death investigation systems 33of the body of Caesar by the physician Antistius. According to the historian,
the physician examined Caesar after his assassination and opined that only
one of his multiple stab wounds was fatal (though one wonders exactly how
this was determined without an autopsy). Even so, there is no indication as to
how the physician came to be involved in the case of Caesar’s assassination.
It is not known if he was appointed by a magistrate or was merely called into
service by the associates of Caesar. If the former, there is little evidence that
this was a common procedure in Rome, for in the majority of extant writ-
ings about early Roman court cases, there is a notable absence of physician
involvement in death investigations.
In the later Roman period, during the reign of the emperor Justinian
(483–565 A.D.), the laws of Rome were brought together and codified. In this
corpus, often referred to as the Justinian Code, reference is made to physi-
cians as expert witnesses, though again their involvement in the investiga-
tion of death is not directly discussed.^2
Postmortem dissection or autopsy examination was forbidden in most
ancient cultures,^4 but Egypt was something of a remarkable exception due
to the fact that the elaborate funerary preparations of that culture provided
some rudimentary degree of anatomic knowledge.^10 In contrast to Athens
and Rome, early Egypt also appears to have had a formal system of death
investigation that did involve physicians.^11 After the Ptolemeic era, and
during the period of Roman rule in Egypt, there were physicians known
as the demosioi iatroi, or “public physicians.” The extant legal writings of
the time are apparently replete with reports by these individuals, known as
prosphoneseis, regarding their examinations of deceased persons. However,
the actual investigation of death was under the control of an administrative
official known as a strategos. This individual had the authority to dispatch an
assistant, known as a hyperete, and a physician to conduct an examination
of a deceased person and render a report on their findings. It seems that the
relationship of the physician to the hyperete was of a subservient and second-
ary nature, similar to that found in the modern coroner system.
Somewhat ironically, greater progress in the medical investigation of
death may have occurred after the barbarian invasions of Rome in the fifth
century A.D., during the so-called dark ages. These invading tribes intro-
duced the concept of the weregeld, a type of compensation or “blood money”
paid to the victim of a crime, or his family, by the assailant.^2 Implicit in this
payment was that a full evaluation of the extent of injury suffered by the
victim must be undertaken by the courts. Medical experts were utilized to
assist the court in conducting these examinations, as documented in the
legal codes of the era. Later, in Charlemagne’s Capitularies, the requirement
for medical testimony in certain types of traumatic injury was required, but
after the death of Charlemagne it seems that progress in death investigation
languished in the West for some time.^2