At least those pranks were comparatively harmless. The dead were gone beyond the reach of hurt, and the feelings of the living were not outraged. As regards the rifling of graveyards, you wonder how it was so often successful. The watchers were, however, paid hirelings, they were frozen with superstitious terror, they were usually paralysed with drink, and they had watched hours and nights already, and nothing had happened. The assailants were infinitely more active in mind and body; they had full command of cash and of all necessary appliances, and they selected the time of their attack; more than all, they seemed absolutely free from superstitious feeling. Yet, with it all, it is curious that no Edinburgh doctor or student seems ever to have been put in actual peril.
I turn now to the Burke and Hare murders, which had important effects in various directions. The locus was Tanner’s Close in the West Port, outside the city boundary. Here Burke kept a lodging-house, and here, on the 29th of November 1827, Donald, an old pensioner, died in debt to Burke. Thus a needy man found himself in possession of the body of his dead-and-gone debtor, and it seemed to him quite justifiable to fill up the coffin with rubbish, and sell the corpse to Dr. Knox of 10 Surgeon Square at £7,10s., a sum which seemed for the moment a small fortune. Then the notion occurred to him or his associate, Hare, how easy to press the life out of some of the waifs and strays that floated about the Grassmarket and its adjacent quarters, the very lowest in Edinburgh! These were here to-day and gone to-morrow, and if they never turned up again who was there to ask after them or mourn their loss? I shall not tell here the story of “Daft Jamie” and handsome Mary Paterson and the other victims, or of how the murderers were discovered, how Hare turned King’s evidence, how Burke was convicted, whilst his associate, Helen Macdougal, escaped. Burke was executed amidst impressive and even terrible marks of popular indignation, and by a sort of poetic justice, which appealed to the popular imagination, he himself was dissected.
For us Dr. Knox is a more interesting and important figure. The thing cast a shadow over his brilliant career, and at last his life was lost in flats and shallows, yet he was one of the most striking figures of his time. Though a cruel attack of small-pox in his youth had left him blind in the left eye, and plain to the verge, or over the verge, of ugliness, he was a special favourite with women, by his talk, by his manner, by you know not what. According to Shakespeare, Richard Crookback, a more evil man, surely, in every way, had the same fatal gift. Knox was widely read and of wide culture. In a city of brilliant talkers he was, so his biographer would have us believe, among the very best, nay, he ranks him equal or superior to De Quincey. We are told that he was so tender-hearted that he hated to think of experiments on living animals; he did not believe that any real advantage was to be gained therefrom. He certainly was possessed of true enthusiasm for science; he was by no means a rich man, yet he spent £300 on a whale which he dissected, and whose skeleton he secured for the museum. It was only an amiable weakness that he was very careful in his dress and person. His friend, Dr. Macdonald, afterwards professor of natural history at St. Andrews, calling upon him one day, found him with his sister Mary. She had a pair of curling-tongs in her hand, with which she was touching up her brother’s rather scanty locks. “Ah, ah! I see,” said Macdonald, “the modern Apollo attired by the Graces.” Knox was not unduly disturbed by remarks of this sort. Monro’s pupils considered themselves in the opposite camp. One of them wagered that he would put the anatomist out of countenance. He set himself right before him in the street: “Well, by Jove, Dr. Knox, you are the ugliest fellow I ever saw in my life!” Knox quietly patted the impudent student on the shoulder: “Ah! then you cannot have seen my brother Fred!” As it happened, Fred was much the handsomer of the two, but he had been rather a thorn in the side of the anatomist, who had shown him much kindness, and maybe Knox was not ill pleased at the chance to give him a sly dig. His own students doted on him, they called him Robert for short. “Yes,” said an enemy, “Robert le Diable”; as such the people regarded him. How he escaped death, or at least bodily injury, is a little curious; even the students were affrighted at the yells and howls of the mob outside his evening classroom. The lecturer pointed out that he had never missed a single lecture, and that he was not afraid. Once the rabble burned his effigy and attacked his house. Knox escaped to his friend, Dr. Adams, in St. Patrick Square. He was asked how he dare venture out. He said he preferred to meet his fate, whatever it was, outside than die like a rat in a hole, then he threw open the military cloak that he wore and revealed a sword, pistols, and a Highland dirk. The brutes might kill him, but he would account for at least twenty of them first. All sorts of legends were told about him. He had many Kaffir skulls in his museum, and he was alleged to have explained: “Why, sir, there was no difficulty in Kaffraria. I had but to walk out of my tent and shoot as many as I wanted for scientific and ethnological purposes.” Knox had experiences in South Africa, but they were not of this kind. In chap books and popular ditties his name ever went with the West Port murderers—a verse may be given:
“Burke an’ Hare
Fell doun the stair
Wi’ a leddy in a box
Gaun tae Doctor Knox.”
Once when walking in the Meadows with Dr. Adams, Knox gave a penny and said some pleasant words to a pretty little girl of six who was playing there. “Would she come and live with him,” he said jestingly, “if he gave her a penny every day?” The child shook her head. “No; you’d maybe sell me to Dr. Knox.” His biographer affirms he was more affected by this childish thrust than by all the hostility of the mob. He could give a shrewd thrust himself, however. Dr. John Reid, the physiologist, had dissected two sharks, in which he could discover no sign of a brain; he was much perplexed. “How on earth could the animals live without it?” said he to Knox. “Not the least extraordinary,” was the answer. “If you go over to the Parliament House any morning you will see a great number of live sharks walking about without any brains whatever.”
