Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Hardcover, New Ed)
Loot Price: R4,416
Discovery Miles 44 160
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Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Hardcover, New Ed)
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Total price: R4,436
Discovery Miles: 44 360
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In 1705-1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession and two
years after a devastating earthquake, an 'epidemic' of mysterious
sudden deaths terrorized Rome. In early modern society, a sudden
death was perceived as a mala mors because it threatened the
victim's salvation by hindering repentance and last confession.
Special masses were celebrated to implore God's clemency and Pope
Clement XI ordered his personal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi,
to perform a series of dissections in the university anatomical
theatre in order to discover the 'true causes' of the deadly
events. It was the first investigation of this kind ever to take
place for a condition which was not contagious. The book that
Lancisi published on this topic, De subitaneis mortibus ('On Sudden
Deaths', 1707), is one of the earliest modern scientific
investigations of death; it was not only an accomplished example of
mechanical philosophy as applied to the life sciences in
eighteenth-century Europe, but also heralded a new pathological
anatomy (traditionally associated with Giambattista Morgagni).
Moreover, Lancisi's tract and the whole affair of the sudden deaths
in Rome marked a significant break in the traditional attitude
towards dying, introducing a more active approach that would later
develop into the practice of resuscitation medicine. Sudden Death
explores how a new scientific interpretation of death and a new
attitude towards dying first came into being, breaking free from
the Hippocratic tradition, which regarded death as the obvious
limit of physician's capacity, and leading the way to a belief in
the 'conquest of death' by medicine which remains in force to this
day.
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