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How did Antonio Benivieni use autopsies to investigate causes of death?
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autopsy
English physicians Charles Scarborough and Edward Arris performing an autopsy in 1651 (watercolour painted in 1818 by G.P. Harding from an original work in the Barber Surgeons' Hall, London).
Antonio Benivieni, a 15th-century Florentine physician, was a pioneer in the use of autopsies to investigate the causes of death. He performed 15 autopsies with the explicit goal of determining why a patient had died.
A significant aspect of his approach was his effort to correlate his anatomical findings from these examinations with the symptoms the patients had exhibited while they were alive. By linking these postmortem observations to the clinical history of the deceased, Benivieni helped advance the practice of medicine toward a more evidence-based understanding of disease processes.1