Van Demon’s Land

Do you ever get tired of reading fiction?

I have to admit that I do. All too often, I’m afraid. There are so many books around, and a great deal of hype is spouted about them. If I started to list the titles of “highly recommended” novels and the names of authors who disappointed me over the last year, I’d go on for hours. So, let’s just breathe the sacred words “dragon” and “tattoo” and leave it at that!

Tired of reading, but never too tired to read, what do I turn to when crime or mainstream fiction temporarily relaxes its hold on me? Well, there are three literary genres which are always ready to step up into the firing line: biography, true crime, and history. I suppose they are obvious choices for anyone who attempts to write historical crime fiction: character is always the central concern, the mechanics and logistics of the crime come next, and, finally, background color is provided by a thorough reading of the available historical material.

At the moment, history has me in its grip; the book I am reading is potentially so interesting to dedicated crime buffs, that I thought I ought to tell you all about it.

The history of science is so vast a subject that few specialist readers manage to keep up with it. And as for the rest of us, well! I say this partly to excuse myself, because the book that I am about to review was originally released way back in 2005, which is like Before-the-Flood in publishing terms. Human Remains, by Helen MacDonald (Melbourne University Press; a U.S. edition was published by Yale University Press in 2006), deserves a favored place on any dedicated crime-fiction fan’s bookshelf, especially when you consider the subtitle: “Dissection and Its Histories.” It immediately brings to mind a classic undergraduate text, What Is History?, by professor Edward Hallet Carr (Vintage, 1967), which candidly states that history is what historians choose to write about, and that, by implication, it raises a host of questions about the stuff that those same historians pointedly choose to ignore. And it also highlights the much-used notion of “the official history of ...,” which must be the greatest whitewash of all time. After all, someone wrote it, and for a specific purpose, missing out on all the bits that didn’t quite fit!

Ms. MacDonald wades straight in and tells you what to expect in this tome of rare delight.

This history explores the way in which certain people’s bodies were turned into surgeons’ things in nineteenth century dissecting rooms, were resurrected from graves, and harvested for desirable parts. They were exchanged for favours, posed as pieces of art, and displayed in museums. All of which was as much a social as it was a scientific matter.

The emphasis is on “certain people,” “surgeons’ things,” “desirable parts,” and the roles of “art” and “science,” which certainly includes a vast chunk of 19th-century social reality, not the bland, conventional tales of the same old resurrectionists that generally appear on the New Crime display tables. If you happen to have read Brian Bailey’s Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls (detailing one of Britain’s most notorious bodysnatching cases), Sarah Wise’s The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830 London, or any one of another dozen midnight-in-the-graveyard books, this one will come as a surprise. Firstly, midday was a much more likely time for the dismembering to start, and secondly, the little that remained of the so-called “subject” (it is an object, as the writer carefully points out) rarely reached the grave­yard to be dug up again. Indeed, there was a huge Victorian market for “desirable parts,” and nothing disreputable about dissecting in the early 19th century, so long as it was done in a teaching hospital’s Dead Room by educated men with medical degrees. The trouble was, as Helen MacDonald amply displays in exquisite prose, the hands-on business of chopping up a human being for display was a filthy mess, and its enthusiastic practitioners hid themselves behind convenient notions of medicine and science in the interests of ... what?

Here the picture starts to really take off.

What happened in Tasmania, for example, when the last Aboriginal Tasmanian died?

MacDonald’s social history of medical practice in the British colonies during the early 19th century is eye-opening. At that time, native Tasmanians were thought to be the most degenerate and degraded of peoples, living proof (though they were rapidly dying out) of the “contamination” which “civilized men” inevitably brought upon the native societies that they colonized. The amazing account of what happened to the skull, hands, feet and body of “King Bill” William Lanney when he died in 1869 makes for bewitching reading, as does the sudden worldwide explosion of anthropological apologists in the pre-Darwinian worlds of monogenists and polygenists, progression­ists and degenerationists (anthropologists of a religious inclination, who argued, respectively, that humankind was in a state of progressive improvement, or else regressive decline), “civilised and uncivilised Europeans,” colonial “contributors” and the learned Royal Society “collectors” with whom they corresponded. Also fascinating was the wild scramble for “perfect” museum exhibits to document­ the last survivor of an extinguished race.

How hard it is to describe a world and a society that no longer exists.

And how easily Helen MacDonald manages it in Human Remains!

So, there you have it. A great historical read, full of local color and the sort of detail that only expert factual historical research can turn up. If you had invented the story, your readers would accuse you of exaggerating. This book asks and answers all the questions that the 19th century chose to leave out, and fills in all the holes that would normally puzzle an amateur modern historian such as myself.

What more can you ask of a great read?