ABSTRACT
Chemical experimentation and anatomical investigation were thriving in the second half of the seventeenth century, but their relationship was an uneasy one, especially with regard to understanding pathological processes and death. Because death was thought to interrupt chemical processes, the dead body – the focus of anatomy – seemed to offer little evidence for what had happened in the living body. This created particularly pressing problems whenever post-mortems were considered a valued resource, for example to find out causes of death in legal disputes. The chapter examines the alleged poisoning of a girl in late seventeenth-century Rome and the heated controversy that followed. All the physicians and surgeons involved had an interest in iatrochemistry and, while duly assessing the findings of the post-mortem, they were acutely aware of the specific challenge posed by poisoning. Its ambiguous signs were often invisible at dissection and could be easily confused with natural pathologies. Reconstructing the practitioners’ various responses, the chapter highlights the problems emerging when the standards of visibility associated with recent anatomical investigations intersected with the chemical model that they favoured.</abstract>
