Robert Knox was a Scottish surgeon and scholar born in 1792 who dedicated his life to anatomy ethnology and racism. Many of Knox's papers and lectures would become the stepping stones of modern eugenics and race theory. Knox advocated for ethnic cleansings, believing Anglo-Saxons to be the dominant race and that a  majority of problems in politics, literature and day to day life were the fault of irreconcilable racial differences. Needless to say his work has been widely discredited as nonsense but it was unfortunately influential.

Here's where shit gets insane. In the 1800s, Anatomists and doctors often purchased dead bodies from prisons or executions to use for their studies. When that wasn't an option they sometimes resorted to hiring men to dig up graves. Robert Knox took a different route, purchasing dead bodies from serial killers. He was friends with lodgers William Burke and William Hare, a pair of brutal landlords who sold the body of a man that died in their house to Robert for his experiments. After that from 1827-1828 the two Williams murdered 16 known people to sell their bodies for money. William Burke and Hare were hung for murder but Robert was cleared of wrongdoing since there wasn't evidence he knew where the bodies came from. The incident still disgraced him from the royal college surgeons of Ediburough, but he remained a very popular lecturer until his death in 1862.

Bastard Suggestion: Robert Knox, the grave robbing maniac who pioneered racism