Burke and Hare (23 page)
Authors: Brian Bailey
Syme continued to hound Knox. In November 1856, he wrote to
The Lancet
criticising Fergusson, who had published an article describing Liston’s surgical techniques. Syme pointed out that Fergusson had never been a pupil of Liston’s, but had always been loyal to Knox, ‘of whose dissecting-room he had the principal charge during a very eventful period’. This allusion, raising the spectre of the Burke and Hare scandal, was made by Syme, in Fergusson’s opinion, from despicable motives. The letter appeared shortly after Knox, after many trials and tribulations, had at last obtained an appointment, at the age of sixty-three, as pathological anatomist at the Cancer Hospital in London. Syme was a master at kicking a man when he was down. Nevertheless, Knox held that post until his death from apoplexy at his home in Hackney on 20 December 1862.
Henry Cockburn wrote in his memoirs:
All our anatomists incurred a most unjust, and a very alarming, though not an unnatural odium; Dr Knox in particular, against whom not only the anger of the populace, but the condemnation of more intelligent persons, was specially directed. But tried in reference to the invariable, and the necessary practice of the profession, our anatomists were spotlessly correct, and Knox the most correct of them all.
14
Lord Cockburn wrote and published these words while Knox was still alive, and was thus one of very few who were prepared to be seen defending him.
The
Medical Times and Gazette
printed a long and generous obituary in which there was no mention at all of Burke and Hare, nor any hint of the difficulties Knox had experienced after the exposure of their crimes, though it did comment on ‘the bitterness with which Dr Knox inveighed against all authority, political, civil, and religious’. It noted only that in 1845 he ‘left Edinburgh and came to London’, and that ‘during a part of his career he was not free from all blemish . . .’ Nevertheless:
In gifts of speech he was unequalled. His voice bland and harmonious; his manner earnest and persuasive; his
facundia
, or by whatever other name we may call that seemingly inexhaustible flow of the choicest and most apposite language, his clearness, his logical precision in speaking, and the enormous amount of information on all subjects connected with natural history and fine art, which flowed without effort from his lips – all conspired to make him justly a favourite with all who formed his acquaintance.
15
The article dwelt almost entirely on Knox’s intellect and his literary works, and sought to explain the ‘savage radicalism’ of a man who was, in his private life, ‘pre-eminently tender, friendly, and affectionate’:
First of all, there was the blood of the Knox family. Make allowance for the difference between a preacher-politician and a philosophical anatomist. The Doctor was but the reformer ‘in a higher power’; and carried out against all ‘kingcraft and priestcraft’ the same revolt which his predecessor had instituted against ‘the monstrous regiment of women’, and the religious authorities of his day.
16
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 had 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.
