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The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson
A tale for this month of Halloween — of murder and haunting
A short while ago I wrote a piece on the body snatchers of Ye Olde England and the case of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh –
On the Trail of Burke and Hare
David Purlmutter left a comment reminding me of the short story, The Body. Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson. Having read it many years ago, I was nudged into revisiting this classic tale.
It was first published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884. What became known as the ‘burking era’ was still in living memory in Stevenson’s day. Burke and Hare had been caught in 1828. Rather than employing the chore of exhuming corpses to sell to the medical profession, Burke and Hare had simply murdered their victims to sell the corpses for dissection, in their case to Doctor Knox of Edinburgh. Although Dr Knox was never convicted he must surely have been aware that his supplies were suspiciously fresh. The locals certainly thought so as the doctor was forced to flee Edinburgh in fear of his life. The Mr K__ in the story is a thinly veiled Dr Knox. Following Burke’s execution (Hare turned king’s evidence to escape punishment) all cases of a similar nature were known as ‘burking’ or the criminals described as ‘burkers.’
