Alexander Monro Secundus

Alexander Monro of Craiglockhart and Cockburn FRSE FRCPE (22 May 1733 – 2 October 1817) was a Scottish anatomist, physician and medical educator.

He is known for the Monro–Kellie doctrine on intracranial pressure, a hypothesis developed by Monro and his former pupil George Kellie, who worked as a surgeon in the port of Leith.

[1] He was sent with his brothers to Mr Mundell's school, where he learned the rudiments of Latin and Greek, and showed early evidences of great ability.

Monro's father decided to make him his successor and sent him to the University of Edinburgh when he was 12 years old, to attend the ordinary course of philosophy before beginning his professional training.

The results were satisfactory and so he presented a petition to the Town Council at the close of the session asking them to appoint his son formally as his successor.

He next visited Paris and on 17 September 1757 entered Leyden University where he formed a friendship with two famous anatomists, Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and Petrus Camper.

Alexander spent some time in Edinburgh during early 1757 in order to fill the place of his father, who was confined to the house by illness.

William Hunter disputed this vigorously before they both realized Francis Glisson had published on the topic a century before, to insufficient general notice.

Henry Dundas, and it is in consequence of the description in this book of the communication between the lateral ventricles of the brain that his name is known to every student of medicine at the present day.

It was this morbid condition that drew Monro's attention to the foramen, and he first described it in a paper read before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1764, but gives a fuller account in this work on the nervous system.

[1] A further important observation in this paper was that the healthy cranial cavity is rigid and of constant volume and, he argued, that since the brain "is nearly incompressible, the quantity of blood within the head must remain the same."

[1] In 1793, he published Experiments on the Nervous System with Opium and Metalline Substances, to Determine the Nature and Effects of Animal Electricity.