ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the medical and religious motives that prompted the request of post-mortems in the multi-confessional German imperial cities between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth century. The practice was common in ordinary families. Parents may request a child’s post-mortem to make sense of the child’s suffering and as a warning of a practitioner’s malpractice; dissections may also provide evidence for witchcraft. Showing how post-mortem findings were integrated into lay understandings of disease, the chapter reassesses the received view that autopsies were more acceptable in southern than in northern Europe. Carried out at the presence of relatives and friends, they were, well into the eighteenth century, part of the deathbed rituals, including commemoration of the deceased. Physicians were in attendance too: they shared in their patients’ devotion, but they also belonged to a different regime of knowledge. Turning the notes they took at the dissection table into publications, they often erased families’ initiative, so creating some of the evidence upon which historians have argued for laypeople’s opposition to post-mortems.</abstract>
