Visible signs, invisible processes: Explaining poison in the late seventeenth century

Olimpia Ginnetti was a young noblewoman from an illustrious if declining Roman family and the patient of prestigious physicians including Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694). After an illness of some months, she died in December 1693. Strong suspicions of poisoning were raised in her household and the city. For legal purposes an autopsy was performed in the presence of some of Rome’s best physicians and surgeons. Most of these were involved in the experimental culture fostered by the city’s medical institutions, in particular its hospitals, which provided a stimulating venue for those interested in the exchanges between medical, surgical and anatomical knowledge and practice. Moreover, the physicians and surgeons who took part in the dispute on the cause of Olimpia’s death were all to a certain extent interested in iatrochemistry. Chemical experimentation and anatomical investigation were equally thriving in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, as the activities of celebrated physicians such as Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654-1720) and Giorgio Baglivi (1668-1707) show.