Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome

In 1705-1706, an ’epidemic’ of mysterious deaths terrorized Rome. Pope Clement XI’s physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, was ordered to perform a series of dissections to discover the cause of the epidemic, which hindered confession, thus threatening the victim’s salvation. The book that Lancisi subsequently published, De subitaneis mortibus (’On Sudden Deaths’, 1707), is one of the earliest modern scientific investigations of death. Sudden Death explores how a new scientific interpretation of death first came into being, and led the way to a belief in the 'conquest of death' by medicine which remains to this day.