs, with a zeal ruthlessly reminiscent of American tourists of yesteryear displaying slides to a hopelessly captive audience. It is a task joyfully completed with heavy-handed judgements, portentous if ludicrous emphases, noisy salesmanship, awe-inspiring complacency and a packaging that if anything conceals the considerable value of the work. The neophyte to Burke and Hare will find a genial guide serving pleasantly digestible horrors. The specialist will be left alternately wanting to shake the author’s hand or to wring her neck.

Burke and Hare have been done before and for the most part done worse. Whatever the merit of her predecessors, Rosner should shake the most complacent of us with some highly proficient questioning of the evidence about several of the corpses murdered in order to maintain the supremacy of the Edinburgh medical establishment. Her answers may be less convincing than her questions, but that is what history means.

Here is where the reader is tempted to turn Burke and Hare on the author. She has plumbed sources never worked in such depth, if at all, while regurgitating ancient findings in the same infallible tone. She has brilliantly doubted whether the murdered Mary Paterson was (as she is always termed) a prostitute, whether she had sexual relations with the anatomy student who later dissected her and whether our gullibility has been exploited by Victorian narrators in quest of morality. 

Yet she casually commits precisely the sin with which she has so ably charged the rest of us: that of following sheep-like in the muddy tracks of conventional wisdom when it comes to Burke’s common-law wife Helen McDougal, found not proven by the jury and never yet convicted of murder by any historian, including Rosner. Yet the legend of McDougal as a murderer is once more trotted out, beginning on the first page of the text.

Overall The Anatomy Murders is at its best when it breaks free of Burke and Hare to discuss the history of anatomy studies in their time and related matters.

It is not the definitive work on this subject, but it shows conclusively that neither is any other book.