Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome - 9781472418739

Taylor & Francis

In 1705-1706, an \u2019epidemic\u2019 of mysterious deaths terrorized Rome. Pope Clement XI\u2019s physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, was ordered to perform a series of dissections to discover the cause of the epidemic, which hindered confession, thus threatening the victim\u2019s salvation. The book that Lancisi subsequently published, De subitaneis mortibus (\u2019On Sudden Deaths\u2019, 1707), is one of the earliest modern scientific investigations of death. Sudden Death explores how a new scientific interpretation of death first came into being, and led the way to a belief in the 'conquest of death' by medicine which remains to this day. > In 1705-1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession and two years after a devastating earthquake, an \u2019epidemic\u2019 of mysterious sudden deaths terrorized Rome. In early modern society, a sudden death was perceived as a mala mors because it threatened the victim\u2019s salvation by hindering repentance and last confession. Special m.