Dark Deaths

Death does not always arrive as placidly and decently as we would like. Both for ordinary people and for those elected who have led a relevant life: warriors, politicians, dictators, scientists, artists, musicians. Death is always an event worthy of attention. And when we look at it closely, we sometimes find strange, suspicious circumstances, without clear and definite explanations, not concordant or anomalous, in two words, dark deaths. And of those dark deaths is full the hazardous history of medicine that is nothing more than the history of humanity.The author does not attempt a purely paleopathographic study, that relatively new forensic specialty that investigates in situ, and with advanced technology, bones, mummies and tombs in order to diagnose, as would be done in an ultramodern hospital, the most recondite diseases and causes of death of the deceased that lie under the microscopes and magnetic resonance devices. Their expectations are much more modest, but they are fed by the same enthusiasm to go a little further in the diagnosis, the medical key par excellence, and thus offer a new vision of certain terminal events, to deepen and investigate beyond death, to find a detail or a possible explanation that has been overlooked previously or that may tempt a budding researcher to a more detailed historical investigation.