The Body Snatcher

This short story is set in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century, when medical schools needed bodies for anatomy teaching and some men supplied them by shady means. Told by a narrator who meets an old acquaintance, now a broken-down doctor, at a country inn, it looks back to his youth as an assistant to a famous anatomist.

There he is drawn into dealings with a sinister cab driver, Gray, and into moral compromises that haunt him. Based on the real scandals of its time, it is a compact tale of guilt, complicity and creeping dread.