The antiquity of disease / by Roy L. Moodie.

  • Roy Lee Moodie
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The antiquity of disease / by Roy L. Moodie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    146/174 page 126
    showed deformities due to rickets, and a series of verte¬ brae gathered from many places showed a continuous history for spondylitis deformans from 4000 B.c- 300 a.d. Ruffer concludes from these studies that the people usually did not survive the age of fifty and life for m'ost of them must have been pretty miserable. There are no evidences that dentistry was ever practiced. Pyorrhea alveolaris especially seems to be as old as the human race, since Ruffer observed evidences of it in skulls of Greeks, Romans, Peruvians, Mexicans, Mero¬ vingians, and Germans. Thoma, 1916, has studied the evidences of dental diseases in 250 ancient Egyptian skeletons (2000 b.c.) preserved in the Peabody Museum at Harvard Univer¬ sity. His results agree with Ruffer’s. SYMMETRIC OSTEOPOROSIS OF THE SKULL A nutritional disturbance, evidently having its inception in infancy or early childhood, was doubtless the cause of the development of patches of porous bone developed in the skulls of certain ancient Egyptians. Thus Adachi has described and figured a skull of a young Egyptian from an ancient cemetery of Siut which exhibits on the posterior half of each parietal, removed from both the sagittal and lambdoid sutures by about 2 centimeters, an elongated, oval area of rounded openings of various dimensions which find their way into the diploe but never into the cranial cavity (Fig. 27). A similar condition is described in a recent Dyak skull of middle age, in which the porosities are larger and more developed on the left side. Another example of this condition is given by Hrdlicka from ancient Peru.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3