THIS week, we present … Cadaver Palaver! Initially, I’d little interest in Robert Knox other than as a cipher to discuss his favourite business partners: Burke and Hare.
However, though committing their hideous crimes in Edinburgh, they were Irish, which let them off the hook. At the same time, I became interested in Knox. Because he was a nutter.
All surgeons are weird. It is unnatural to enjoy sticking your hands in other people’s innards. Dead or alive. But, even beyond that level of dubiety, Knox held strange opinions.
In a wild book called The Races of Men he offered crude characterisations of different races, detecting a vast gulf in attainment between the “negroid” and most “mongoloid” races on one hand and white fellows on the other.
That said, he defended Cape Africans against accusations of cannibalism, while rebuking the Dutch for treating them like animals.
Bizarrely, given his nationality (Scottish), Knox’s strongest racial enmity was directed at Celts. Observing through his one good eye (the other lost to childhood smallpox) a “peculiar Mongol face” in many Highlanders, he concluded they were descended from an early migration of “Mongol races”. I see.
The Irish Celt was “most to be dreaded”, and would be none the worse for a bit of ethnic cleansing: “The source of all evil lies in… the Celtic race of Ireland… Look at Wales, look at Caledonia; it is ever the same… The race must be forced from the soil…
“The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for clearing the land of all Papists and Jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves, they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish the work. But the Encumbered Estates Relief Bill will do it better.” Sounds like a plan. Not a plan. What’s that other one? A pillock.
The pillock was born in 1791 in Edinburgh. He was educated at the Royal High School, being noted as a bully who thrashed his fellow students “mentally and corporeally”. At Embra Yoonie, he wrote a thesis on narcotics. In Latin.
Easily triggered
Joining the army, he attended the wounded at Waterloo. Later, after experimenting with cures for syphilis, he sailed with the 72nd Highlanders (presumably keeping his ethnic opinions private) to South Africa where he enjoyed shooting animals.
After accusing a leading Boer of theft, he was challenged to a duel, which he declined. His challenger horse-whipped him in front of everybody. Knox grabbed a sabre and inflicted a slight wound on his assailant’s arm. He returned to Britain in disgrace.
Thus suitably qualified, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and appointed curator of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh’s new anatomy museum.
He continued lecturing. The Birds of America author John James Audubon, shown round the dissecting theatre by Knox, reported sights “shocking” beyond belief. “I was glad to leave this charnel house and breathe again the salubrious atmosphere of the streets.”
Scots law restricted sources of corpses for anatomical ghoulishness, leading to the phenomenon of body snatching by “resurrection men”. However, as families took measures to protect their recently deceased, the shortage was exacerbated.
Enter Burke and Hare. William Burke was born in 1792 in County Tyrone. He joined the British army and served in the Donegal militia, before moving to Scotland and becoming a labourer on the Union Canal. Afterwards, in Edinburgh, he became a hawker of second-hand clothes then a cobbler. He was seldom seen without a Bible, sure sign of derangement.
William Hare was born somewhere in Northern Ireland. He also came to work on the Union Canal. Author Brian Bailey describes him as “illiterate and uncouth – a lean, quarrelsome, violent and amoral character with the scars from old wounds about his head and brow”.
Body of evidence
BURKE moved into Hare’s lodging house. That’s where the trouble started. In 1827, when a rent-owning lodger died of dropsy, our enterprising heroes sold the body to Knox, who paid them the tidy sum of £7.10s.
Coupla months later, Hare and Burke murdered a fever-stricken resident and sold her body to Knox too. This was the first of 16 murders.
While the first victim was suffocated with a pillow, they later relied on Hare’s hand over the nose and mouth, while Burke held the body down.
This was after victims, apart from one child, were plied with whisky. So it wasn’t all bad.
Victims during their 10-month killing spree included Mary Paterson, James Wilson (“Daft Jamie”), and Margaret or Margery Docherty. Paterson’s corpse was still warm when delivered, and Knox was delighted with it (though an assistant thought he recognised her), storing it in whisky for three months before dissecting it.
Several students also recognised Wilson’s body and, when rumour spread the lad was missing, Knox dissected it ahead of others in storage. The head and similarly identifying deformed feet were removed before dissection.
Burke and Hare were discovered when Docherty’s body was found under a bed by other lodgers. Under arrest, Hare turned King’s evidence in return for immunity. Burke was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang, with this body to be dissected. Delectable irony!
He was hanged on January 28, 1829, in front of a crowd estimated at 25,000. Tenement windows overlooking the scaffold were rented out. During dissection of his body, in front of clamouring students, Prof Alexander Monro dipped his quill pen into Burke’s blood and wrote an inscription that added: “This blood was taken from his head.” Surgeons, what are they like? A pocketbook said to be bound with Burke’s tanned skin is on display at Surgeons’ Hall Museum. Deranged or what?
As for Knox, under investigation he’d been found “deficient in principle and heart”, even if technically he’d broken no law. Though on a list of 55 witnesses, he was not called to give evidence.
Mob justice
NEWSPAPER editorials said he should have been in the dock alongside the murderers. His house was attacked by an ethically incensed mob, who smashed his windows and burned him in effigy.
Needless to say, his anatomy classes spiralled in popularity among trainee surgeons but, professionally, he found himself gradually edged out of all the Royal organisations that had promoted him in the first place.
He wrote a bestselling book on fishing and found work as a pathological – mot juste – anatomist at a cancer hospital in London. Appropriately for someone cold-blooded, he is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of African lizard, Meroles knoxii.
Robert McNeil is a freelance journalist specialising in crime, mainly housebreaking, vandalism, drunk and disorderly. None of the charges have been proven.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel