Pre- and Post-Mortem Inquiries: Assessing Poisoning in the Law Courts of Sixteenth-Century Rome

Résumé En

This essay focuses on a poisoning trial held in Rome in 1562 following the sudden death of Giovanni Domenico Bianchini. The main defendant in the case was the wife of the gentleman Pantasilea and during the course of the proceedings numerous witnesses and experts filed before the Tribunale del Governatore. These included various medical practitioners. Two academic surgeons – Lazzaro Colombo and Scipione de’ Rossi- were entrusted with the task of performing an autopsy on the cadaver. The physician Vincenzo Perini who had seen the victim when the first excruciating pains appeared was called in to testify about the symptoms he had observed during his examination. Finally, the celebrated doctor Bartolomeo Eustachi was asked to interpret the set of medical signs that had emerged during the trial.The core of the paper will be devoted to the dissection of the victim’s cadaver. However, this will be considered in relation to the accumulated testimony and medical examinations contained in the dossier of the trial with the aim of shedding light on the particular relationship between living body and dead body that took shape during the course of the criminal proceedings.Through a detailed examination of the trial’s sources, the contribution will first undertake to reconstruct concretely the circumstances of autoptic investigation with reference to the places, players and actual methods of dissection while comparing these to similar practices in other contexts (university anatomy lessons, hospital dissections, etc.). Next the paper will look at the knowledge produced by the autopsy and the particular type of relationship between auctoritas and experientia that it assumed and how this was interpreted, communicated and further elaborated during the different phases of the trial, also in relation to other testimony that was gathered. Finally, the paper will look at how the performance of an autopsy for the purpose of investigating a presumed poisoning – and, hence, carried out on a “pathological body”, but one that had become so after ingesting an external substance – was related more generally to other aspects of the contemporary debate on the notion of “pathological”.