And over in this corner, you will find resurrectionists like Burke and Hare, who went from simple body snatching to murder in order to provide medical men with corpses to dissect and learn anatomy. Drimmer is no scholarly historian he’s not interested in questions of contingency, agency, and discourse, but he’s pretty careful about his facts and more than a little sympathetic with the subalterns in his narratives.īut, what will you get if you pay your quarter to enter the chamber of horrors? Well, he we have the famous “Hottentot Venus,” who was pored over by theorists of Eugenics to prove the relative evolutionary value of the races. In a lot of ways, reading this reminds me of the old “Murder Can Be Fun” fanzine, which always seemed just a bit smarter than its subject matter as well. Drimmer appears to be a tad more erudite than the average carnival barker. Of course, freak shows have claimed for generations to be “educational as well as entertaining,” but Mr. Yet, the author, Frederick Drimmer, just seems to be a bit ahead of them at every step, and actually seems to want to infuse his work with a little bit more class.
In general, this book is what it appears to be, a highly exploitive array of stories about dead bodies and freaks (the dead bodies of freaks), written to titillate a semi-literate audience who today would probably get their jollies on the so-called “History” channel.
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