Health in the Ancient World: Part II

I'm looking to gear my Winter Quarter Skeletal Biology research paper on uncovering and understanding disease in the ancient world, perhaps even a comparison with Greek and Roman bone samples if that is not too ambitious. The great news is that I have received permission from my instructor, Dr. Stout, to explore the subject and to come up with a paper topic by whatever I deem research-worthy or most interesting.

In the first part of this series on ancient health, I took a look at the recent news posting about new data from dental pulp samples revealing typhoid fever as a possible cause for the plague of 430 B.C. in Athens. I was curious about the remarks of the Greek historian Thucydides, who, in Book II of Histories, led scholars to rule out typhoid as the cause of the plague.

An article called "Thucydides and the Plague: The Roots of Scientific Writing", appeared in Written Communication, v. 15, issue 3: 1998. It sums up previous research that attempted to make analogous the ancient plague descriptions with modern illnesses such as influenza and measles. But with Thucydides' descriptions of the plague, there seems no real modern counterpart, the culprit of the ancient deaths remaining largely a mystery. That is precisely what makes the new research on dental pulp so exciting as we begin to see more of a bioarchaeological approach being used to solve an old question.

Integration of archaeological evidence with written evidence from ancient historians is what drew me into classical archaeology in the first place: comparing ancient texts, i.e.Pliny's description of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, to the evidence left behind in the record, is not only exciting, but also provides such a great tool to learn about the past.

In what other ways can we start putting together the history of ancient health and disease?

For starters, Malaria and Rome : a history of malaria in ancient Italy by Robert Sallares was recommended to me as an "interesting read" by my former ancient history advisor Dr. Nathan Rosenstein.

The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, v. 60, no. 1: January 2005, provides a book review of Malaria and Rome by Dr. Ann Hanson of Yale. Hanson states that Sallares "juxtaposes ancient literary and archeological evidence about malaria with what is now known about the disease's ecology and epidemiology...". The book is being sent to me as we speak, so I will post an update once I go through the material.

In the next post in this series, I'll be discussing two recent publications on ancient health--both are case studies: one from Isola Sacra and the other on Classical and Hellenistic Greeks.