Monsters, Whales, and Body-Snatchers: John Hunter and R.L. Stevenson

In the 18th century, an explosion in the study of anatomy lead to a shortfall in cadavers for medical students to dissect. Unscrupulous corpse-dealers known as "resurrectionists" profited from the demand by robbing graves--or worse, committing murder--as exemplified by the notorious case of Burke and Hare (from which we also get the term "burkers").

John Hunter (1728-1793) was at the forefront of anatomical science in his day. Running a medical school from his London home, he had amassed one of the world's best collections of interesting and unusual anatomical specimens. There prominently stood the 7'7" skeleton of Charles Byrne--the so-called "Irish giant"--whose dying wish to be buried at sea had been thwarted by body-snatchers. Mary Shelley may have had Byrne's fate in mind when she conceived Frankenstein's 8-foot-tall charnel-house monster.

Furthermore, Shelley was likely influenced by contemporary debates on the origins of biological life. As science contended with theology, the surgeon John Abernethy argued that living matter was animated by a "vital principle" distinct from chemical or physical forces. He derived this theory from Hunter's work on monstrosity, which implicitly relied on a similar idea to explain abnormal growth. Immanual Kant (via Blumenbach) adopted a version of this concept into the Critique of Judgment (1790). If, as Deleuze says, "we have the Critique of Judgement as the foundation of Romanticism," then arguably John Hunter is its ultimate forebear.

Melville was particularly interested in Hunter's work on whale anatomy. In the marginalia of his personal copy of Bennett's Whaling Voyage, he quoted William Hazlitt: "John Hunter was a great man. He would set about carving up the carcass of a whale, with the same greatness of gusto, that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble."

For this meetup, we will read selections from John Hunter, plus Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "The Body Snatcher" (1884), inspired by the notorious surgeon Robert Knox:

1. "On Monsters" and "Observations on... whales" by John Hunter ~70pp:

• PDF

2. "The Body Snatcher" ~18pp:

• Kindle
• Google books
• Librivox 42m

Supplemental:

• The Body Snatcher (1945 movie adaptation)

Extracts:

• "“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with immense velocity.” John Hunter’s account of the dissection of a whale. (A small sized one.)" (Moby-Dick, "Extracts")
• "Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy." (Moby-Dick, 32)
• "In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it." (Moby-Dick, 55)
• "This skeleton I procured in person from the Hunterian department of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It is a masterpiece of art." (White-Jacket, 63)
• "Propriety forbids that I should enter into details; but kidnappers, burkers, and resurrectionists are almost saints and angels to them." (Redburn, 39)
• "...the man had been actually dead when brought on board the ship; ... and merely for the sake of the month’s advance... the body-snatching crimp had knowingly shipped a corpse on board of the Highlander, under the pretense of its being a live body in a drunken trance." (Redburn, 49)
• "...if need should come, he would not be forced to turn resurrectionist, and dig up his grandfather’s Indian-chief grave for the ancestral sword and shield, ignominiously to pawn them for a living!" (Pierre, 18.2)
• "...poor Israel seemed some gravedigger, or churchyard man, tucking away dead little innocents in their coffins on one side, and cunningly disinterring them again to resurrectionists stationed on the other." (Israel Potter, 23)
• "Go, Yoomy: go study anatomy: there is much to be learned from the dead, more than you may learn from the living and I am dead though I live; and as soon dissect myself as another..." (Mardi, 2.79)
• "...press-gangs, prowling through the land like bandits and Burkers." (White-Jacket, 90)
• "Moan, Burker of kind heart: all's known / To Him; ..." (Clarel, 2.36)

This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters.