Strong feelings, weak medicine

This double microhistory from Rome, 1582, recounts the deaths of two noble brothers. The first involved a horse, a mask, and a concealed pistol. Disguised as the commedia clown Zanni, Fulvio Alberini schemed to shoot a foe for honour’s sake; his attempt ended in a half-grisly, half-comic failure that prompted his beheading. The second Alberini death started with a humble footstool, emblem of a begrudged paternal inheritance. When Giovanni Battista demanded the stool, his brother Paolo stabbed him, then fled Rome. One attending surgeon, under family pressure, reported the wound as sine periculo mortis . Thanks to this lie, as the patient’s condition worsened, the medics’ fear of the law rose. The trial lays bare the complex dialogues among the doctors, Giovanni Battista’s failing body, and the apparatus of justice.