Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome

Maria Pia Donato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472418739
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317048510
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: 19th Century History

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.

Part I Sudden Death and the Physician’s Role in Society

Chapter 1 Fears

DOI: 10.4324/9781315611273-2

Prologue: A Mysterious Chain of ‘Accidents’

On Thursday 17 December 1705, the learned antiquarian Francesco Valesio noted in his diary the strange case of a ‘certain greengrocer in Piazza Navona who was stricken by apoplexy while walking out of a tavern and fell immediately dead’.¹

¹ Valesio, vol. 3, p. 513.

Similar cases had been reported since the previous spring.² Then, over the summer and the autumn, there had been reports of ‘sudden deaths and apoplectic accidents and most serious ailments’.³ The first isolated episodes took an alarming turn when, on 9 January 1706, two more victims of sudden death where discovered, an innkeeper and a greengrocer near the Chiesa dell’Anima, and only three days later ‘a poor woman who died unexpectedly in her bed was found in the S. Urbano alley’.⁴ The following week another chronicler noted that ‘many people died of apoplexy’.⁵

² Ibid., vol. 3, p. 335, on the death of a bookkeeper ‘struck by an apoplectic accident’; p. 375, on the death of a fiscal of the Senatorial tribunal; p. 414, on two other inexplicable deaths. News on similar accidents had already been reported in Diario di Clemente XI, November 1703, fols 181v–182r. ³ Diario di Clemente XI, fol. 215, 7 October 1705, reports the case of a ‘curialist [who] died of an apoplectic accident while he was presenting a case’. Valesio, vol. 3, p. 388, 16 May 1705, notes that ‘a certain greengrocer died suddenly while he was drinking merrily at the Leoncino inn, and a woman in Monti passed to the other life in a similar way; and many have been struck with apoplectic accidents this week’. ⁴ Valesio, vol. 3, p. 535. ⁵ Diario di Clemente XI, fol. 223.

Sudden death was dreaded by any Christian. It was considered as shameful and despicable as violent death.⁶ An invocation to ward it off could be found in any prayer book, and litanies to the saints pleaded for protection a subitanea et improvisa morte.⁷ Especially daunting since it threatened the salvation of the soul, sudden death was also dangerous for the corpse, as it might be withheld from consecrated land, as happened to an unfortunate prostitute who died ‘after dining merrily … and since she passed away without repenting, her corpse was buried outside the city walls’.⁸

⁶ P. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver, London, 1981, pp. 12–13. ⁷ Rituale Romanum Pauli V P.M. iussu editum, Rome, 1615, p. 70. ⁸ Valesio, vol. 3, p. 566. As stated in the Rituale romanum, jews, infidels, heretics, schismatics, the excommunicated and manifest sinners (including those who committed suicide, although it was difficult to ascertain their fault, especially for persons drowned in rivers) were excluded from consecrated burial. On the burial area outside the city walls at Porta Flaminia, also called Muro Malo, see A. Menniti Ippolito, ‘Il “vecchio recinto” del Testaccio: agli inizi della sepoltura degli acattolici in Roma’, in The Protestant Cemetery in Rome: The ‘Parte Antica’, ed. A. Menniti Ippolito and P. Vian, Rome, 1989, pp. 15–90. On the threat of sudden death to convert prostitutes, see T. Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 47–50.

The chain of deaths continued incessantly. Valesio noted in his diary 18 cases in the period from January to March 1706: a poor woman ‘walking out of the Traspontina Church’ and a ‘wretched, crippled beggar’, and then peasants, craftsmen, ‘Messina the Jesuit priest’, servants and prelates. The death of the young footman of the Marquis Spada, who passed away ‘sitting by the fire in the home of a prostitute’,⁹ seemed to embody the exempla that for centuries had admonished Christians to avoid all opportunities for sin where the end might catch them by surprise: dances, games and houses of ill repute. Fear quickly spread throughout Rome. What was happening? The horrific spectacle of the contorted bodies in the city streets turned these events into a public calamity. The demise of a servant of Cardinal Sacripanti who, ‘while serving his master at the door of the carriage on his return to St. Peter’s … fell suddenly dead, to the utter dismay of the cardinal who ordered that the carriage be stopped immediately and assistance given to bring him back to life, all in vain’, caused enough sensation to be reported in the avvisi dispatched to all parts of Italy from the papal city.¹⁰

⁹ Valesio, vol. 3, pp. 542–3, 549. ¹⁰ Ms BNR, Vittorio Emanuele 790, fol. 115, 23 January 1706: ‘several apoplectic accidents causing the sudden death of several persons befell on Sunday, among whom the footman to Cardinal Sacripanti while he was attending to the carriage of His Eminence, who stepped out of the carriage to help him, but too late since he was dead’. Further accounts of apoplectic accidents in Rome are reported in the Gazzetta di Bologna, 9 March and 12 April 1706.

People had been living in fear for years. The seventeenth century had ended in a difficult and uncertain situation for the temporal and spiritual power of the papacy, beset by famine, adverse weather conditions and poverty, against a backdrop of war and pestilence. With the new century, a succession of calamities struck with such violence and was accompanied by signs so sinister as to herald even more desolation.

The War of the Spanish Succession threatened the territorial integrity of the Papal States. The politics of neutrality of the Apostolic See – ‘a dangerous resolution for a weak party’, as the famous scholar and annalist Ludovico Antonio Muratori would say – immediately revealed its weakness. Rome, the centre of diplomacy of the Catholic world, turned into the theatre of an unprecedented struggle. Fights, scuffles and brawls involving the opposing factions were frequent, and the fabricated news of an attempt to kidnap the pope’s nephew made the situation so tense as to appear out of control.¹¹ An actual uprising broke out in September 1701, provoked by the intrigues of Cavalier della Macchia, whereby ‘the city looked as if it would rebel altogether, with rising cries and suspicions as it became filled with armed people, nor did anybody know whether they sided with Philip V or with the Emperor’.¹² There was no way of recovering peace. The following year an observer reckoned that ‘if diligence is not applied, there is the danger that some Sicilian vespers may break out’.¹³

¹¹ L. Muratori, Annali d’Italia, vol. 12, Rome, 1744, p. 4; S. Tabacchi, ‘L’impossibile neutralità: il papato, Roma e lo Stato della Chiesa durante la guerra di successione spagnola’, Cheiron, 39–40, 2003, pp. 223–43. ¹² Diario di Clemente XI, fols 57v–70v, quotation fol. 60r. ¹³ G.V. Gravina, Carteggio politico (1690–1712), ed. A. Sarubbi, Naples, 1971, p. 217.

The uncertain fortunes of the war, exacerbated by the House of Savoy abandoning the French side and allying with the Imperialists, took a turn for the worse. After the incursion of the imperial troops in Ferrara in 1701, many episodes of border violation between the French and the Austrian armies ensued. In 1704, the Ficarolo diplomatic incident – when the French occupied the locale previously freed by their adversaries in the name of papal neutrality – made enemies of the imperial troops stationed along the Po River, who then proceeded to a new invasion of Ferrara in 1705.¹⁴ Meanwhile, as a result of the widespread destruction and shortages caused by the warring armies, feeding Rome required an enormous effort on the part of the congregations of the Annona and the Grascia, all to the detriment of the impoverished provinces.¹⁵

¹⁴ L. von Pastor, History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, trans. E. Graf, vol. 33, London, 1957, pp. 24–41. ¹⁵ On the Annona, which supplied grains to the capital and controlled the price of bread, see J. Revel, ‘Le grain de Rome et la crise de l’Annone dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen Âge, Temps modernes, 84, 1972, pp. 201–81; M. Martinat, Le ‘juste marché’: le système annonaire romain aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris, 1994; D. Strangio, Crisi alimentari e politica annonaria a Roma nel Settecento, Rome, 1999. The congregation of the Grascia regulated the commerce of meat and all related products; see H. Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime, Cambridge, 1990, ch. 7.

Nature’s destructive force compounded with troubles created by man. Since the close of the seventeenth century, the weather had showed no sign of relenting. In March 1702 ‘a whirlwind and a sudden hailstorm did great damage’ causing the death of some workers, and it was immediately followed by reports from Naples and Benevento announcing the eruption of Vesuvius (some tremors were felt in Rome too), ‘upon which calamity such strong winds, heavy rainstorms and hailstorms followed that the whole earth may be engulfed’.¹⁶ Due to the heavy rain, the Tiber first burst its banks and dragged away a number of unfortunate bystanders, then overflowed at the end of December and ‘rotten, putrefied corpses [were seen] floating in the Tiber, which caused great fear’.¹⁷

¹⁶ Diario di Clemente XI, fol. 102v, 13 March 1702; Distinta relazione dell’orribile, e spaventoso terremoto, accaduto alli 14 del presente mese di marzo nella città di Benevento, Rome, 1702. ¹⁷ Diario di Clemente XI, fol. 148v; B. Abbati, Epitome metheorologica de’tremoti, con la cronologia di tutti quelli che sono occorsi in Roma dalla creatione del mondo … Con la relatione non solo di questi, ma dell’inondatione del Tebro ancora, Rome, 1703.

Worse was yet to come. In January 1703 Rome was hit by an earthquake, the most unexpected and swiftest of catastrophes, reaping death and destruction in a matter of moments. Tremors were so strong that ‘the bells pealed by themselves … [and] the population was struck with horror, Rome was turned into a maelstrom of shrieks and wails … and everybody threw themselves at the feet of the confessors to pour out their sins’.¹⁸ Many slept in the open for days, and although there was a limited amount of damage, shrieks and prayers ‘made this calamity appear greater than it really was’.¹⁹ At the beginning of February, a more violent earth tremor added to the general fear. Several localities on the Appennines were razed to the ground, hundreds of victims were counted in Norcia, Cascia and Aquila, ‘nor can the havoc and fright that was in Rome be expressed … because over April, May and June more tremors were felt, and everyone was constantly alarmed, fearing the worst’.²⁰ The seismic activity continued into the month of October. Then, an incredibly violent hailstorm caused the death of several animals, as one chronicler claimed.²¹ Nature raged with unabated fury.²²

¹⁸ Diario di Clemente XI, fol. 153. ¹⁹ Ibid., fol. 155; Muratori, Annali, p. 14. ²⁰ Muratori, Annali, p. 15; P. De Carolis, Relazione generale delle rovine e mortalità cagionate dalle scosse del terremoto de 14 gennaro e 2 febbraro 1703 in Norcia, Cascia e loro contadi, Rome, 1703; Relazione de’ danni fatti dall’innondazioni, e terremoto nella città dell’Aquila, ed in altri luoghi circonvicini, Rome, 1703; Veridica, e distinta relazione, overo diario de’ danni fatti dal terremoto dalli 14. Gennaro, sino alli 2. di Febraro 1703, Rome, 1703. ²¹ Diario di Clemente XI, fol. 181r. ²² On the ‘great storm’ of 1703 in Britain, see I. Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, Chicago, 2007, pp. 41–52.

An endless stream of alarming events and omens heralding further disasters exacerbated fear and instilled the suspicion that some divine or diabolical plan was at work. Not long before the earthquake, for instance, a worker was swallowed by a chasm near the Aurelian walls and ‘most horrifyingly, the body was never found’.²³ Pope Clement XI’s inspection of the flooded Tiber was enough to spark the rumour that ‘as soon as he raised his hands, the water began to lower, a truly admirable and prodigious act that can be deemed a miracle of the pontifical authority’.²⁴ Sinister planetary conjunctions led astrologists to predict ill-fated times. In 1703 the whole of Rome was ‘upset by the prediction which was found in a certain book by a self-proclaimed astrologist called Albigini from Florence, a mighty fortunate man in his delusions, as it has been said that he has been always right this year’.²⁵ The price of the book went up from 25 baiocchi to 4 giuli, ‘from which we can gather the ingenuity of the Florentines, who know how to extract great gain from such trifles’, commented Valesio cuttingly.²⁶ A year later, all it took was a fire, and immediately ‘it was said that this was a manifest and clear sign of future calamities’.²⁷ Everyday life was beset by disconcerting scenes heightening tension, as happened in February 1703, when a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Translator’s Notes
• Introduction
• Part I: Sudden Death and the Physician’s Role in Society
• Part II: Sudden Death In Medical Theory And Practice
• Part III: The Lost and the Saved: Sudden Death as an Ethical and Religious Issue
• Index