2018_Kinzelbach_Dissecting_Pain_Intro_In_Pathology_Practice.pdf
Annemarie Kinzelbach2018, Dissecting Pain Patients, Families and Medical Expertise in Early Modern Germany
My analysis of wide-ranging sources from late sixteenth- to early eighteenth-century imperial cities reveals that families and individuals with a diverse social background routinely requested post-mortems. Their active role was omitted in accounts of the dissections by physicians writing for their peers; and because historians have usually based their interpretation on this kind of source, families’ involvement has been overlooked. I have shown that physicians applied different criteria of selection to the notes they took in their practice when they published their work and how these criteria depended on their intended audience. Once we broaden our sources, a different picture emerges and my work calls for a revision of the received view that in northern European countries people tended to be hostile to dissection. Administrative and legal records, manuscript notes of daily medical practice and observations of ordinary town surgeons or town physicians provide evidence for the long history of the initiative taken by families and individuals. The attitude that Katharine Park has found among noble families and members of the church in medieval Italy was not unique or linked to a Catholic approach to death. In early modern Lutheran and mixed-confessional urban republics even poorer members of society and those who embraced Pietism requested post-mortems. Autopsies had become a means to achieving wide-ranging goals. Families could draw on the findings of a post-mortem to demand compensation, identify malpractice and express their concern for the broader welfare of their community. They also wanted to gain insight into what pathological changes had caused the suffering of a loved one and combined such aim with the celebration of God’s creation. For many men and women knowledge of the causes helped to come to terms with suffering. In Lutheran and mixed-confessional communities the overlap between knowledge and religion went further than in the Italian context. While there dissections may reveal sanctity, here they were also a means to exposing the devil’s action and how black magic may have caused harm. Moreover, for families and individuals who had embraced Pietism, autopsies could be an integral part of the funeral ceremony and of the all-important act of commemorating the dead.