Quaestiones medico-legales. in quibus eae materiae medicae, quae ad legales facultates videntur pertinere, proponuntur, pertractantur, resolvuntur ..

Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1651. THIRD EDITION. Full contemporary vellum yapp edges; wormhole trailing through first 16 leaves. Overall an excellent copy with an early ownership inscription on the title. Third edition, first printed in 1621. Divided into three sections , the first contains decisions of the Rota Romana during the author’s time serving as the official advisor. The Rota Romana is the highest judicial appellate tribunal of the Catholic Church. The other two sections cover questions of human physiology. He examines situations such as the animation of the fetus and the formation of hermaphrodites. It also includes a discussion of impotence, simulated or factitious diseases and hypochondria, teratology, and the jurisprudence of insanity among other topics. Zacchias collected a great deal of material related to “unnatural” deaths caused by murder, poisoning, suicide, abortion, witchcraft and insanity which are discussed here.

Zacchias (1584-1659) was an Italian physician, personal physician to Popes Innocent X and Alexander VII, teacher of forensic medicine, medico-legal jurist, philosopher, and poet. The founding father of modern legal/forensic medicine, his Quaestiones medico-legales was translated into several other languages and was used by medical practitioners into the eighteenth century. It marked the beginning of the study of legal medicine as a separate field of interest.

Rare; OCLC locates no copies of this edition or earlier editions in America; Nemec, International Bibliography of the History of Legal Medicine, 1594 (“cornerstone of legal medicine”)’.