In the end Knox and Reid quarrelled over a scientific matter. Knox never recovered from the effect of the Burke and Hare incident; in spite of the favourable report of an influential committee appointed to inquire into his share in the proceedings, and his own explicit statements, the public never acquitted him of at least a wilful shutting of his eyes to much that ought to have aroused his suspicions. His crowded class-room gradually became empty during the next few years, and the once brilliant, talented, and determined man became demoralised and left Edinburgh. Christison says that Knox finally died almost destitute in London, and that one of his last occupations was that of showman to a party of travelling Ojibbeway Indians. However the strong personality and attractive lecturing of Knox may have influenced him, it is undoubted that to the personal influence of MacArthur and Reid, acting upon his constant hunger to know nature and truth, stimulated as it was by what he saw of anatomy and physiology, we owe the fact that Simpson decided to enter the medical profession. Although the number of medical students in Edinburgh University reached one of its highest points during the years that Simpson was a student, it is remarkable that with one, or perhaps two, exceptions, the University professors were men of no marked eminence in their various subjects. On the other hand, the extra-mural teachers included men of such wide reputation as Knox, Lizars, and Liston. Syme, who reached the height of his fame as a surgeon about the same time that Simpson became renowned, had just resigned the teaching of anatomy to take up surgery; shut out at first from the wards of the Royal Infirmary by jealous colleagues, he was boldly establishing for himself the little Minto House Hospital, which became the successful nursery of his own unsurpassed system of clinical teaching, and remains in the recollection to this day as the principal scene of Dr. John Brown's pathetic story, "Rab and his Friends." It was chiefly these extra-academical teachers who at that time made the medical school famous, and were raising for it a reputation in surgery such as it had acquired in physic in the days of Cullen. In certain subjects the students would, according to the regulations for the degree, take out their tickets of attendance on the professor's course of lectures, but would put in only a sufficient number of appearances to entitle them to the necessary certificates; the real study of the subject being made under the more accomplished teacher outside the University walls.