The study of the human remains from Nubia: The contribution of Grafton Elliot Smith and his colleagues to palaeopathology

Abstract

Human remains have excited the curiosity and interest of the general public for centuries but their systematic study, and that of the diseases whose marks they bear, has been erratic and most often a fringe activity of those whose professional interests were directed mainly elsewhere.The first palaeopathological report appears to have been that of Esper' who described a tumour in the femur of a cave bear but which Mayer subsequently considered to be a simple fracture.2Other reports in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also concerned with fossilized animal bones and credit for the introduction of human palaeopathology is generally accorded to Virchow in consideration of his publication on Neanderthal bones in 1872.3Virchow described a shortening of the ulna and humerus which he thought was due to rickets and osteoarthritis (arthritis deformans); the diagnosis of rickets was substantiated much later by Ivanhoe.4Palaeopathological studies in Europe lagged far behind those in America, however, where J C Warren and S G Morton had produced works on the crania of the mound builders between 1822 and 1839 and begun what Jarcho described as a cranial fixation which persisted well into the first half of the twentieth century.5Both Warren and Morton described artificial cranial deformation and, in Morton's case, evidence for trauma.The first systematic study of disease in ancient human remains in America was undertaken by Joseph Jones, the results of which were published in a monograph in 1876.6 Syphilis was one of the diseases which Jones reported as being present in his assemblage and this disease became a subject of intense speculation among early American palaeopathologists.The studies in America had been stimulated very largely by the great quantities

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