Alexander Monro (tertius) Charles found the sight of surgery so upsetting that he stopped trying and turned his attention to natural history. During Monro's tenure as Professor of Anatomy, Edinburgh was rocked by scandal due to the notorious "Burke and Hare murders" in which healthy individuals were intentionally killed in order to supply cadavers for dissection by anatomy lecturers and their students. One of the murderers, William Burke, was hanged on 28 January 1829, after which he was famously dissected at the Edinburgh Medical College by Monro himself. In a letter, Monro dipped his quill pen into Burke's blood and wrote, "This is
Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom extraction of corpses more difficult. Body snatchers were not the only people to come under attack; in the public's view, the 1752 Act made anatomists agents of the law, enforcers of the death penalty. Riots at execution sites, from where anatomists collected legal corpses, were commonplace. Matters came to a head following the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. Parliament responded by setting up the 1828 Select Committee on anatomy, whose report emphasised the importance of anatomical science and recommended that the bodies of paupers be given over for dissection. In response to the discovery in 1831 of a gang