Robert Knox

Robert Knox: The Anatomist Edinburgh Never Forgave

In the winter of 1828–29 a crowd came up to a house in Newington Place, Edinburgh, and put its windows through. Inside lived a one-eyed lecturer who had bought sixteen bodies over twelve months and had never once asked where they came from. William Burke hanged for supplying them; William Hare walked free by turning King's evidence. Robert Knox was never charged with anything — and never forgiven for anything either.

A Smallpox Childhood

He was born on 4 September 1791 in North Richmond Street, Edinburgh, the eighth child of Mary Scherer and Robert Knox, a teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy. Smallpox took his left eye in infancy and disfigured his face. At the Royal High School he was remembered as a bully and won the Lord Provost's gold medal in his final year. He entered medical classes at the University of Edinburgh in 1810, failed his anatomy examination outright, then joined John Barclay's extramural class and passed, graduating in 1814 with a Latin thesis on narcotics.

Commissioned hospital assistant on 24 June 1815, he studied under John Abernethy at St Bartholomew's and was sent to Belgium for the wounded of Waterloo. In April 1817 he joined the 72nd Highlanders and sailed for South Africa, where he began the observation of racial types that occupied him for forty years. After a duel with an officer named Burdett — Knox horse-whipped first, delivering a sabre wound second — his promotion was cancelled and he came home in disgrace on Christmas Day 1820. He spent 1821–22 in Paris, sharing a dissecting room at the Pitié-Salpêtrière with Thomas Hodgkin and attaching himself to Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

The Most Popular Anatomy Teacher in Britain

Back in Edinburgh by Christmas 1822, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 1 December 1823 and became curator of a Museum of Comparative Anatomy on 13 January 1825, at £100 a year. That year Barclay took him into partnership at the Surgeon's Square anatomy school; when Barclay died in 1826, Knox had it to himself. He had more students than every other private tutor in the city combined, and at his peak taught a record 504 in a session. He was theatrical and savage, mocking the clergy from the bench and calling the Bridgewater Treatises the "bilgewater treatises." John James Audubon, visiting the dissecting theatre, found "the sights were extremely disagreeable, many of them shocking beyond all I ever thought could be." He had married a woman named Susan in 1824 and kept it quiet because she was, in his friend Henry Lonsdale's phrase, of inferior rank; of seven children, two reached adulthood.

Sixteen Bodies

Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 the legal supply of corpses was almost nil while hundreds of students needed material — a shortage that had already created a trade in resurrection men. In November 1827 Hare arrived at Knox's rooms with the body of a lodger who had died owing him rent. The transaction was easy and the money good, £8 to £10 a body, so Hare and Burke stopped waiting for people to die. They murdered at least sixteen of Edinburgh's poor before police took Burke on 1 November 1828. Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829 and publicly dissected; his skeleton is still displayed in the University's Anatomical Museum.

Knox's defence was that he had bought bodies, not murders, and asked no questions because nobody in the trade did. A Royal Society of Edinburgh inquiry accepted it, finding he had not dealt personally with Burke and Hare. The city did not. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote him into "The Body Snatcher" as the sinister Mr K—, and he has been played on screen by Peter Cushing, Alastair Sim and Tom Wilkinson.

The Long Expulsion

What came next was slower than a trial and more thorough. By June 1831 the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh had extracted his resignation as museum curator; he gave up his army commission the same year. When the 1832 Act made bodies available he quarrelled with the Inspector of Anatomy over supply and lost his advantage, and the University's decision to make practical anatomy compulsory finished the rest. In 1837 eleven professors blocked his candidature for the chair of pathology, preferring to abolish the post. He moved to Glasgow in 1842, closed the school in 1844, and in 1847 was found guilty of falsifying a student's certificate; the College refused his certificates thereafter, ending his teaching in Scotland. The Royal Society expelled him that year and cancelled his election retrospectively.

The Races of Men

In London he wrote for the medical press until 1856, lectured, and published. *The Races of Men: A Fragment* (1850) is the book he is remembered for and the one that damns him. "Race, or hereditary descent, is everything," he wrote. He held that each race was suited to its environment and perfect in its own way, then wrote crudely about all of them, his own included: the Saxons "invent nothing," have "no musical ear" and no "genius." His hostility to the Irish Celt was murderous in intent — "The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave" — and he praised the Orange Order as a Saxon confederation for clearing the land. The record is not uniform: he had begun an abolitionist, called the Boer "the cruel oppressor of the dark races," and in the 1862 edition defended African peoples against cannibalism charges. None of it redeems the book. His best-seller, incidentally, was *Fish and Fishing in the Lone Glens of Scotland* (1854).

Beneath the polemic sat a real speculative mind. Following Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Goethe, Knox proposed that new species appear suddenly, through shifts in embryonic development rather than gradual accumulation — saltation, argued before Darwin published. "The conversion of one of these species into another cannot be so difficult a matter with Nature," he wrote, asking whether "the fish of the early world may have produced reptiles, then again birds and quadrupeds; lastly, man himself?" A reviewer called it "bold, disgusting, and gratuitous atheism."

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The word attached to Knox in his own lifetime, and it attached to his teaching rather than to any discovery. His gift was the demonstrator's: the ability to hold five hundred students in a badly lit room and make a dissected body legible as a system, delivered with a showman's timing and a heretic's contempt for pieties. That is craft — physical, verbal, performed — and it should be named as craft rather than dressed up as insight. He described no landmark structure that carries his name; his lasting anatomical monument is an African lizard, *Meroles knoxii*.

The intellectual case is narrower and better. Knox took Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire seriously when British anatomy was still largely descriptive, and reasoned from comparative form to a theory of species arising by sudden developmental shift — a real idea, published before *On the Origin of Species*, and one his contemporaries found blasphemous rather than trivial.

The counter-case is severe. The same conviction that form dictates destiny produced *The Races of Men*, a book whose science was contested in its own day and whose politics ran to advocating the clearance of a people from their land. And the incuriosity that let sixteen suspiciously fresh bodies through his door was not only an ethical failure; it was a failure of the observational rigour he sold to his students every morning. Knox was formidable, original in flashes, and catastrophically wrong where it mattered most. Genius, on this record, is a stretch.

Legacy

From 1856 he was pathological anatomist to the Free Cancer Hospital in London, joined the medical register at its creation in 1858, practised obstetrics in Hackney, and was made an honorary fellow of the Ethnological Society of London on 27 November 1860, speaking in public for the last time on 1 July 1862. He died on 20 December 1862 at 9 Lambe Terrace, Hackney, and was buried at Brookwood Cemetery. His racial theory outlived him in the worst way, feeding the scientific racism of the later nineteenth century; his anatomy teaching died with his school. Edinburgh kept the skeleton of the man Burke hanged for, and kept the story of the lecturer who never asked.

Achievements

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh