Burke and Hare (22 page)

Scott was at the meeting next day, and found that some members thought that:

Scott noted on 16 January that Knox had consented to withdraw his paper, ‘or rather suffers the reading to be postponed’. But on the twenty-third Sir Walter’s senses were again offended. He received a visit from George Sinclair, son of Sir John Sinclair, First Baronet of Ulbster:

On 11 February, the intensity of feeling against Knox was increased to fever pitch by the announcement that a committee of gentlemen, to be headed by the Marquis of Queensberry, had undertaken to investigate, in the public interest, Dr Knox’s dealings with Burke and Hare.
The Scotsman
, in welcoming this development, said that the enquiry must be ‘full and fair, the evidence must be taken impartially, and none of any value refused; and what is still more important, the whole evidence, as well as the opinions of the examinators, must be laid before the public’.
⁴

Next day, a mob assembled on Calton Hill, bearing aloft a life-size effigy of the obnoxious anatomist, labelled with his name on the back for fear anyone should be in any doubt as to whom it was meant to represent. The crowd set off for Newington, gathering reinforcements en route, and stopped outside 4 Newington Place, where, amid hysterical shrieking and cries for Knox’s blood, the figure was hanged from the branches of a tree. An attempt was then made to set fire to it, but it would not burn, so it was torn to pieces instead. Knox himself, meanwhile, had escaped by the back door, and the police, having gained entry there, rushed out at the front and drove some of the rioters from the doctor’s garden, but the mob remained in the street and took to throwing stones, which broke windows in the house and caused minor injuries to police officers.

There were more riots elsewhere in the city. Noisy crowds gathered in the High Street and Canongate, and damage was done to Knox’s premises in Surgeons’ Square. Another effigy was carried to Portobello, whence it was suspected that Knox had retreated, and there it was hanged from an ancient gibbet at the top of Tower Street and burnt. After dark, further damage was done to Knox’s house at Newington. Some twenty rioters, mostly youths, were arrested that night, but were dealt with leniently (and wisely) by the magistrates. The handful convicted were bound over sand ordered to pay fines, but the fines were met from a fund which had been set up, apparently, for that very purpose. The Edinburgh
Weekly Chronicle
repeated a warning it had issued before, that ‘the agitation of public feeling will never subside till the city be released of this man’s presence, or until his innocence be manifested. In justice to himself, if he is innocent, in justice to the public if he is guilty, he ought to be put upon trial.’

The press continued to stoke the fires of public fury against Knox. One paper considered his relation to Burke the same as that of Banquo’s murderers to Macbeth.
⁵
Another accused him of recklessness bordering on guilty knowledge, and continued:

Professor Wilson attacked Knox in
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
, challenging him to ‘prove to the conviction of all reasonable men that it was impossible he could suspect any evil . . .’ ‘The whole world,’ he said, ‘shudders at the transactions, and none but a base, blind, brutal beast can at this moment dare to declare, “
Dr Knox stands free from all suspicion of being accessory to murder
”’.
⁷

Wilson (Christopher North) has been severely criticised in some quarters for his attacks on Knox. ‘Literary ruffianism,’ Lonsdale wrote, ‘is too mild a term to apply to the foul words used by Wilson . . .’ But Lonsdale himself seems to have absorbed some of his mentor’s immunity or indifference to the genuine fears and objections of the poor:

The fact is that both Professor Wilson and Sir Walter Scott gave literate voice to popular sentiment, which was not ignorant, but angry and apprehensive. Had Knox once expressed his shock and regret at the revelations of multiple murder, and taken some part in the prosecution of the murderers, the public anger against him may not have been so vociferous. But not only did he fail to express a word of remorse for his failure to suspect murder, he repudiated any suggestion of responsibility for it. Added to which, the paradox that a science which was intended to benefit the poor had encouraged their victimisation and murder was seen by the public as unspeakable hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, Knox continued his lectures as before, never missing a session, and when his students were distracted by the noise of hostile crowds outside, he told them not to be alarmed. ‘It is my life, not yours, they seek. The assailants of our peace may be big in menace, but they are too cowardly in act to confront such a phalanxed body of gentlemen as I see before me.’
⁹
This drew cheers from his audience, but it could easily have become another of Knox’s fatal misjudgements. The public hostility to all anatomists and dissection had already led to attacks on medical students as well as their teachers, in both England and Scotland. As long ago as 1730, before professional body-snatchers had appeared on the scene, students who had dug up corpses from the churchyards of Cambridge and neighbouring villages for dissection in the medical colleges had given rise to ‘disturbances between the scholars and the inhabitants’.
¹⁰
A medical student had nearly been lynched by an angry mob in Glasgow in August 1828. This recent incident was passed over by the national press as a little local disturbance. At Carlisle, a surgeon-anatomist had been shot in the face and his colleague thrown to his death over the parapet of a bridge.

On 23 February, it was announced that Lord Queensberry, chairman of the committee ‘investigating’ Knox’s dealings, had withdrawn from it. No reason was given and none has ever been produced.
¹¹
Could Queensberry (Charles Douglas, the 6th Marquis) have been got at by someone such as Scott or Wilson, one wonders? The chairmanship was taken over by John Robinson, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The other members were not all doctors and surgeons closing ranks, as Sir Walter had feared, but they were all carefully chosen citizens who met with Knox’s approval. They were William Pulteney Alison, Professor of the Theory of Physic (who had been listed as a trial witness but was not called); Sir George Ballingall, Professor of Military Surgery; Dr James Russell, Professor of Clinical Surgery; Sir William Hamilton, Professor of Universal History; George Sinclair of Ulbster (who had sought Scott’s participation); Thomas Allan, a banker; and M.P. Brown and J. Shaw Stewart, both lawyers.

The committee’s report was published in the Edinburgh papers on 21 March. It fell a long way short of the standards proposed by
The Scotsman.
The enquiry took place in private and none of the evidence it gathered was made public. The committee’s report is given as Appendix IV. Briefly, the committee exonerated Knox, clearing him of either knowing or suspecting that Burke and Hare were murdering the people whose corpses he paid for. It had been ‘proved’ to the committee’s satisfaction that no mutilation or disfigurement was practised to conceal the identity of the subjects. The committee mildly reproved Knox for what it called ‘laxity of the regulations under which bodies were received’. The circumstances in which his seven assistants and his doorkeeper received fresh subjects from suppliers whom they thought were body-snatchers, with instructions from Knox not to enquire where the bodies had come from, were incautious and demanded greater vigilance. That was the extent of the committee’s censure. It had found no evidence of any suspicion having been aroused either in the mind of Dr Knox,
‘or of any other of the individuals who saw the bodies of these unfortunate persons prior to the apprehension of Burke’.
The italics are mine, and it is clear that this assertion does not agree with the impression given in the ‘Echo’s’ open letter to the Lord Advocate.

The committee’s satisfactory conclusions (from Knox’s point of view, at least) led him to forward the report to the
Caledonian Mercury
for publication with a covering letter from himself – the only word of self-defence he ever committed to print on the subject. He clearly resented criticism of himself, though he handed it out readily to others. He appeared indifferent to the fact that some of his subjects had met violent deaths, and expressed no word of regret. He implied that the committee had been set up by his friends after he had been dissuaded from bringing libel actions against some of his critics. Although there were sufficient grounds for such actions, ‘disclosures of the most innocent proceedings even in the best-conducted dissecting-room must always shock the public and be hurtful to science’. Knox considered himself the unfortunate victim of circumstance which could have befallen anyone else in his situation.

A fortnight after the report was published, Sir Walter Scott noted in his journal that he had received a letter:

This is the last we hear of Paterson, although Alexander Leighton noted in 1860 that Paterson was still a ‘respected citizen’ of Edinburgh.

Knox carried on as before and weathered the storm for a time, but he was
persona non grata
in Edinburgh society, and his classes diminished in size as students began to migrate to Glasgow or Dublin. Sometimes people would recognise him in the streets and point him out to their friends as the notorious anatomist Knox. He finally gave up teaching anatomy. In 1837 he applied for the recently vacated Chair of Pathology at the university. The day after his application was received, a proposal that the Chair should be abolished was signed by Sir Charles Bell and Professors Alison, Christison and, needless to say, perhaps, Syme. In the end, the Chair was not abolished, but Knox did not get it. Quite apart from his association with Burke and Hare, he was considered a dangerous radical as well as untrustworthy.

In the
Medical Gazette
of 30 October 1840, Knox published what he claimed was a discovery of his own concerning the placenta. But it had been brought to his notice by Dr John Reid. When censured by Reid for this discourtesy, Knox said that he had told his students about it in 1839. It became evident that Knox’s honesty, or his memory, could not be relied upon.

Knox obtained an appointment as lecturer in anatomy at the extramural medical school in Argyle Square, but found that he could no longer attract sufficient students. When he left Edinburgh for London, he disposed of his school in Surgeons’ Square to his former pupil, Henry Lonsdale.

Cold-shouldered by his colleagues, he was hounded out of Edinburgh’s medical hierarchy and struck off the Roll of Fellows of the Royal Society. Professor Christison wrote later that Knox:

This was wildly misleading. The native Americans Christison referred to had attracted great interest when they came to England, and Knox, one of whose subsequent publications was
Ethnology, or the Races of Men
, naturally took a scientific interest in them. Knox’s wife died in 1841, after giving birth to their sixth child, and soon afterwards, their four-year-old son died. Knox wrote several books on a variety of subjects while trying in vain to get another permanent position.

His literary works were far from being restricted to scientific manuals on anatomy and surgery. He published a book on fishing in Scotland, a
Manual of Artistic Anatomy for the Use of Painters, Sculptors, and Amateurs
, and what was commonly regarded as his best work,
Ethnology, or the Races of Men.
He also translated works from the French.