"CSI: Italian Renaissance" by Tom Mueller, Smithsonian (July-August 2013) ssg: Some cases are a lot colder than others. Some critics believe pursuit of a solution amounts to grave-robbing. I see it as a commitment to justice. Pisa, Italy. Gino Fornaciari is no ordinary medical examiner; his bodies represent cold cases that are centuries, sometimes millennia, old. As head of a team of archaeologists, physical anthropologists, historians of medicine and additional specialists at the University of Pisa, he is a pioneer in the burgeoning field of paleopathology, the use of state-of-the-art medical technology and forensic techniques to investigate the lives and deaths of illustrious figures of the past. Over the past half-century, using tools of forensics and medical science as well as clues from anthropology, history and art, he and his colleagues have become detectives of the distant past, exhuming remains throughout Italy to scrutinize the lives and deaths of kings, paupers, saints, warriors and castrati opera stars. Fornaciari himself has examined entire noble populations, including the Medici of Florence and the royal Aragonese dynasty of Naples, whose corpses have been, in effect, archives containing unique clues to the fabric of everyday life in the Renaissance. Such work is not without its critics, who brand scholars such as Fornaciari as little more than grave-robbers, rejecting their efforts as a pointless, even prurient, disturbance of the dead’s eternal rest. Yet paleo-sleuthing has demonstrated its value for the study of the past and future. Click on the article title below to read the complete text at Smithsonian. #news #history #culture #science #scienceeveryday #sciencesunday #anthropology #archaeology #technology #medicine #paleopathology #italy #medicalexamination #forensics #coldcase #paleosleuthing #opinion #slideshow #sharongaughan
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 14:32:25 +0000
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