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Anatomy, National Museum of Scotland, review: creepy coffins, body snatchers and the history of dissection

Miniature coffins found on Arthur's Seat, in Edinburgh, in 1836 - National Museums Scotland
Miniature coffins found on Arthur's Seat, in Edinburgh, in 1836 - National Museums Scotland

How peculiar that, in an exhibition which revolves around dissected and decaying bodies and is well-stocked with cast iron coffins and reports of corpses stuffed into casks, it is a musty, scarlet and ivory silk robe that proves supremely creepy.

The robe was worn by Lord Justice-Clerk Boyle at the 1828 trial of William Burke who, in cahoots with William Hare, turned 16 hapless people into premature fodder for the dissection table. It was Boyle who ordered Burke’s skeleton be preserved, “that posterity may keep in remembrance [his] atrocious crimes”. Turn around, and the wretch is right there, grinning toothily behind you.

Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life, at the National Museum of Scotland, isn’t wholly about Burke and Hare, though the case makes up a generous part. Given this first-rate exhibition takes place within a few hundred feet of where the murders took place, and they contributed to an act of parliament that regulated the supply of bodies to anatomists, it would have been weird if it hadn’t.

You know what you’re getting, anyway, because the “West Port murders” – as they were known at the time – are mentioned at the show’s entrance, beside a mid-19th century papier-maché model that could be repeatedly taken apart. Clever, yes, but it shows immediately the need for tissue and tendon proper. Three double-sided, c1508-11 anatomical studies by Leonardo da Vinci follow. They’re a bit of a red herring, because this exhibition isn’t about that anatomical art: Leonardo earns his place here as polymath, not painter.

Human bodies have been part of anatomical teaching since the 13th century, but it wasn’t until direct observation ousted classical texts that the practice became widespread. Room two dunks you vividly into that arena, and introduces the first of the superstar anatomists on whose shoulders the exhibition rests.

First up, the Paduan professor Andreas Vesalius, whose 1543 book, On the Fabric of the Human Body, is presented in a chest-height wooden semi-circle, on which 2D skeletons teeter. A bit much, you might think, but it echoes a 1610 drawing of the famed Dutch anatomist Pieter Pauw in his anatomy theatre in Leiden displayed nearby. Pauw’s demonstrations were popular: about 250 Scots studied under him, returning full of the joys of sinew.

Zip past the second-rate paintings of anatomists improbably at work in velvet knickerbockery and lace cuffs, to a powerful display about Enlightenment Edinburgh, when dissection became practically a civic endeavour. I doubt I’ll ever erase the image of John Barclay “wading to his knees amongst the viscera of the great tenant of the deep [a beluga whale that washed up in the Firth of Forth in 1815], alternately cutting away...and regaling his nostrils with copious infusions of snuff”.

Snuff may be just the thing for the next room: a Hammer Horror-esque intro to body snatching, with howling wind and flickering lanterns. The bodies of executed criminals had been legally available for dissection since 1752, and authorities turned a blind eye to professors acquiring bodies by other means, but Joe Public was not of the same opinion. Dominating the display is a half-tonne mortsafe, hired to house a coffin until the body had decomposed, and nearby, a grisly iron collar that could be bolted through a coffin base.

Coming face to face with Burke and Hare after all this, one feels fiendishly unnerved. The display is comprehensive, but its macabre vein elegantly offset by plaques commemorating their victims, and 17 tiny wooden coffins discovered on Arthur’s Seat in 1836, thought to have been lain there by someone anxious to give the victims a burial.

The supply of bodies for dissection rather dried up after that, though poorhouses could still be relied upon to sell unclaimed former residents. From here we leap, not altogether smoothly, to videos in which a current professor, medical student and donor attempt to convince us of the merits of donating one’s body to science, but it’s wildly different in tone from the rest of the exhibition and so misfires entirely. An worthy afterthought in an otherwise deeply gripping encounter.


From July 2 until Oct 30; nms.ac.uk