Medical Expertise, Bodies, and the Law in Early Modern Courts

Going beyond Enlightenment critiques of ancien régime justice, historians are now exploring its distinctive procedures; courtrooms have become a fundamental site for recapturing early modern political and social dynamics. Historians of science and medicine can benefit too. Serving as expert witnesses was prominent among the activities of medical practitioners; and, especially in Continental Europe, natural and medical knowledge was routinely presented and contested in tribunals. This essay aims to promote further research on the resulting wealth of manuscript and printed sources that give access to crucial social and epistemological issues. The voices of different actors, preserved in trial records, can extend our histories of the body. The relations among medical practitioners, and with the legal authorities, provide a hitherto neglected context within which to understand contemporary epistemological debates, from claims and challenges to expertise to the definition and production of evidence, including the status of signs, personal observation, and tests. O UR LANDSCAPE OF EARLY MODERN NATURAL KNOWLEDGE has recently been transformed. Bringing travelers, apothecaries, merchants, missionaries, and artisans into the picture allows historians to make sense of a wider range of specific practices and sites where such knowledge was produced. As a result, we can also look afresh at the contribution of the two traditional learned professions of medicine and the law. Medicine has always had a place in accounts of early modern natural knowledge, but recent work has convincingly shown how physicians’ practices, including collecting and discussing cases, contributed to broader epistemological debates.1 Given the competition from other medical practitioners, studies of early modern learned physicians are particularly well placed to help make sense of the building and contesting of intellectual and social authority. * Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom. This research was funded by Wellcome Trust grant no. 70619. For valuable comments and suggestions, I am very grateful to Nick Hopwood and Nick Jardine. 1 Gianna Pomata, “Praxis Historialis: The Uses of Historia in Early Modern Medicine,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 105–146. On our wider view of early modern knowledge see, e.g., Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002). 316 FOCUS—ISIS, 98 : 2 (2007) By contrast, jurists have only recently entered the world of historians of science, although legal sources and examples were the basis of students’ general dialectical training, as legalistic ways of arguing in astronomical disputes and natural historical compilations show. Francis Bacon’s reformed natural philosophy has now been linked to his legal competence, and the fact-finding techniques used in the legal arena have been presented as one root of experimental philosophers’ key notion of fact.2 Jurists were not alone, however; unique features of the ius commune—the mixture of Roman law and canon law followed in Continental European tribunals, as opposed to the common-law tradition that was dominant in the English-speaking world—meant that practitioners with specific expertise shared in establishing facts. Judges would routinely resort to expert witnesses, such as surveyors, when they lacked the competence to understand the details of a case. Since the Middle Ages, medical practitioners were much the most active expert witnesses, and on the Continent between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a special discipline of legal medicine was created. While Anglophone historians of science have brilliantly used the etiquette of princely courts to make sense of specific features of early modern natural investigations, the rules of another kind of court were every bit as important in determining which natural phenomena would be explored, how, and by whom.3 Since encounters between medical and legal experts in Continental courtrooms focused on bodily issues, medicolegal sources can enrich the history of the body. I wish more specifically to show how they might throw light on two questions now at the center of research on early modern medicine and science. On the one hand, these materials offer a new perspective on the definition of, and negotiations surrounding, experts’ authority; on the other, they provide insights into a kind of knowledge that did not meet the highest Aristotelian standards of universality and necessity but nevertheless played the dominant role in many fields. A distinct discipline at the intersection between medicine and the law, legal medicine centered on semiology, the complex art of reading signs. One of the most important and difficult-to-learn doctrines, allegedly distinguishing the educated physician from the crowd of unlearned practitioners, semiology was also one of the most conjectural parts of medicine: bodily signs were ambiguous and could be the effects of very different causes. We now have comprehensive accounts of the logic on which semiology rested and of practical semiology at the bedside;4 studying medicolegal practice allows us to see these skills used more expansively in one of the most important functions of ancien régime societies: the administration of justice. I begin, though, with a brief survey of the historiography of legal medicine and how recent changes have started to unlock its potential for a broader history of early modern