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
1788 Doctors' riot year later, in January 1789, a statute was finally put into law in order to codify the proper treatment of corpses, with harsh punishments imposed for those who violated it. Anyone who broke the law would stand on the pillory or be publicly whipped, fined, or imprisoned. The statute also permitted the bodies of executed criminals to be used in dissection, “in order that science [might not] be injured by preventing the dissection of proper subjects”. “Resurrection men”, professionals who used stealth and discretion, were recruited to replace the students and went on to control the supply of cadavers for