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 leading to an unfortunate situation in which corpses not legally given over for dissection were taken anyway. Documented cases of grave robbery for medical purposes can be found as far back as 1319. The 15th-century polymath Leonardo da Vinci may have secretly dissected around 30 corpses, although their provenance remains unknown. In Britain, the practice appears to have been common early in the 17th century. For example, William Shakespeare's epitaph reads "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones" and