The obituary also revealed something which neither of Knox’s biographers pursued.
Radical as he was, he yet felt the honest pride of a Scotsman at his own ancestry, and longed to get possession of Ranfurly, an ancient domain where his family had been lairds, and the occupation of which place and title by his Irish kinsman, Knox, Earl of Ranfurly, he complained of.17
It was Thomas Knox who had been created 1st Earl of Ranfurly. It may be that a gnawing resentment of what he perceived as an injustice was also part of the make-up of Robert Knox’s character, and perhaps contributed to the impatience and intolerance of which he was so often guilty. The Ranfurly estate is near Bridge of Weir, west of Glasgow, and is still the seat of that branch of the Knox family which holds the title today.
A number of authors, mostly in the medical profession, have tried to restore Knox’s reputation since his death. He was, it is said, made a scapegoat by his fellow-surgeons and anatomists in the intolerant Edinburgh of the time. He was a victim of professional jealousy. He was a prophet without honour in his own country. His friend, biographer and former pupil, Henry Lonsdale, described him as a man of genius, gifted with ‘rare intellect’ and ‘commanding eloquence’, and insisted that he was ‘humane, compassionate, and kind-hearted’, and ‘tender to a degree, wherever humanity was concerned’.18 Lonsdale told an affecting little story which would nowadays, sadly but inevitably, raise suspicions of paedophilia. Knox was walking in the meadows with his friend Dr Adams when a pretty little girl, aged about six, caught his notice while she was playing:
He gave her a penny, and said, ‘Now, my dear, you and I will be friends. Would you come and live with me if you got a whole penny every day?’ ‘No,’ said the child; ‘you would, may be, sell me to Dr Knox.’ The anatomist started back with a painfully stunned expression; his features began to twitch convulsively, and tears appeared in his eyes.19
Of course, we can think of several human monsters who were kind to children and animals. Another medical author stated that Knox was a ‘great, strong, outstanding, and valiant character; the most versatile, and the most thorough teacher of anatomy that Scotland, a country which has long been noted for the excellence of its anatomical instruction, ever has produced . . .’20
So should Knox be accorded ‘benefit of clergy’? Consider one more of his biographer’s apologias for his former teacher and colleague:
It was by the merest accident . . . that Knox was brought in relation with Burke at all; and his contemporaries should have remembered that his misfortune might have been theirs, and was within an ace of being Monro’s.21
That is not necessarily so. It was undoubtedly Knox’s bad luck that one of his eager students, thinking to do him a service, directed Burke and Hare to his premises when they were looking for Monro’s. If they had found Monro, he – or any other teacher of anatomy – would have acted, some say, in the same way as Knox did. This, however, is a debatable conclusion, and we can point to at least one man who did not act as Knox did. Furthermore, other anatomists did not pay as much for subjects as Knox did, and did not pay as promptly. Nor did they leave students to deal with body-snatchers, with instructions not to ask awkward questions. It is possible that Burke and Hare might not have been greeted elsewhere with such encouragement, and might soon have come to the conclusion that the business was too risky.
The question is, was Knox guilty of criminal negligence in not suspecting foul play or, at the very least, not enquiring how Burke and Hare had come by their fresh, unburied corpses, which included those of a twelve-year-old boy and two or three other young people who were, to all appearance, healthy? (Mary Paterson, Jamie Wilson and Ann McDougal, who was described as a young, married woman.) If it was true that Knox had taken Jamie Wilson’s corpse for dissection out of turn and had it disfigured to prevent recognition, why had he preserved another young and recognisable body, that of Mary Paterson, for longer than usual, on account of its beauty? Could it have been because she was a prostitute, beyond redemption, whose demise he assumed no one would care about? And if Knox believed that the bodies brought by Burke and Hare were generally those of derelicts or old people who had died of drink or other diseases and been sold by their friends or relations, what did he think about the twelve-year-old boy who was brought in at the same time as his grandmother, both of them packed tightly into a herring-barrel?
According to Isobel Rae, a later biographer of Knox, he ‘had no reason, then, to believe that the body of Mrs Docherty was other than that of one of the many unclaimed strangers who died natural deaths in the city’.22 But she fails to point out that this was the last in a long series of unburied corpses.
The committee of enquiry’s assertion that no one entertained any suspicion about the bodies delivered to Knox clearly contradicts Paterson’s evidence during Burke’s trial, and what the ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’ said in his open letter, as well as other medical opinions which came to light afterwards. Sir Robert Christison wrote, many years later:
My own opinion at the time was, that Dr Knox, then the most popular lecturer on anatomy in Edinburgh . . . had rather wilfully shut his eyes to incidents which ought to have excited the grave suspicions of a man of his intelligence. In a conversation I had with him before the information obtained from Hare and his wife had been communicated to me, I observed that the body taken by the police from his rooms must have been delivered there while warm and flexible, and consequently never had been buried. He made very light of this suggestion, and told me that he had ten or eleven bodies brought the previous winter to his rooms in as recent a state; and that they were got by his providers watching the low lodging-houses in the Cowgate, Grassmarket, and West Port, and, when a death occurred, purchasing the body from the tenant before any one could claim it for interment . . . Knox, a man of undoubted talent, but notoriously deficient in principle and in heart, was exactly the person to blind himself against suspicion, and fall into blameable carelessness. But it was absurd to charge him with anything worse.23
Dr Thomas Wakley, founder and editor of the medical journal The Lancet, wrote that if the receiver of the sixteen bodies had ‘been punishable as well as the murderer, the crimes which have cast a stain on the character of the nation and of human nature, would not have been committed’.24
It was impossible to tell with certainty that a person who had died from suffocation had been murdered, unless there was other external evidence of violence. The Royal College of Surgeons of England, submitting to the government a petition for a change in the law in 1831, stated, ‘It is vain to imagine it is always possible to distinguish the body of a person who has been murdered from that of any one who has died a natural death.’25 But the petition also said, ‘The large prices which have of late been given for anatomical subjects have operated as a premium for murder.’ This comment was made in the light of copycat murders occurring in London, and perhaps seems like being wise after the event. But in the spring of 1828, before the crimes of Burke and Hare had been discovered, Sir Benjamin Brodie, of St George’s Hospital in London, certainly had murder in mind when he told a Select Committee of the House of Commons that he considered it ‘a dangerous thing to society that body-snatchers should be able to get ten guineas for a body’.26 And Sir Henry Halford, President of the Royal College of Physicians, told the same committee that ‘when there is difficulty in obtaining bodies, and their value is so great, you absolutely throw a temptation in the way of these men to commit murder for the purpose of selling the bodies of their victims’.27 The philosopher Jeremy Bentham had foreseen the danger in 1826, and other eminent medical men were aware of it before anyone had heard of Burke and Hare.28 And, of course, there was the old Scottish precedent of Torrence and Waldie.
Knox purchased from Burke and Hare, in the course of nine months, seventeen bodies which had clearly not been buried. They were fresh and still supple. The orifices had not been plugged and the bodies were unwashed. One or two were still warm. Mary Paterson’s hair still ha
d paper curlers in it and she, like Mrs Docherty, had traces of blood about the mouth and nose. The faces of some, if not all the subjects, had a livid colour.
It appears that there are but two possible explanations for Dr Knox’s failure to raise any suspicions about the origins of these subjects. Both were clearly expressed by the author of the Letter to the Lord Advocate:
. . . I have always been led to consider that suffocation or strangulation causes the blood to flow to the head, consequently makes the face of a strong livid colour, with a small discharge of blood from the mouth, nose, and ears. Now, as most of the subjects produced by Burke and Hare had suffered death by suffocation, and as these bodies were generally disposed of to Dr K–, I think it but natural to infer, that if the Doctor saw these bodies, he is either horribly ignorant of his profession, or he wilfully withheld that information he ought to have given.29
Since it is universally acknowledged, even by his enemies, that Robert Knox, so far from being ignorant of his subject, was a master of it, the only possible conclusion is that if he did not know that he was dealing with murderers, he must have suspected that he could be, but chose to remain silent, because he did not care where the subjects came from so long as they suited his purposes.
The late Dr Betty Bostetter, who was working at the time of her death on a major biography of Thomas Wakley, claimed to have found a fragment of a letter to Wakley from Robert Liston, who wrote in May 1828 that he had seen the corpse of Mary Paterson in Knox’s premises, and suspected foul play at once. The idea of her body being dissected by students (such as Fergusson) who had probably slept with her offended his sense of decency, and a quarrel ensued between Liston and Knox during which Knox was knocked down in front of his students. Liston said that he then took away Mary Paterson’s body for burial. Unfortunately, Dr Bostetter’s papers are not available for confirmation, but if this is all true, it proves beyond doubt not only that other doctors had suspicions about the sources of Knox’s subjects as early as the spring of 1828, but that Knox himself was well aware of such doubts, and chose to ignore them.30 Of course, it also shows that Liston could have given important evidence to the Lord Advocate. As he was not listed as a trial witness, he must either have chosen or been persuaded to remain silent.
At what point should Knox have had sufficient suspicion to raise the alarm? After the second corpse, or the third, or the sixth, or the tenth? Burke was clearly an accomplished liar, and if my proposed order of the murders is correct, there is no reason why Knox or anyone else should have had any strong suspicions about the first two, or perhaps three, bodies sold to him by Burke and Hare. After all, the poor who appeared to have died in workhouses and other such places with no friends or relatives to claim the bodies were just what the doctors ordered. But it seems reasonable, in all the circumstances, to suggest that, even without Liston’s intervention, Mary Paterson’s corpse ought to have been the one to alert him to the possibility of murder, and make him speak out. If he had done so, Knox could have saved the lives of perhaps a dozen people and Hare could have been brought to justice as well as Burke. Dr Knox’s silence was a costly evasion, and may be seen in retrospect as part of a tacit conspiracy.
Sir Robert Peel said after the trial that he doubted whether uncertainty as to the extent and history of the murders was not as great an evil as any exposure of the facts could be. But that was clearly not the view of the Edinburgh elite. Knox’s remark in his letter to the Caledonian Mercury, that as he had not been charged, it proved that the authorities had nothing to charge him with, was patently absurd. But the intellectual leadership produced by the Scottish Enlightenment would have been irreparably damaged by public arraignment of one of its most celebrated members.
NOTES
1 Scott, Journal, p. 574.
2 Ibid, p. 575.
3 Ibid, p. 580.
4 The Scotsman, 11 February 1829.
5 Caledonian Mercury, 29 December 1828.
6 Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle, quoted in George MacGregor, The History of Burke and Hare, (Glasgow, Thos. D. Morison, 1884), p. 157.
7 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1829.
8 Lonsdale, p. 108.
9 Ibid, p. 111.
10 Sir Humphrey Rolleston, ‘Provincial Medical Schools a Hundred Years Ago’, Cambridge University Medical Society magazine, 1932, p. 8.
11 I am told by the present Marquis that he has no family papers relating to the matter.
12 Scott, Journal, p. 618.
13 Christison, p. 311.
14 Cockburn, pp. 457–58.
15 Medical Times and Gazette, 27 December 1862. (The editor of the journal and author of this notice was Dr Robert Druitt, an uncle of Montague Druitt, who committed suicide in 1888 and remains one of the chief suspects in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders.)
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Lonsdale, pp. 149, 236, 363, 394.
19 Ibid, p. 115.
20 Ball, p. 96.
21 Lonsdale, p. 89.
22 Rae, p. 61.
23 Christison, pp. 310–11.
24 The Lancet, 21 March 1829.
25 Petition of the Royal College of Surgeons in London to the Viscount Melbourne, 1831.
26 Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy, House of Commons, 1828.
27 Ibid.
28 Dr Ruth Richardson cites a draft letter of April 1826 from Bentham to the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, in her Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 112.
29 ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’, Letter to the Lord Advocate.
30 Richardson, p. 327.
* * *
12. AFTERMATH
* * *
It is one of the inescapable paradoxes of human existence that out of what we regard as evil can come goodness. Body-snatching itself was a necessary evil. Burke and Hare and their unfortunate victims contributed to medical science and helped to educate much-needed surgeons. They were also about to expedite changes in the law which had been long overdue. Events in Edinburgh blasted the government’s apathy with an explosion of outrage.
Burke also made a contribution to the English language. He gave it a new verb which is still in the dictionaries. Within months of his execution, the anatomical theatre of Dr Andrew Moir in Aberdeen had been nicknamed ‘the burkin’ hoose’. To ‘burke’ was used originally as a synonym for ‘kill’ or ‘murder’, but soon came to mean, more specifically, to smother or suffocate someone. For a time afterwards, moronic youths in Scottish and some English towns thought it a great joke to leap out at women and girls in the streets and slap sticking-plaster over their mouths, delighting in the shock and terror they caused in the aftermath of such fearful revelations. A confusion of ideas seems to have linked Burke and Hare with sticking pitch-plasters over their victims’ faces. But in the few serious cases of ‘burking’ recorded, the evidence appears to suggest that this method was being used to facilitate sexual assault. ‘Burkophobia’, as it was called, among other names, certainly caused genuine and widespread fear and distress, and some actual injury, but it never resulted in murder.
On the same day that the Knox committee’s report was published in Edinburgh, 21 March 1829, the House of Commons in London was presented with a Bill by Henry Warburton, MP for Bridport and Commons spokesman for the medical profession, who had headed a Select Committee appointed to enquire into the subject of teaching anatomy. The Bill was intended to bring some control to the study of anatomy by licensing qualified teachers, providing a legal supply of subjects, making grave-robbing a felony, and repealing the Act which gave judges the power to order dissection after execution, thus removing the widely felt stigma resulting from the association of anatomy with crime. The Bill was supported by Sir William Rae, the Lord Advocate for Scotland. The Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, said the measure was necessary to put a stop to the various atrocities caused by the difficulties of obtaining dead bodies. It was painful, he said, to allude t
o the recent Edinburgh murders, but he hardly dared to think that those were the only crimes that had sprung out of the system.
Sir C. Forbes, the Member for Malmesbury, observed that the sick in hospitals could only be visited once a week, on Tuesdays. He feared that if this Bill became law, ‘a husband might enquire after his wife’s health on one Tuesday and be told that she was getting well, and on the following Tuesday, he might be told that she was dead and dissected’. Another MP expressed his fear that ‘in a moment of excitement or intoxication’, some men might engage to ‘sell their bodies to the Jews’. Nevertheless, the Bill was passed by the Commons on 20 May, but thrown out by the House of Lords on 5 June, opposition to it there being led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
There was a great deal of nervousness in government circles about legalising the dissection of unclaimed corpses from hospitals and workhouses, as the Bill proposed, and it was considered unsatisfactory in its present form, notwithstanding that one member of the Select Committee, Ralph Leycester, delivered himself of the opinion that paupers would welcome dissection after their deaths in poorhouses because they would thus be able to repay the debt they owed to those who had cared for them! The truth, of course, was as Edward Gibbon Wakefield explained it:
The thought of being dissected after death, or of having the body of a relative dissected, is quite horrible to the great majority of people of all conditions. This prejudice, against the conversion of inanimate flesh to the only useful purpose of which it is susceptible, has been fostered in various ways; and in particular by the law, which directs that the bodies of murderers shall be ‘anatomised’.1
Thomas Wakley took the opportunity to attack the government’s timid approach to the problem, writing in The Lancet that, had it not been for Burke and Hare, there would be no debate, and:
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