The Forensic Tradition in Milan’s Civic Mortality Registers

From the late fourteenth to seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content character from most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, London Bills Mortality, authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This practice illustrates invention secular investigation systems an era recurring plague. Milan’s uniquely detailed civic registers, 1452 1525, display underlying forensic such record-keeping, public health context which records have long been understood. Diagnosing cause manner death, fundamental objective medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for entirety era. How could one be certain a was caused particular affliction? Our practices are now far more sophisticated, but current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle measure record human costs crisis mortality.