Robert Knox was a Scottish anatomist and ethnologist best known for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders.
29 Facts About Robert Knox
2.
Robert Knox devoted the latter part of his career to studying and theorising on evolution and ethnology; during this period, he wrote numerous works advocating scientific racism.
3.
Robert Knox was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, where he was remembered as a 'bully' who thrashed his contemporaries "mentally and corporeally".
4.
Robert Knox won the Lord Provost's gold medal in his final year.
5.
Robert Knox soon became interested in transcendentalism and the work of Xavier Bichat.
6.
Robert Knox was twice president of the Royal Physical Society, an undergraduate club to which he presented papers on hydrophobia and nosology.
7.
Robert Knox joined the "extramural" anatomy class of the famous John Barclay.
8.
Robert Knox graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1814, with a Latin thesis on the effects of narcotics which was published the following year.
9.
Robert Knox joined the army and was commissioned Hospital Assistant on 24 June 1815, after having studied for a year under John Abernethy at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
10.
Robert Knox was sent immediately to Belgium to attend the wounded from the Battle of Waterloo and returned two weeks later with the first batch of wounded aboard a hospital ship; during the voyage he successfully employed Abernethy's technique of leaving wounds open to the air.
11.
Robert Knox developed an interest in observing racial types, and disapproved of what he saw as the Boers' contempt for the indigenous peoples.
12.
Relations with Stockenstrom were marred when Knox accused O G Stockenstrom, Andries' brother, of theft, a charge apparently prompted by ill feeling between British and Boer officers.
13.
Robert Knox turned his sharp wit on the elders and the clergy of the city, satirising religion and delighting his students.
14.
Robert Knox routinely referred to the Bridgewater Treatises as the "bilgewater treatises" and his 'continental' lectures were not for the squeamish.
15.
Robert Knox's school flourished and he took on three assistants, Alexander Miller, Thomas Wharton Jones and William Fergusson.
16.
Robert Knox's house was attacked by a mob of 'the lowest rabble of the Old Town,' and windows were broken.
17.
Robert Knox's school moved to the grander premises of Old Surgeons' Hall in 1833 but his class declined after Edinburgh University made its own practical anatomy class compulsory in the mid-1830s.
18.
Robert Knox continued to purchase cadavers for his dissection class from such shadowy figures as the 'Black Bull Man,' but after the 1832 Anatomy Act made bodies more available to all anatomists, he quarrelled with HM Inspector of Anatomy over the supply of bodies, and his competitive edge was lost.
19.
In 1837 Robert Knox applied for the chair in pathology at Edinburgh University but his candidature was blocked by eleven existing professors, who preferred to abolish the post rather than appoint him.
20.
Robert Knox left for London after the death of his wife.
21.
In 1854 his son Robert died of heart disease; Knox tried for a posting to the Crimea but at 63 was judged too old.
22.
Robert Knox joined the medical register at its inception in 1858 and practiced obstetrics in Hackney.
23.
Robert Knox continued working at the Cancer Hospital until shortly before his death on 20 December 1862, at 9 Lambe Terrace in Hackney.
24.
Robert Knox was buried at Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.
25.
Robert Knox once wrote that he believed all human races to descend from an original 'Caucasian' race.
26.
The Black, Robert Knox remarked, 'is no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra'.
27.
In 1862 Robert Knox took the opportunity of a second edition of The Races of Men to defend the "much maligned races" of the Cape against accusations of cannibalism, and to rebuke the Dutch for treating them like "wild beasts".
28.
Robert Knox wrote that he was concerned to prove the existence of a generic animal, "or in other terms, proving hereditary descent to have a relation primarily to genus or natural family".
29.
Robert Knox is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of African lizard, Meroles knoxii.