Career in Edinburgh
He returned to Edinburgh by Christmas 1822. In 1823 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. During these years he communicated a number of well-received papers to the Royal and Wernerian societies of Edinburgh on zoological subjects. Soon after his election he submitted a plan to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for a Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which was accepted, and within eight months he was appointed Conservator over the new museum.
From 1826 to 1840 he ran Barclay's anatomy school in Surgeon's Square, Edinburgh. 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
tertius who put off many of his students (including the young Charles Darwin who took the course 1825–1827). This created a demand for private tuition, and the flamboyant Knox had more students than all the other private tutors put together.
He turned his sharp wit on the elders and the clergy of the city, satirising religion and delighting his students. His 'continental' lectures were not for the squeamish. John James Audubon, was in Edinburgh at the time to find subscribers for his
Birds of America. 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. I was glad to leave this charnel house and breathe again the salubrious atmosphere of the streets".
The Resurrectionists
Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 widened the supply, the only legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes in the UK were those condemned to death and dissection by the courts. This led to a chronic shortage of legitimate subject of dissection, and this shortage became more serious as the need to train medical students grew, and the number of executions fell. In his school Knox ran up against the problem from the start, since — after 1815 — the Royal Colleges had enforced an extension of anatomical examination in the medical curriculum. If he taught according to what was known as ‘French method’ the ratio would have had to approach one corpse per pupil.
As a consequence, body-snatching became so prevalent that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after burial, to stop it being violated. In November 1827 William Hare began a new career when an indebted lodger died on him by chance. He was paid £7.10/- (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox. Now Burke and his accomplice Hare set about murdering tramps and drunks on a regular basis. After 16 more transactions, in what became known as the West Port Murders, on 2 November 1828 Burke and Hare were caught, and the whole city convulsed with titillated horror, fed by ballads, broadsides and newspapers, at the terrible deeds of Burke & Hare. Hare turned King's evidence, and Burke was hanged, dissected and displayed.
- :Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,Knox, the boy who buys the beef!
Knox was not prosecuted, which outraged many in Edinburgh. His house was attacked by a mob, and windows were broken. A committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated him of blame, 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 the Curator of the museum he had proposed and founded. His profitable lecturing was the next to suffer. His class finally collapsed when Edinburgh University made its own practical anatomy class compulsory in the mid-1830s. Knox continued to purchase cadavers for his dissection class, but the 1832 Anatomy Act made bodies more available to all anatomists, and his competitive edge was lost.
London
Knox made enemies of Edinburgh's city elders, and left for London in 1842 after the death of his wife (the remaining children were farmed out to a nephew). He found it impossible to get a post as a surgeon, and from then until 1856 he worked on medical journalism, lectures, and various publications. His books about fishing sold best.
In 1856 he became anatomist to the London Cancer Hospital, Brompton. He worked there for the next six years until his death on 20 December 1862. He was buried at Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.