Monro, ALEXANDER, founder of the medical school of Edinburgh, styled primus to distinguish him from his son and successor, was born in London, September 8, 1697. His grandfather, Sir Alexander Monro, a colonel in the army of Charles II. at the battle of Worcester in 1651, was afterwards an advocate at the Scottish bar. Alexander studied at London under Hawksbee, Whiston, and Cheselden, at Paris under Bouquet, and at Leyden under Boerhaave, and after 1719 lectured at Edinburgh on anatomy and surgery. His lectures, with those of Alston on botany, led to the founding of the medical school, when Monro was appointed professor of Anatomy in 1721. He was received into the university in 1725. For forty years he lectured regularly on anatomy and surgery from October to May, students coming from all parts of Britain to hear him. Of the establishment of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh he was one of the two principal promoters, and he there delivered clinical lectures. In 1759 he resigned the anatomical chair to his youngest son, Dr Alexander Monro, but continued his clinical lectures at the Infirmary. His principal works are Osteology (1726), Essay on Comparative Anatomy (1744), Observations Anatomical and Physiological (1758), and an Account of the Success of Inoculation of Smallpox in Scotland (1765). He died July 10, 1767. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and of various foreign societies. A collected edition of his works, with Life, was issued by his son (1781).
ALEXANDER MONRO, secundus (1733-1817), youngest son of the preceding, studied at Edinburgh, Berlin, and Leyden, and succeeded his father in the chair of Anatomy, and as secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He published works on the nervous system (1783), on the physiology of fishes (1785), and on the brain, the eye, and the ear (1797).—He again was succeeded by his son, ALEXANDER MONRO, tertius (1773-1859), who wrote on hernia, and on the stomach, and an Anatomy of the Human Body (4 vols. 1813).