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
Murder for body parts does not diminish its status as a practice that has resulted in legal trials and convictions of perpetrators. The perpetrators are usually men, although women have been convicted as well, most notably in Swaziland when Phillippa Mdluli was hanged in 1983 for commissioning a medicine murder. Perpetrators vary widely in age and social status. An individual or group of individuals commissions a traditional healer or "inyanga / nanga " (a herbalist skilled in traditional medicine) to assist them by concocting medicine (or muti). The medicine supposedly strengthens the 'personality' or personal force of the person who commissions the medicine. This