ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores an early episode in the long history of how physicians gained control over death. The 1706 investigation into the causes of the spate of sudden deaths that terrorised Rome, together with Lancisis treatise On Sudden Death, laid the first conceptual, ideological and technical foundations of the medicalisation of death that we still experience in our times. The book describes the events occurred in early eighteenth-century papal Rome, the centre of a troubled Catholicism in search of reform. It shows how medicine broke free from the Hippocratic tradition, which regarded death as the obvious limit of the physician's capacity. The book portrays how an early modern society coped with the most frightening of events and how the boundaries between medicine and religion were redrawn, when death ceased to be regarded as beyond the realm of scientific investigation.
