Dr. Knox

Knox presents as a worn military coroner, a onetime surgeon whose years spent cutting into the dead rather than tending the living show in his weary, brusque manner and in the cluttered squalor of his bachelor's home.

Behind a curt, grumbling exterior, Knox carries a heavy remorse. Ordered to serve in Ishval as a pathologist who studied burns on living Ishvalan captives, he came to see himself as a doctor who took lives instead of saving them, and afterward he confined himself to forensics, feeling he had forfeited any right to treat the living. The war left him with lasting trauma, nightmares, sleeplessness, and flashbacks so severe that he once attacked his own wife in his sleep, mistaking her for an enemy, an incident that ended his marriage. For all his gruffness, a buried decency survives in him and resurfaces the moment he is offered a chance to make amends.

Knox enters the story after Roy Mustang appears to have burned Maria Ross to death. Though the charred corpse plainly does not match a woman killed that way, Knox certifies it as hers using dental records, shielding his old Ishval comrade. When Mustang needs Lan Fan's mangled arm treated, Knox operates despite his rusty bedside skills, and it is Knox who lets slip that Selim Bradley is an adopted child and that Bradley himself has fathered no offspring, deepening suspicion that the Führer is a homunculus. After Gluttony breaks loose, Knox drives Mustang, Lan Fan, and Hawkeye clear and shelters the injured in his home.

His household grows more crowded when Alphonse brings the wounded May Chang to him, forcing Knox to referee between May and Lan Fan, members of rival Xing clans who would otherwise come to blows. As Al helps tidy the place, Knox unburdens himself about Ishval. His fortunes turn when his estranged ex-wife and son visit and the young man announces he is studying medicine to save lives alongside his father; furious at first, Knox relents, invites them in, and takes a tearful step toward mending his broken life. He appears one last time in the finale, guiding Dr. Marcoh to the blinded Mustang.