The Court of Cacus; Or, The Story of Burke and Hare. Alexander Leighton
succeeded by Knox, did this Scotch shame undergo any diminution, if it did not wax more brazen in its features. Knox was destined, as well by his powers as a public lecturer as by his ambition and vindictive impatience of an intruder on his peculiar walk, and independently altogether of the dark suspicions which rose like thick exhalations out of the depths of the great tragedy subsequently enacted, to become a marked man, and the centre of attraction to ardent students. His ambition felt, too, the quickening spur of Liston, who, as an extra-academical lecturer on surgery, offered for even more than a national reputation. The professional emulation of these men soon degenerated into professional, if not personal hatred, scarcely alleviated by the collateral envy they both bore towards the academical professor, who, himself a good anatomist of the old school, with family honours not distinguished from a professional inheritance, could afford to view the new men with an easy if not proud disregard.
With these feelings among the lecturers, we may easily fancy the almost natural effects among the students, always remarkable for devotion to their teachers. The spirit of the latter went through them like an inoculation, and, while working in them as a rancour, it took the form, as in the elders, of a professional emulation. Nay, it seemed to become almost a frenzy among them, that those of one class should excel those of another in the knowledge of the human body. Questions came to be discussed among them, often suggested by faults imputed by one lecturer to another, and the quarrels of the masters thus became bones of contention among their scholars. An unsuccessful operation would be seized on as a pretext to run down the operator; and as the anatomical books could not always, or often, settle the dispute, the area of controversy would be in the halls of dissection. In this state of affairs, it behoved that the demand for subjects, which ever since the advent of Barclay had been on the increase, should become day by day more clamant, and the number of vagabonds who betook themselves to the calling came soon to take on the form and organisation of a regular staff.
Unfortunately the characters of the leaders, with the exception of Monro, were not calculated to temper this zeal with discretion, or throw a veil of decency over the transactions of low men, which, however justified, as many said, by the necessities of science, were hostile to the instincts of nature, and fearfully resented by the feelings of relatives. Liston was accused, whether justly or not, of wiling patients from the Infirmary, to set off by his brilliant operations the imperfections of the regular surgeons of that institution; and great as he was in his profession, it is certain that he wanted that simplicity and dignity of character necessary to secure to him respect in proportion to the admiration due to his powers. But Knox was a man of a far more complex organisation, if it was indeed possible to analyse him. A despair to the physiognomist who contemplated his rough irregular countenance, with a blind eye resembling a grape, he was not less a difficulty to the psychologist. There seemed to be no principle whereby you could think of binding him down to a line of duty, and a universal sneer, not limited to mundane powers, formed the contrast to an imputed self-perfection, not without the evidence of very great scientific accomplishments. Even before he took up Barclay’s class he was damaged by a story which went the round of the public, and was brought up against him at the time of his great occultation.
On returning from the Cape, where he had been attached as surgeon to a regiment, he was one day met by his old teacher, Professor Jameson, who, after a kindly recognition in his own simple way, inquired what had been his pursuits when abroad.
“Why,” replied Knox, with one of these expressions of an almost unreadable face—something between a leer and overdone sincerity—“why, I was busy in your way,—keen in the study of natural history. No place in the world excels the Cape for curious objects in that department; will you believe it, Professor, I have made an extraordinary discovery?”
“Discovery! ah, you interest me.”
“And well I may,” he continued, as the light of the one orb expressed the new-born zeal of the naturalist. “I have found a new species of animal. Yes, sir, altogether new, and at a world’s-wide distance from any congeners with which you are acquainted—quite an irreproducible phœnix.”
“Then we must identify it with your name,—some adjective connected with night, but not darkness.”
“And that I have done, too,” continued the naturalist.
“Why, then, the description will form an excellent article for our journal. I could wish that you write it out and send it to me. It will be something grand, to shew the Southerners we are en avant.”
“I will do it,” was the reply; “and you shall have it for the next number.”
Nor was Knox worse in this instance than his word, if he could be, for by and by there came to the Professor a spirited, if not elaborate description of the new species, which, having been approved of by the simple Professor, flared brilliantly among the heavy articles of his beloved work. But unhappily for the discoverer, no less than for the editor, the article fell under the eye of Dr Buckland, who soon found out the whole affair to be an excellent hoax. Often afterwards Jameson looked for his contributor to administer a reproof in his gentle way, but this opportunity never awaited him, for Knox, though with one eye, had a long sight when there was danger ahead, and the Professor in the distance sent him down the nearest close with even more than his usual celerity.
Those who knew the man would have no hesitation in placing such an example of his recklessness to the credit of his rampant egotism,[2] certainly not to that of practical joking, a species of devil’s humour not always dissociated from a bonhommie to which the earnest mind of the man was a stranger. Even the bitterness of soul towards competitors was not sufficiently gratified by the pouring forth of the toffana-spirit of his sarcasm. He behoved to hold the phial with refined fingers, and rub the liquid into the “raw” with the soft touch of love. The affected attenuation of voice and forced retinu of feeling, sometimes degenerating into a puppy’s simper, bore such a contrast to the acerbity of the matter, that the effect, though often ludicrous, was increased tenfold. We may now read such a passage as we subjoin,[3] serving merely as a solitary example of the style; but it would be vain to try to estimate the effect from the mere allocation of vocables disjoined from the acrimony they collected in their passage through the ear and carried to the brain.
The Young Amateurs
It would seem that conspiring circumstances at the time pointed to that kind of denouement which is the issue of an evil too great for society to bear. In Barclay’s time, the increased demand for the physical material of the dissecting halls was supplied by a most convenient arrangement of places. There was the Infirmary a little to the west, where deaths were occurring several times a week, and many bodies left unclaimed by their friends. Then, at the back of Barclay’s hall was a little “death’s mailing” set apart for those who had been relieved of life in that refuge of the wretched, and, strangely enough, the windows looked out upon the tempting field; so that a man or woman, dreaming of no such fate, might die and be buried, and taken and dissected, all within the temporal space of a few days, and the physical of a few yards. No great wonder that there was there a rope-ladder of ominous intention, and a box with such accommodating appurtenances as would permit of the insertion of hooks at the end of lines, whereby it might be let down empty and light, and brought up full and heavy. Nor was it inappropriate that young Cullen, the grandson of Celeberrimus, should be the man who accomplished with greatest spirit these easy appropriations. Some will yet recollect how these young gouls grinned with a satanic pleasure, as they saw the heavy-looking sextons busy with the work which they were so soon to undo, if it was not also more than surmise that these grave men could smile in return, even while they were beating down the green sod, as if it were to remain till the greater resurrection, in place of the smaller.
As connected with the continued spoliation of this unfortunate little Golgotha, a story was current out of which was formed a mock heroic imitation of the 17th book of the “Iliad.” It seemed that an old beggar of the name of Sandy M‘Nab, who used to be known in Edinburgh as a cripple ballad singer, had died of almost pure old age in the Infirmary, and