This angling book is titled "Fish And Fishing In The Lone Glens Of Scotland. With A History Of The Propagation, Growth and Metamorphoses of the Salmon", by Dr. Knox and published in London and New York by G. Routledge in 1854. The book is a first edition, according to WorldCat, and is 3/4 bound, with five raised bands, gilt lettering and gilt devices on the spine, green pebbled boards, marbled endpapers with a fancy "S" on a small bookplate on the front paste-down, a pencil note on the back of the front flyleaf says the book was bound in March 1894, then a vignette title page, two pages of Contents, and 144 pages of text, with a couple of tables and illustrations along the way. Robert Knox (1793 - 1862) was a prominent Scottish anatomist and physician who had a fascinating story - actually, pretty gory. Born in Edinburgh, he became a leading teacher of anatomy in the 1820's, but is best known today for his involvement in the West Point murders, the most notorious in Scottish history. After graduating from high school in 1810, he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh and stood for examination three years later, but failed in anatomy. To remedy this deficiency, he switched professors and turned to studying with John Barclay, who ran an extramural school of anatomy. Knox not only passed the examination in 1814, but decided to make anatomy his area of special interest. Following his graduation in 1814, Knox joined the army, where he was posted to Brussels to attend to the wounded from the Battle of Waterloo, and took part in in South Africa. On returning to Scotland in 1822, he became a key force in establishing a museum of anatomy and pathology at the College of Surgeons and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he was involved in setting up a major anatomical school where he was famed for his gory lectures. Knox was tremendously successful as an anatomy teacher. During the academic year 1828 to 1829, he was so popular that he gave special Saturday lectures to the public. Yet it was Knox's very success that caused him trouble: ever since his experiences in France, he came to believe it was essential for students to have their own cadavers to dissect. Cadavers were in short supply in Edinburgh, however, and had been for a long time. Gangs of "Resurrectionists" robbed graves to sell bodies, and anatomists in Edinburgh imported bodies from Ireland and even from London. While Knox attempted to get Parliament to pass a law that allowed the medical profession to acquire the unclaimed bodies of paupers, he also offered premium prices for cadavers regardless of source. He kept students on duty at night to receive the bodies, instructing them to ask no questions and to pay the agreed fees in cash. And that brings us to the West Point murders. William Burke and William Hare were Irish immigrants who committed a series of murders over a period of about ten months in Edinburgh in 1828 - they killed sixteen people - they didn't rob graves, but strangled sixteen vagrants - and sold the corpses to Dr. Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures, and he was accused of murder, along with the two men. To avoid the gallows, Hare gave evidence against Burke, who was convicted and sentenced to hang and have his body dissected, and Hare was granted immunity by the prosecution. When Hare left the city, angry Edinburgh citizens, unable to get at him, hanged Knox in effigy; many of them regarded Knox as the instigator of the crimes. Some professional colleagues turned their back on Knox, but a committee of his friends sponsored a private investigation which cleared him of any duplicity, and Knox announced the results in a letter to the press, his only public statement on the matter. His students supported him, giving him a gold vase as evidence of their support. The affair served to mobilize Parliament, which finally passed an anatomy act in 1832 which allowed doctors to use unclaimed bodies of paupers for study. Despite public outcry, Dr. Knox was never tried for his involvement in the murders, though his reputation was severely damaged. Shortly after the West Point case, the Royal College of Surgeons pressured him to resign from his role of curator at the museum. Knox continued to be pushed out by the medical establishment, eventually moving to London, where he published several books, but his life was never the same afterwards. He remained under a cloud of suspicion, and in order to support himself, he turned to writing medical journals and to public lectures. His most successful books were probably Races of Men (London 1850) 1862), Manual of Human Anatomy, Descriptive, General, and Practical (London 1853), and the book at auction here, Fish and Fishing in the Lone Glens of Scotland. He died in Hackney, London, in 1862. As a cause celebre, his life was the focus of play by James Birdie entitled "the Anatomist", first produced in 1930, and a screenplay by Dylan Thomas that was published, but never filmed. The screenplay was titled "The Doctor and the Devils", and a book was written about the West Point murders titled "Burke and Hare" (London and Edinburgh 1921 and enlarged in 1948), and you have to wonder if any of the murder mysteries on English tv in the 1950's which featured grave robbing were based on this sad affair. Despite his reputation as a distinguished anatomist and lecturer, Robert Knox is best remembered for his involvement in the West Port murders. He got off Scot free - a bad pun - he was from Scotland - but he paid a price for what happened - he was forced to move and was shunned by the medical community, and the last years of his life were never really the same after that. The book measures 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 in. wide, with a tight binding and relatively clean pages and text, light rubbing on the gilt and crown and heel of the spine, cover loss on the leather in the top right corner and scrapes on the leather in the lower right corner of the front cover, light wear at the tips, light wear and light browning on the title and Contents pages, light browning in the margins on a couple of pages, slight creases at the tips on a few pages, and brown spots and a small chip on the last two pages of text. So what you thought was just an angling book about fishing in Scottish waters was much more than that … a story of grave robbing and murders of vagrants and paupers to satisfy the need of learning more about human anatomy - gruesome ties to a book about fishing and angling in benign waters. #131 #1591