Robert Knox FRSE FRCSE (4 September 1791 – 20 December 1862) was a Scottish anatomist and ethnologist best known for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders.

However, Knox's incautious methods of obtaining cadavers for dissection before the passage of the Anatomy Act 1832 and disagreements with professional colleagues ruined his career in Scotland.

Knox also devoted the latter part of his career to studying and theorising on evolution and ethnology; during this period, he also wrote numerous works advocating scientific racism.

[9] His army work at the Brussels military hospital (near Waterloo) impressed upon him the need for a comprehensive training in anatomy if surgery were to be successful.

He did not suffer fools gladly and—in an aside with terrible consequences for his future career—he was critical of the surgical work of Charles Bell with casualties at the Battle of Waterloo.

He enjoyed riding, shooting and the beauty of the landscape with which he felt in spiritual harmony—an early expression of his transcendental world view.

[11] Knox developed an interest in observing racial types, and disapproved of what he saw as the Boers' contempt for the indigenous peoples.

However, after an abortive Xhosa rebellion against the colonial forces, he was involved in a retaliatory raid commanded by Andries Stockenström, a magistrate and future Lieutenant Governor.

Knox initially refused to fight, and Burdett "soundly horse whipped him on the parade before every Officer of the Garrison."

[15] While in Paris he befriended Thomas Hodgkin, with whom he shared a dissecting room at l'Hôpital de la Pitié.

[19] At this time most professorships were in the gift of the town council, resulting in such uninspiring teachers as the professor of anatomy Alexander Monro, who put off many of his students (including the young Charles Darwin who took the course 1825–1827).

Shown round the dissecting theatre by Knox, "dressed in an overgown and with bloody fingers", Audubon reported that "The sights were extremely disagreeable, many of them shocking beyond all I ever thought could be.

In his school Knox ran up against the problem from the start, since—after 1815—the Royal Colleges had increased the anatomical work in the medical curriculum.

He was paid £7.10s (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox's dissecting rooms at Surgeons' Square.

After 16 more transactions, each netting £8-10, in what later became known as the West Port Murders, on 2 November 1828 Burke and Hare were caught, and the whole city convulsed with horror, fed by ballads, broadsides, and newspapers, at the reported deeds of the pair.

[26] A committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated him on the grounds that he had not dealt personally with Burke and Hare, but there was no forgetting his part in the case, and many remained wary of him.

Almost immediately after the Burke and Hare case, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh began to harry him, and by June 1831 they had procured his resignation as curator of the museum he had proposed and founded.

[32][33] In 1837 Knox applied for the chair in pathology at Edinburgh University but his candidature was blocked by eleven existing professors, who preferred to abolish the post rather than appoint him.

On 27 November 1860 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Ethnological Society of London, where he spoke in public for the last time on 1 July 1862.

His relevant political views were radical: he was an abolitionist and anti-colonialist who criticised the Boer as "the cruel oppressor of the dark races.

He offered crude characterisations of each racial group: for example the Saxon (in which race he included himself) "invents nothing", "has no musical ear", lacks "genius", and is so "low and boorish" that "he does not know what you mean by fine art.

From Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire and Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, he gained a spatial and thematic perspective on living things.

If the natural historian were perspicacious enough to examine the creatures in this correct order he could perceive—aesthetically—the archetype that was immanent in the totality of a series, although present in none of them.

According to Richards, The Races of Men advocated "a common material origin of life and its evolution by a process of saltatory descent"; that is to say, new species arose not by gradual change but by sudden leaps due to shifts in embryonic development.

For one contemporary reviewer, his claim that "Species is the product of external circumstances, acting through millions of years" was "bold, disgusting, and gratuitous atheism."

In modern terms, he proposed a theory of saltatory evolution, in which "deformations" in embryonic development produced "hopeful monsters" that, if fortuitously suited to the prevailing environmental conditions, gave rise to new species in a single, macroevolutionary leap.