VENTURA F.

A recent Italian legal matter has raised the issue of fetal burial together with respect for maternal privacy and consent. Although the case was closed with a dismissal after the Public Prosecutor's request, it nevertheless raises important reflections on the issues of the moral value of the embryo, the mourning to be recognized to fetal death...

The authors analyse the suicidal phenomenon on the basis of the records collected at the Departmental Section of Legal Medicine, University of Genova, in the five-year period 2006-2010. Several variables (gender, age, mode, location and season of suicide) have been compared not only with previous researches performed in the same area but also...

In many circumstances the forensic pathologist can question whether the dead person experienced sepsis, which caused or contributed to death. The autopsy of a death related to sepsis is a difficult task for the forensic pathologist due to the lack of typical pathological factors as well as clinical and circumstantial information about death....

At the present time, when COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting black people in several countries, the Henrietta Lacks centennial year reminds us of our responsibility to strive for a fairer era of research. The cells of Henrietta Lacks, which were taken without her consent, have been reproduced billions of times for medical purposes. The...

AIM: We report a particular case study of the unexpected death of a 70-year-old caucasian man (affected by crohn's disease) due to the laceration of the ileocolic mesentery and its blood vessels following a colonoscopy procedure carried out only a few hours previously. MATERIAL OF THE STUDY: The autopsy showed that the lacerated blood vessels...

Biliary atresia (BA) is a fatal condition resulting in the lack of effective biliary drainage leading invariably to liver failure and cirrhosis within a year, and it is often lethal within a few months in the absence of corrective surgery or liver transplantation. In fact, BA is the most common indication for pediatric liver transplantation....

Background: Intracranial dural arteriovenous fistula (DAVF) consists of a meshwork of arteriovenous shunts. Drainage of the fistula may be into a dural sinus or directly into cortical veins. Rarely, dural arteriovenous fistulas drain exclusively into perimedullary veins. Prompt diagnosis is important, as the clinical course is potentially life...

Introduction and objectives. In Italy, four minors have died in the last year as a result of male circumcision (MC) procedures performed for cultural and religious reasons by unqualified persons in unhygienic conditions. Results and discussion. After illustrating the historical and ethical outlines of the moral admissibility of MC within a...

Decapitation is the severance of the head from the body. Generally, cases of decapitation are considered as homicidal, as there are very few cases of accidental and suicidal decapitation in the world. In homicides, decapitation could be the cause of death as well the result of a postmortem body dismemberment or mutilation in order, for example,...