Anthropodermic bibliopegy performed, or collected by medical doctors, who have access to cadavers, sometimes those of executed criminals, such as the case of John Horwood in 1821 and the Red Barn Murder in 1828. Another tradition, with less supporting evidence, is that books of erotica or the occult have been bound in human skin. The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh preserves a notebook bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke after his execution and subsequent public dissection by Professor Alexander Monro in 1829. What Lawrence Thompson called "the most famous of all anthropodermic bindings" is exhibited at the Boston
Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom of Physicians the right to anatomise four felons annually in 1564. Several major hospitals and teaching centres were established in Britain during the 18th century, but with only a very few corpses legally available for dissection, these institutions suffered from severe shortages. Some local authorities had already attempted to alleviate the problem, with limited success; in 1694, Edinburgh allowed anatomists to dissect corpses "found dead in the streets, and the bodies of such as die violent deaths ... who shall have nobody to own them". Suicide victims were given over, as were infants who had died while being born and