Questioning medicine in seventeenth-century Rome: the consultations of Paolo Zacchia.

This paper surveys the life and contributions of Paolo Zacchia (1584-1659) before analyzing 85 Latin consilia (or consultations) in his Quaestiones medico-legales. Topics include death, paternity, sexuality, disease, and miracles. Because the consilia cite the rest of his treatise, they open the entire work, elucidating applications of theory. This research relied on the construction of a database, built on subject, date, and citations. The paper closes with historiographic suggestions for why this prominent author has been ignored in North America.