he married in 1824. According to Knox's friend Henry Lonsdale the marriage was kept secret as she was 'of inferior rank.' During his time in Edinburgh, Knox lived at 4 Newington Place with his sisters Mary and Jessie, while Susan and his four children lived at Lilliput Cottage in Trinity, west of Leith. They had seven children, but only two of them survived into adulthood. West Port murders Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 widened the supply, the main 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 subjects for 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 increased the anatomical work 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 £7.10s (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox's dissecting rooms at Surgeons' Square. Now Hare and his accomplice, William Burke, set about murdering the city’s poor on a regular basis. After 16 more transactions, each netting £8-10, in what later became known as the West Port Murders, on 2 November 1828 Burke and Hare were caught, and the whole city convulsed with horror, fed by ballads, broadsides, and newspapers, at the reported deeds of the pair. Hare turned King's evidence, and Burke was hanged, dissected and his remains displayed. Knox was not prosecuted, which outraged many in Edinburgh. His house was attacked by a mob of 'the lowest rabble of the Old Town,' and windows were broken. A committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated him on the grounds that he had not dealt personally with Burke and Hare, but there was no forgetting his part in the case, and many remained wary