Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/564

546 offered an exciting spectacle. The race was neck and neck, and woe betide whoever fell in the way! Old and young passers-by were thrown down in the mêlée caused by scores of agile-limbed fellows contending for the Knox goal. The rare and intense enthusiasm that Knox created in his class belongs to the past; no such high fervor is manifested by the student of these latter days. The reason is obvious: he who called it forth is gone, and his counterpart is nowhere to be found; indeed, it is more than doubtful if another Knox will ever appear before a British audience. Old pupils of Knox, both privately and publicly, still speak with sparkling eyes of the grand excitement and rush for favored seats in his lecture-room."

Robert Knox was, moreover, a hater of all humbug, and an unsparing critic of shams of every sort. He ridiculed the superficial method of teaching anatomy practised by rival lecturers, and in his sudden bursts of oratory, his sharp, pithy sentences, which came like sparks from a furnace, often created havoc among doubtful medical reputations, and his telling sarcasms would often circulate through Scotland. It was therefore impossible that he should not make many enemies. His very eminence and popularity also could not fail to be a source of hostility on the part of the envious and jealous. Often his class seemed spellbound under the influence of a speech; and as he wound up his lecture with increasing emphasis, and a sweeping torrent of rhetoric, and bowed his exit, the crowded audience would often rise en masse, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, and cry: "Bravo! bravo! Knox forever, and one cheer more!" All this was delightful; but, as this world is constituted, men often have to pay dearly for such things; and so did Dr. Knox.

Anatomy is the foundation of surgery, and the basis of all rational medical science. To know the structure of the human organization is indispensable both to the progress and the intelligent practice of the healing art. A knowledge of anatomy is therefore the first condition of the most important and beneficent of all occupations—that of alleviating human suffering and saving human life. But the knowledge of the human body that is necessary to remedy its diseases cannot be obtained except by studying it through and through; and this can only be done when the corporeal fabric becomes useless for other purposes. Dead bodies, worthless for any thing else, are invaluable for dissection, and if dissected they must of course be obtained for the purpose. Yet, with an absurd inconsistency, governments, while exacting of medical students a knowledge that can only be procured by the dissection of corpses, have at the same time outlawed the procurement of subjects. Such has been the policy of states for centuries, and in pursuing it the civil power has but given expression to one of the profoundest prejudices and most wide-spread superstitions of human nature. Antipathy to dissection after death is a deeply-rooted