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Chapter 4 Sold to Dr. Knox “A Native of Cheshire,” “Old Woman” Burke and Hare never learned the names of their next two victims, murdered sometime in February or March 1828. The first was “an Englishman, a native of Cheshire,” Burke remembered. He was a tall man, about forty, with black hair and “brown whiskers, mixed with gray hair.” He sold tinder, “spunks” as it was called in Scotland, and was probably a kind of regular transient, traveling between the outskirts of the city and its inner closes. He stayed at the lodging house in Tanner’s Close, and Burke remembered that he had jaundice and lay “in bed very unwell.” Perhaps his murderers thought he was likely to die anyway, or perhaps he was simply weakened by his illness. He was killed “in the same manner as the other” and “sold to Dr. Knox for £10.” According to Burke, Margaret Hare had a principal share in the next murder; he may have wanted to see her accused in place of Helen M’Dougal, as “guilty of the said crime, actor or actors or art and part.” Hare was out “working on the boats in the canal,” and Burke was mending shoes, on the morning that Margaret Hare “decoyed into the house” an old woman, name, origin, and occupation unknown. She gave the woman whiskey, and tried to get her to go to bed, but she apparently kept getting up, as Margaret Hare had to “put her to bed three times.” Finally “she was so drunk that she fell asleep,” and when Hare came home for dinner, probably early afternoon, “he put part of the bed-tick on her mouth and 80 Chapter 4 nose” to suffocate her. When he came home at night she was dead, and we may wonder if Margaret Hare helped the process along. Burke and Hare removed her clothes, put her in a tea box, and brought her to Surgeon’s Square that night. For this corpse, too, Dr. Knox paid £10. Technically the old woman had been smothered, rather than burked, and a modern forensic team would certainly have found telltale evidence of the bed tick around her nose and mouth. But neither Knox nor his assistants were experienced forensic surgeons, and even though this was the fifth fresh, uninterred corpse that “John” and “William” had brought them in three months, they followed their usual practice of asking no questions. What, we may wonder —as contemporaries wondered—was Dr. Knox thinking? Robert Knox has been an enigma since his purchase of Burke’s and Hare’s cadavers was first made public. It seemed incredible to contemporaries that a respected medical man could connive at murder, but it seemed equally incredible that he had had no suspicions of the true nature of his purchases. His biographers, starting with Henry Lonsdale, have only compounded the mystery, for they have stressed his brilliance as both scientist and surgeon.Their exertions were as damaging to Knox’s later reputation as any of his detractors’ accusations. For if Knox had been a great surgeon in the Victorian mode—like Joseph Lister, for example—then he was clearly either a villain or a fool: a villain, if he noticed the evidence for murder and did nothing, or a fool if he did not notice the evidence. And so we should begin our investigation of Robert Knox by noting that he was not a surgeon in the modern sense: he did not maintain a practice in which he treated patients, performed operations, or carried out postmortem examinations to determine the cause of death. Instead, the goal he pursued throughout his life was research into anatomical science. His models were the French comparative anatomists Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and his burning ambition was to establish in Edinburgh the equivalent of the natural history research center in Paris, the Jardin des Plantes. The academic year 1827–1828 was only his second year as an independent lecturer on anatomy, but he had already achieved enviable success. Still, in the spring of 1828, as he purchased two more bodies from Burke and Hare, he surely knew he still had far to go. Knox was born on September 4, 1791, the eighth child of Robert Knox, a mathematician and teacher in Edinburgh, and his wife, Mary Scherer. The Knox family lived at 6 Nicolson Streeet, a few blocks from the main [3.14.142.115] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06:16 GMT...

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