he met both Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who were to remain his heroes for the rest of life, to populate his later medical journalism, and to become the subject of his hagiography, Great artists and great anatomists. While in Paris he befriended Thomas Hodgkin, with whom he shared a dissecting room at l'Hôpital de la Pitié. Career in Edinburgh Knox returned to Edinburgh by Christmas 1822. On 1 December 1823 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. During these years he communicated a number of well-received papers to the Royal and Wernerian societies of Edinburgh on zoological subjects. Soon after his election he submitted a plan to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for a Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which was accepted, and on 13 January 1825 he was appointed curator of the museum with a salary of £100. In 1825, John Barclay offered him a partnership at his anatomy school in Surgeon's Square, Edinburgh. In order for his lectures to be recognised by the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, Knox had to be admitted to its fellowship; a formality, but, at £250, an expensive one. At this time most professorships were in the gift of the town council, resulting in such uninspiring teachers as the professor of anatomy Alexander Monro, who put off many of his students (including the young Charles Darwin who took the course 1825–1827). This created a demand for private tuition, and the flamboyant Knox—in sole charge after Barclay's death in 1826—had more students than all the other private tutors put together. He turned his sharp wit on the elders and the clergy of the city, satirising religion and delighting his students. Knox routinely referred to the Bridgewater Treatises as the "bilgewater treatises" and his 'continental' lectures were not for the squeamish. John James Audubon was in Edinburgh at the time to find subscribers for his Birds of America. Shown round the dissecting theatre by Knox, "dressed in an overgown and with bloody fingers", Audubon reported that "The sights were extremely disagreeable, many of them shocking beyond all I ever thought could be. I was glad to leave this charnel house and breathe again the salubrious atmosphere of the streets". Knox's school flourished and he took on three assistants, Alexander Miller, Thomas Wharton Jones and William Fergusson. Marriage and personal life Little is known of Knox's wife, Susan Knox, whom