ZACCHIA, PAOLO. - Physician, born in Rome in 1584, died there in 1659.
He completed his primary and secondary studies with the Sodality Fathers and the Jesuits; he earned his degree in medicine in Rome. In 1644, during the papacy of Innocent X, he was appointed by the pope as Protomedico and Pontifical Archiatros, also thanks to the widespread fame he had achieved through his *Quaestiones medico-morales*, which he had begun publishing as early as 1621. He was a man of versatile intellect, devoting himself to painting, composing music and poetry, but he remains renowned for his medical culture and practical skill; above all, he is considered the founder and, for his time, an excellent practitioner of legal and pastoral medicine (v. PASTORALE). He was buried in the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome.
In his works, he addressed a wide range of subjects and was among the first to affirm the contagiousness of tuberculosis. His *Quaestiones* in 10 and 11 volumes, intended for physicians and legal scholars—a publication that cost him about thirty years—deal in particular with a variety of medico-legal topics, from pregnancy and childbirth, dietetics and teratology, offspring and the recognition of paternity, toxicology, malingering, the contagiousness of diseases, professional errors, medical deontology, pulmonary docimasy, the possessed and the demoniac. He also wrote a treatise on neuro-psychoses of a depressive type.