Paleopathology

The word paleopathology, derived from the Greek palaios, pathos, and logos, meaning liter- ally “study of ancient diseases,” was coined in 1892/3 by the German physicist R. W. Schufeldt and has appeared in the Standard Dictionary of Funk and Wagnall since 1895. However, it was Sir Armand Ruffer who made the word popular, using it in his extensive studies on Egyptian mummies. Paleopathology can be defined as the discipline that studies the diseases of past populations through the examination of ancient human remains, both skeletonized and mum- mified (see MUMMIES AND MUMMIFICATION). In these last decades paleopathology has become an autonomous discipline, distin- guishing itself as a branch of medicine, but retaining its interdisciplinary characteristics; it makes use of contributions from different sub- jects, such as history, archaeology, physical anthropology (see ANTHROPOLOGY), and patho- logical anatomy. This type of approach makes paleopathology different from the history of medicine: while the history of medicine is based prevalently on indirect sources, both historical and literary, in order to reconstruct the history of physicians and therapies, paleopathology studies disease in ancient human remains directly. Paleopathology has a double interest, both anthropological and medical: anthropological, because the habits and lifestyles of ancient populations can be reconstructed from the features and the incidence of different pathol- ogies; medical, because the study of the origins of some important present-day diseases, such as cancer and arteriosclerosis, as well as the reconstruction of the historical diffusion of infectious diseases, have a great interest in modern medicine. From the first steps of the discipline, dating from the end of the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, substantial progress has been made. Early studies generally consisted of brief reports, which described pathologies observed from a macroscopic point of view in isolated samples. With the passing of time, an epidemiological and statis- tical approach has been adopted, and interest in disease incidence within entire populations, as well as the arrangement of diachronic and synchronous models, has prevailed. Recently, paleopathology has started to apply the most up-to-date imaging techniques employed in medicine to the study of ancient human remains. In addition to conventional radiology, used extensively since the 1920s, the discipline has in recent decades promoted the application of other modern techno- logies including: Computed Tomography (CT) for a more detailed analysis of mummies and virtual reconstructions; endoscopy, for the exploration of the body cavities; microscopy, including light microscopy; Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM); and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) for the histologi- cal, histochemical, and immunohistochemical analysis of ancient tissues. Finally, DNA study for the investigation of paleogenetics and ancient pathogens, which is revolutionizing the knowledge of past infections, is likely to bring about promising techniques in the near future. In the 1970s, Aidan and Eve Cockburn founded the Association of Paleopathology in Detroit, providing a fundamental tool of communication for researchers in the field (Cockburn et al. 1998). At present the Associ- ation, which brings together hundreds of scholars of different disciplines distributed all over the world, organizes an annual meeting in North America and a biennial one in Europe, and publishes a quarterly publication, the Paleopathology Newsletter, which collects all the news about the discipline. REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aufderheide, A. C. and Rodriguez-Martin, C. (1998) The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology. Cambridge. Buikstra, J. E. and Beck, L. A., eds. (2006) Bioarchaeology: the contextual analysis of human remains. Amsterdam. Cockburn, A., Cockburn, E., and Reyman, T. A. (1998) Mummies, disease and ancient cultures. Cambridge. Ortner, D. J. (2003) Identification of pathological conditions in human skeletal remains. Amsterdam. Roberts, C. and Manchester, K. (2007) The archaeology of disease. Ithaca. Waldron, T. (2009) Palaeopathology. Cambridge.