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The eye doctor had seen to it that Pius XII's final agonies were photographed, and he himself took copious clinical notes on the papal pulse, temperature, elimination, and death throes. Within a week after the Pope's death, Galeazzi-Lisi solicited bids on his photographs and deathbed journal. The price list: $13,320 for an anecdotal article on his life with the Pope, to include clinical details; $8,000—later reduced to $3,200—for an hour-by-hour account of the papal agony; $3,200 for photographs of the death throes; $1,600 for a story on the embalming process. (Il Giorno Editorialist Gaetano Baldacci charged that Galeazzi-Lisi, employing an "aromatic spirits" technique which he claimed had been used on the body of Christ, wretchedly botched the job.) Two Italian dailies, Rome's Il Tempo and Turin's La Stampa, bought Galeazzi-Lisi's second entree for a joint bid of $3,200. Conservative, pro-Catholic Il Tempo printed it, after deleting "certain passages which appeared to us too crude."
How Could It Be? In the outcry following this journalistic coup, Galeazzi-Lisi first defended his act ("I waited until my patient was dead"), then denied that he had received "un soldo" for his pains, then resigned his post. The College of Cardinals banned him from the Vatican. As the storm of censure mounted, the greatest cry was appropriately against the money-hungry doctor rather than the story-hungry press. Milan's daily Il Giorno (circ. 150,000), coming to the astonished realization that the Pope's chief physician was not a tried clinician, asked what was, perhaps, the most startling question raised by the whole furor: "How could Pius XII entrust his health for so many years to a quack?"
This week, as the College of Cardinals balloted on a new Pope, they acted under the tightest code of secrecy in the history of the papacy. Author of the rules, which decreed excommunication for the slightest leak: press-relations-conscious Pius XII, who may have known more about the foibles of Popes' aides and press than anyone thought he knew. With the strict code in force, the edgy press corps watched smoke rise from the chimney in the Sistine Chapel after the first two ballots last week and, in each case, fired off false bulletins. They flashed too soon because the first puff of smoke seemed to be white (Pope elected) but on second puff it turned out to be black.
* Showing a higher sense of propriety than the physician, the publications that accepted the pictures decided not to use them.
† At 3:52 a.m., a chronological fact that sent Romans scurrying to place their lire on numbers three and 52 in the daily lottery; both paid off.
* From the Greek archi and iatros, or "first physician," a title given to court physicians by both the ancient Greeks and Romans.