anatomist to the Free Cancer Hospital, London. He joined the medical register at its inception in 1858 and practiced obstetrics in Hackney. On 27 November 1860 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Ethnological Society of London, where he spoke in public for the last time on 1 July 1862. He continued working at the Cancer Hospital until shortly before his death on 20 December 1862, at 9 Lambe Terrace in Hackney. He was buried at Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey. Ethnology and racism Knox's interest in race began as an undergraduate. His relevant political views were radical: he was an abolitionist and anti-colonialist who criticised the Boer as "the cruel oppressor of the dark races." Knox is generally considered to be a polygenist; however, some have argued that he was a monogenist, including biographer Alan Bates, who considers such claims to be "exaggerated". In his best-selling work, The Races of Men (1850), a "Zoological history" of mankind, Knox exaggerated supposed racial differences in support of his project, asserting that, anatomically and behaviourally, "race, or hereditary descent, is everything". He offered crude characterisations of each racial group: for example the Saxon (in which race he included himself) "invents nothing", "has no musical ear", lacks "genius", and is so "low and boorish" that "he does not know what you mean by fine art". No race was without its redeeming features, however; Knox described Saxons as "[t]houghtful, plodding, industrious beyond all other races, [and] a lover of labour for labour's sake". Such supposed racial characteristics meant that each race was naturally fitted for a particular environment and could not endure outside of it. While Knox maintained that all races were capable of some form of civilized life, he maintained that a vast gulf stood between the limited attainments available to the 'negroid' and to most 'mongoloid' races on one hand and the much greater past achievements and future potential of white men on the other. The Black, Knox remarked, 'is no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra'. Ultimately however, all races were "[d]estined ... to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence", it mattering "little how their extinction is brought about". In 1862 Knox took the opportunity of a second edition of The Races of Men to defend the "much maligned races" of the Cape against accusations of cannibalism, and