Robert Knox
Robert Knox ethnologist | |
---|---|
Known for | Burke and Hare murders |
Robert Knox
Knox's views on humanity gradually shifted over the course of his lifetime, as his initially positive views (influenced by the ideals of
Life
Early life
Robert Knox was born in 1791
In 1810, he joined medical classes at the University of Edinburgh. He soon became interested in transcendentalism[5] and the work of Xavier Bichat.[6] He was twice president of the Royal Physical Society, an undergraduate club to which he presented papers on hydrophobia and nosology.[7] The final recorded event of his university years was his just failing the anatomy examination. Knox joined the "extramural" anatomy class of the famous John Barclay. Barclay was an anatomist of the highest distinction, and perhaps the greatest anatomical teacher in Britain at that time. Redoubling his efforts, Knox passed competently the second time around.
Life abroad
Knox graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1814, with a Latin thesis on the effects of narcotics which was published the following year.[8] He 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. He 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.[9] His army work at the Brussels military hospital (near Waterloo) impressed upon him the need for a comprehensive training in anatomy if surgery were to be successful. Knox was intelligent, critical and irritable. He did not suffer fools gladly and—in an aside with terrible consequences for his future career—he was critical of the surgical work of Charles Bell with casualties at the Battle of Waterloo. After a further trip to Belgium he was placed in charge of Hilsea hospital near Portsmouth, where he experimented with non-mercurial cures for syphilis.[10]
In April 1817, he joined the
Career in Edinburgh
Knox returned to Edinburgh by Christmas 1822. On 1 December 1823 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. During these years he communicated a number of well-received papers to the Royal and Wernerian societies of Edinburgh on zoological subjects, including a paper suggesting that the "Hottentot" or "Bosjesman" Khoe and San people descended from "Mongolic" Chinese people.[17] Soon after his election he submitted a plan to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for a Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which was accepted, and on 13 January 1825 he was appointed curator of the museum with a salary of £100.[18]
In 1825,
He turned his sharp wit on the elders and the clergy of the city, satirising religion and delighting his students. Knox routinely referred to the
Marriage and personal life
Little is known of Knox's wife, Susan Knox, whom he married in 1824.[21] According to Knox's friend Henry Lonsdale the marriage was kept secret as she was 'of inferior rank.'[22] During his time in Edinburgh, Knox lived at 4 Newington Place[23] with his sisters Mary and Jessie, while Susan and his four children lived at Lilliput Cottage in Trinity, west of Leith. They had seven children, but only two of them survived into adulthood.[24]
West Port murders
Before the
As a consequence,
In November 1827, William Hare began a new career when an indebted lodger died on him by chance. He was paid £7.10s (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox's dissecting rooms at Surgeons' Square. Now Hare and, his friend and accomplice, William Burke, set about murdering the city’s poor on a regular basis. After 16 more transactions, each netting £8-10, in what later became known as the
Knox was not prosecuted, which outraged many in Edinburgh. His house was attacked by a mob of 'the lowest rabble of the Old Town,' and windows were broken.[26] A committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated him on the grounds that he had not dealt personally with Burke and Hare, but there was no forgetting his part in the case, and many remained wary of him.
Almost immediately after the Burke and Hare case, the
London
Knox left for London after the death of his wife (the remaining children were left with a nephew). He found it impossible to find a university post, and from then until 1856 he worked on medical journalism, gave public lectures, and wrote several books, including his most ambitious work, The Races of Men in which he argued that each race was suited to its environment and "perfect in its own way."[37] Additionally, Knox wrote a book on fishing in Scotland, which became his best-selling work.[38] In 1854 his son Robert died of heart disease; Knox tried for a posting to the Crimea but at 63 was judged too old.[39]
In 1856 he became the pathological
Ethnology and racism
Knox's interest in race began as an undergraduate. His relevant political views were radical: he was an abolitionist and anti-colonialist who criticised the Boer as "the cruel oppressor of the dark races."[11]: 99 Knox is generally considered to be a polygenist;[43][44][45] however, some have argued that he was a monogenist,[46] including biographer Alan Bates, who considers such claims to be "exaggerated".[47] Robert Knox once wrote that he believed all human races to descend from an original 'Caucasian' race.[48] In his best-selling work, The Races of Men (1850), a "Zoological history" of mankind, Knox exaggerated supposed racial differences in support of his project, asserting that, anatomically and behaviourally, "race, or hereditary descent, is everything". He offered crude characterisations of each racial group: for example the Saxon (in which race he included himself) "invents nothing", "has no musical ear", lacks "genius", and is so "low and boorish" that "he does not know what you mean by fine art".[11]: 45 No race was without its redeeming features, however; Knox described Saxons as "[t]houghtful, plodding, industrious beyond all other races, [and] a lover of labour for labour's sake".[11]: 45 Such supposed racial characteristics meant that each race was naturally fitted for a particular environment and could not endure outside of it. While Knox maintained that all races were capable of some form of civilized life, he maintained that a vast gulf stood between the limited attainments available to the 'negroid' and to most 'mongoloid' races on one hand and the much greater past achievements and future potential of white men on the other. The Black, Knox remarked, 'is no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra'.[49]: 99 Ultimately however, all races were "[d]estined ... to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence", it mattering "little how their extinction is brought about".[49]: 302 In 1862 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".[50]
From the perspective of a Lowland Scot Protestant, Knox's racist works espoused extreme racial hostility to
Transcendentalism
In his writings Knox synthesised a perspective on nature from three of the most influential natural historians of his time. From Cuvier, he took a consciousness of the great epochs of time, of the fact of extinction, and of the inadequacy of the biblical account. From Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire and Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, he gained a spatial and thematic perspective on living things. If one had the skill, all living beings could be arranged in their correct placing in a notional table, and one would see both internally and externally the elegant variation of their organs and anatomy according to the principles of connection, unity of composition and compensation.
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". This way, he could lay claim to a stability in the natural order at the level of the genus, but let species be extinguished. Man was a genus; not a species.
Evolution
According to Richards, The Races of Men advocated "a common material origin of life and its evolution by a process of saltatory descent"; that is to say, new species arose not by gradual change but by sudden leaps due to shifts in embryonic development.[54] Knox tentatively concluded that "simple animals ... may have produced by continuous generation the more complex animals of after ages . . . the fish of the early world may have produced reptiles, then again birds and quadrupeds; lastly, man himself?" Newly formed species survived or perished according to external conditions, which acted as "potent checks to an infinite variety of forms". For one contemporary reviewer, his claim that "Species is the product of external circumstances, acting through millions of years" was "bold, disgusting, and gratuitous atheism." In modern terms, he proposed a theory of saltatory evolution, in which "deformations" in embryonic development produced "hopeful monsters" that, if fortuitously suited to the prevailing environmental conditions, gave rise to new species in a single, macroevolutionary leap. In 1857 he wrote: "The conversion of one of these species into another cannot be so difficult a matter with Nature, especially when all or most of the specific characters are already present in the young. Thus a given species may perish, but another of the same consanguinité takes its place in space: it is a question of time... Thus parenté extends from species to genus and from genus to class and order, in characters not to be misunderstood."
Legacy
Knox is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of African lizard, Meroles knoxii.[55]
Knox in fiction
- An Amazon original anthology television series Lore features Burke and Hare murders case in its Season 2 episode 1 named " Burke and Hare: In the Name of Science" released on 19 October 2018.
- Peter Cushing plays Knox in The Flesh and the Fiends (1960). Written and directed by John Gilling, the film is a reasonably accurate depiction, allowing for some dramatic licence and time constraints, of the Burke and Hare story.
- The Anatomist (1961) Alastair Sim as Knox. This was based on a 1930 play of the same name by James Bridie, which the BBC broadcast in 1939 with Knox played by Andrew Cruickshank[56] and in 1980 with Patrick Stewart as Knox.[57]
- John Hoyt played Knox in an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on the Burke and Hare murders.
- The character Thomas Rock in the Dylan Thomas play The Doctor and the Devils is based on Knox. The play was filmed in 1985 with Timothy Dalton as Dr Rock.
- Knox was the model for the character of Thomas Potter in Matthew Kneale's epic novel English Passengers, which deals with the perceptions and perspectives of different races, nationalities and stations in society.
- The Knox scandal forms the background of West Port murders.
- In Burke & Hare, the last film of veteran director Vernon Sewell, Knox is portrayed by Harry Andrews.
- The character Doctor Knox from manga series Fullmetal Alchemist from 2001 (which got an animation adaptation in 2009) is probably a reference to the real Robert Knox since both have the same name, physical similarities and were military surgeons specialising in autopsies and Pathologists.
- Knox is a major character in Nicola Morgan's 2003 novel "Fleshmarket"
- Medicinal Purposes, which pitted the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) against another time-traveller (Phillips) who had taken the place of the historical Knox, and was manipulating the events of the Burke and Hare murders.[58]
- The Horrible Histories TV series (Series 1, Episode 13) includes a sketch about Robert Knox, in which the story of the body-snatching cases is told in a song. Knox is played by Mathew Baynton and Burke and Hare by Simon Farnaby and Jim Howick respectively.
- Knox was played by Burke and Hare.
- Knox was played by Comedy Central(2015)
- In 1942 the Dutch author Johan van der Woude published his Anatomie: Een Episode uit de Geschiedenis der Chirurgie, later published as Schandaal om Dr Knox, which is a historical novel about Knox and the Burke and Hare affair.
- In 1972 the TV show Night Gallery (episode #70 "Deliveries in the Rear"), a callous surgeon (loosely based on Knox) turns a blind eye to "resurrectionists" who murder to supply corpses for anatomy classes – until he goes insane upon finding the latest victim is his fiancée.
Works
- Engravings of the nerves: copied from the works of Scarpa, Soemmering and other distinguished anatomists. Edinburgh 1829. [Edward Mitchell, engraver]
- The races of men: a fragment. Renshaw, London. 1850, revised 1862.
- Great artists and great anatomists: a biographical and philosophical study. Van Voorst, London 1852.
- A manual of artistic anatomy 1852.
- Fish and fishing in the lone glens of Scotland, with a history of the propagation, growth and metamorphoses of the Salmon. Routledge, London 1854.
- Man – his structure and physiology 1857.
References
- ^ Douglas, p. 16.
- ISBN 978-1-84519-381-2.
- ISBN 978-0-902198-84-5. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 October 2006. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
- ^ Lonsdale, Henry (1870). A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox, the Anatomist. London: Macmillan and Co. p. 5.
- .
- .
- ISBN 978-1-84519-381-2.
- ^ Knox, Robert (1815). "On the relations subsisting between the time of the day, and various functions of the human body; and on the manner in which the pulsations of the heart and arteries are affected by muscular exertion". Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal. 11: 52–65.
- .
- ^ Bacot, John (1828). "Essays on syphilis". London Medical Gazette. 2: 289–94.
- ^ a b c d e Knox, Robert (1850). The Races of Men: a Fragment. London: Henry Renshaw.
- ^ Hutton, C.W. (1887). The Autobiography of the Late Sir Andries Stockenström, Bart... Cape Town: J.C. Juta and Co. p. 119.
- ^ Hutton, C.W. (1887). The Autobiography of the Late Sir Andries Stockenström, Bart... Cape Town: J. C. Juta and Co. pp. 161–2.
- ISBN 978-1-84519-381-2.
- ^ Knox, Robert (1852). Great Artists and Great Anatomists. London: John van Voorst.
- ^ Letter from Thomas Hodgkin to John Hodgkin, Oct 1821, Wellcome Library AMS/MF/3/1
- ^ Knox, Robert (1824). "Inquiry into the Origin and Characteristic Differences of the Native Races inhabiting the Extra-tropical Part of Southern Africa". Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society. 5: 206–219 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ RCSEd Minute Book 1824, p. 149.
- ^ RCSEd Minute Book 19 Apr. 1825, p. 248.
- ^ Audubon, Maria R. (1899). Audubon and His Journals. New York: C. Scribner. pp. 146, 152.
- .
- ^ Lonsdale, Henry (1870). A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox, the Anatomist. London: Macmillan and Co. p. 36.
- ^ "Edinburgh Post Office annual directory, 1832-1833". National Library of Scotland. p. 103. Retrieved 25 February 2018.
- ISBN 978-1-84519-381-2.
- ^ "The Resurrectionists". New York Academy of Medicine. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 27 April 2008.
- ^ "Belfast News-Letter". Belfast News-Letter: 2. 17 February 1829.
- ^ RCSEd Minute Book 1831, 502.
- ^ Lonsdale 1870, p. 21.
- ^ Bates 2010, p. 88.
- ^ Richardson R. 1987. Death, dissection and the destitute. Routledge, London. [includes a reassessment of Knox's culpability in the Burke and Hare case]
- ^ Richards E. 1988. The 'moral anatomy' of Robert Knox: a case study of the interplay between biological and social thought in the context of Victorian scientific naturalism. J. Hist. Biol.
- ^ "The Anatomy Murders Corpse of the Day—Dr. Robert Knox". Penn Press Log, October 2009. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ISBN 978-0-8122-4191-4.
- ^ Bates 2010, pp. 99-100.
- ^ RCSEd Minute Book 1847, 85-6.
- ^ Campbell, Neil (1983). The Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783-1983). Edinburgh: Royal Society of Edinburgh. p. 72.
- JSTOR 235460.
- S2CID 249830554– via SAGEJournals.
- ^ Bates 2010, p. 143.
- JSTOR 3024816.
- ISBN 0-902-198-84-X.
- ^ "Dr Robert Knox". Necropolis Notables. The Brookwood Cemetery Society. Archived from the original on 20 March 2007. Retrieved 23 February 2007.
- )
- ISBN 978-1-139-46265-5. Retrieved 25 April 2015.
- S2CID 162747396.
- ISBN 978-0-824-82902-5.
- ISBN 978-1-845-19381-2. Retrieved 25 April 2015.
- ^ Knox, Robert (1824). "Inquiry into the Origin and Characteristic Differences of the Native Races inhabiting the Extra-tropical Part of Southern Africa". Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society. 5: 206–218, 210 – via Internet Archive.
"We may view the human race as derived originally from one stock, to which the arbitrary name of Caucasian has been given. This species, infleunced by climate and civilization, assumed, at a very early period, five distinct forms, which has also been arbitrarily designated by the names of Caucasian, Mongolic, Ethiopian, American, and Malay." (Note: Robert Knox was skeptical whether 'Malay' could be considered its own race and he considered them to be related to the "American variety" instead.)
- ^ PMID 772684.
- ^ Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations. 2nd ed. London: Henry Renshaw, pp. 542, 546, 548-9, 563.
- ^ Knox 1850, p. 253
- ^ Knox, Robert (1824). "Inquiry into the Origin and Characteristic Differences of the Native Races inhabiting the Extra-tropical Part of Southern Africa". Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society. 5: 206–219, 217 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Knox 1850, p. 254
- ^ Richards, 1994
- ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Knox", pp. 143-144).
- ^ "The Anatomist (1939)(TV)". imdb. Retrieved 12 October 2009.
- ^ "Play of the Month: The Anatomist (1980)". EOFF. Archived from the original on 21 November 2008. Retrieved 12 October 2009.
- ^ "Medicinal Purposes". Big Finish Productions. Retrieved 14 June 2010.
Sources
- Bettany, George Thomas (1892). Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 31. London: Smith, Elder & Co. . In
- Taylor, Clare L. "Knox, Robert". doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15787. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
Further reading
- Bates, A.W. (2010), The Anatomy of Robert Knox: Murder, Mad Science and Medical Regulation in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh, Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, ISBN 978-1-84519-381-2, retrieved 14 November 2014
- Lonsdale, Henry (1870), A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox, the Anatomist, London: Macmillan and Co., retrieved 10 November 2014
- Richardson, Ruth (1987), Death, Dissection and the Destitute, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-7102-0919-3, retrieved 16 July 2010
- Sera-Shriar, Efram (2013), The Making of British Anthropology, 1813-1871, London: Pickering & Chatto, pp.81-107