La statue de Giordano Bruno dressée sur le Campo de Fiori, le procès de Galilée dont la mémoire est toujours présente à travers le théâtre ou les débats de l’Académie pontificale des sciences disent ...assez combien le destin de la Rome des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles a été négativement associé à celui de la science moderne et de son avènement conflictuel. Les études réunies dans ce volume, résultat d’un programme collectif de recherche sur la genèse de la culture scientifique européenne, entendent apporter une nouvelle contribution non seulement au dossier de la révolution scientifique en milieu catholique, mais plus largement à celui des relations que chaque société entretient avec les acteurs et la production du savoir et de la science. La focale mise sur Rome, comme milieu social spécifique, comme capitale de la catholicité et comme centre d’une monarchie pontificale en profond renouvellement entre XVIe et XVIIIe siècle, permet de discuter les paradigmes classiques d’une historiographie qui a trop hâtivement relégué le milieu romain à la marge de toute forme d’innovation savante. Il s’agit aussi d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de réflexions et de nouveaux chantiers sur les diverses configurations socio-intellectuelles au sein desquelles le travail savant a continué à faire de Rome un centre actif de travail et de production de savoirs.
Going beyond Enlightenment critiques ofancien régimejustice, historians are now exploring its distinctive procedures; courtrooms have become a fundamental site for recapturing early modern political ...and social dynamics. Historians of science and medicine can benefit too. Serving as expert witnesses was prominent among the activities of medical practitioners; and, especially in Continental Europe, natural and medical knowledge was routinely presented and contested in tribunals. This essay aims to promote further research on the resulting wealth of manuscript and printed sources that give access to crucial social and epistemological issues. The voices of different actors, preserved in trial records, can extend our histories of the body. The relations among medical practitioners, and with the legal authorities, provide a hitherto neglected context within which to understand contemporary epistemological debates, from claims and challenges to expertise to the definition and production of evidence, including the status of signs, personal observation, and tests.
Studying early modern medico-legal testimonies can enrich our understanding of witnessing, the focus of much research in the history of science. Expert testimonies were well established in the Roman ...Canon law, but the sphere of competence of expert witnesses—one of the grounds on which seventeenth-century physicians claimed social and intellectual authority—troubled contemporary jurists. By reconstructing these debates in Counter Reformation Rome, and by placing in them the testimonies given by Paolo Zacchia, one of the founding fathers of legal medicine, this article discusses the epistemological and social issues surrounding the definition of expertise about the body in court. It shows how a high-ranking expert witness would define his competence versus the legal authority on the one hand, and versus lay and lower-status expert witnesses on the other. But it also explores the interactions between specific legal constraints, for example about eye witnessing, and the ways in which different kinds of witnesses would use the body as a source of evidence for testimony. While engaging with medico-legal issues including the ambiguous signs of childbirth and the (in)visibility of pain, the article examines their meanings within Counter Reformation social controversies, including control over sexuality, imposition of discipline and the social status of physicians.
In seventeenth-century Rome a popular financial scheme made it crucial to establish if pregnancy or childbirth had caused a woman's death. Courts sought medical advice, and this prompted physicians ...to reconsider the issues. Their disagreements provide historians with evidence from which to reassess received views of early modern doctors' involvement with birthing bodies. Among others, Paolo Zacchia intervened, revealing discord between physicians and jurists on how to establish the causes of death. One of his testimonies in a case shows more broadly how legal, medical, and lay views on pregnancy and childbirth intersected in courts of law. In Roman tribunals the very distinction between healthy and preternatural births was contentious, and the parties had an interest in having births either proved healthy in medical terms or construed as pathological. The controversies, the author argues, challenge historical expectations about early modern perceptions, including the boundaries between female and male, private and public, healthy and pathological.
Following the stellar career of papal physician Giulio Mancini, the article brings into focus learned doctors' uses of, and relationships with, manuscripts. Manuscripts were the main outcome of their ...practice - as letters of consultation to patients and colleagues, as consilia of various kinds, including for use in courts of law, and also in the form of key professional tools such as casebooks. Clues found in Mancini's rich paper-trail shed light on material aspects of his professional writing and on the role that circulating knowledge in manuscript had in creating and sustaining medical networks. The article also argues that even in a domain as shaped by print as early modern medicine, physicians' use of this medium should not be taken for granted; especially in courtly settings, scribal, as opposed to print, publishing provided them with an effective means of building the social relationships on which their careers depended.
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of ...the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians' different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians' identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research.
PDF
