Knox, the anatomist

"The nefarious practices of the murderers Burke and Hare were revealed on 2nd November 1828, with the discovery and identification of a woman's corpse in the cellar of Dr Robert Knox's School of Anatomy. Soon it was known that at least fifteen other persons has been similarly done to death. Rumours began to spread and broadsides were published to acquaint the public with all the lurid details. Henceforward Knox's name was to be inseparably linked with those of the murderers. People were in no mood to differentiate between the degrees of culpability of those involved in the scandal, and public opinion held him to be as guilty of murder as Burke and Hare who had smothered their victims withour remorse. In this book the author tells the complete life-story of Robert Knox; the years of success before 1828 and the tragic years that followed. Knox emerges as a dedicated scientist, a brilliant teacher of anatomy to whom nineteenth-century surgeons owed much; a man, probably genuinely unaware of the methods used by Burke and Hare, who found the Victorian world relentlessly unforgiving. Knox appears as a character in The Anatomist, a play by James Bridie, and in Dylan Thomas's film script The Doctor and the Devils, but neither Bridie nor Thomas shows him as the vivid character he was. Miss Rae, in seeking to vindicate him both as a man and as a doctor, has given us a sympathetic and highly readable study of one of the pioneers of modern medicine" --Dust jacket.