ABSTRACT

Focusing on an alleged poisoning case in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, this chapter investigates the uses of post-mortems in the administration of early modern justice. It examines how medical practitioners contributed to the case as expert witnesses, in particular how they discussed the findings of the autopsy which, ordered by the legal authority, was performed by prominent surgeons. Poisoning posed specific challenges and the post-mortem was expected to provide important evidence and influenced considerably the legal proceedings. Locating the medical witnesses within Rome’s lively anatomical and medical world, the chapter discusses their different roles, expertise and interactions in the legal arena. It highlights how the most prestigious of them, eminent anatomist Bartolomeo Eustachi, correlated the signs found in the cadaver to the account of the symptoms produced by the attending physician. Expert witnessing was an intellectual stimulus and the chapter shows the productive, and so far unexplored, interactions between Renaissance anatomy, autopsies and bedside medicine.</abstract>