1.3 Bodies from Roman London

So Becky, what can we find out about the diseases people lived with when we look at human bones?

Well, human bones are fantastic because what they do is they capture lots of information about a person’s life. So we can look at their health from childhood right up until the time that they died. And here I’ve taken a selection of middle aged Roman men from London, and they’ve all broken their tibia. So these are your shin bones, so this is the bones below your knee. And as you can see, they’ve got the same fracture so they’ve all sustained an oblique fracture. So they’ve had a twisting force on their leg.

That one’s really twisted.

So what we’re looking at is this area here. And so we can see that there’s a degree of overlap on the bone. We can see here on the shaft it should be one continuous run. And instead, we’ve got this big lump here and this is where the end of the bone has got overlapped on the main shaft.

And we can see here this is the callus, which is all remodelled into the bone so it’s all the same colour, and this is telling us that the person sustained the injury many years ago. This one is very much twisted and you can see here that, in contrast to a lot of them, that it has been angulated so it’s been tilted forwards so their whole foot would have been pushed forwards.

So when they’re walking--

Oh yeah--

--you could have told he’d got an injury. An old one.

Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. And then if we look here, we’ve got-- this is all osteoarthritis here. So that-- the shininess, the pitting, and that lipping here is where the knee joint has been placed under a lot of stress.

Some of these injuries you think, gosh how could you possibly walk with that?

Exactly because most of the impairments that we see in the ancient world are mainly derived through injury, so accidental injury like this, or through old age where people have debilitating conditions like osteoarthritis. Because we have so much clinical data and we have all of the ancient medical texts which are telling us how people should set fractures and things, that really we can look at this and see the range of treatments that were available and how successful they were. But what we also have to bear in mind is that we’re seeing an individual.

Yes.

And so this person may have broken their leg but not actually had enough money to have it set properly rather than it being set badly.

So what you’re saying is that the medical texts are helpful.

Yeah.

But you can’t obviously tell if someone accessed the person who knew how to set bones.

Exactly.

So what about babies in the ancient world? I see we’ve got some skeletons of infants here.

Yes, we do.

What can we tell from that about the sorts of things people-- people lived with and also what children were born with--

Yeah.

--in the ancient world?

Children are absolutely fantastic because they are a snapshot of a very limited amount of time. So unlike these individuals where we see years and years and years, because we can age them very, very well, we can see the changes that are happening over a shorter time span. So they’ve actually got the same disease.

Oh, what’s that?

Well, this is a very, very interesting disease to us and this is rickets. So it’s rickets when it’s in children, and it’s osteomalacia when it’s in adults, but it’s caused by the same thing. So these children haven’t had sufficient levels of vitamin D, and most of your vitamin D you absorb by exposure to the sunlight through your skin.

Yes.

And Britain is really bad for this, and it’s very, very unusual for children to develop vitamin D in this age group. So for this person, what we’re looking at here is the end of that radius – so that’s one of the forearm bones – has got more of a conical shape.

Yes.

And it looks very frayed, and it’s got lots of holes in it. So the thing is because children grow so quickly, we have to be very careful in distinguishing between what is growth and what is pathological. But in comparison to lots of other infants from Rome and London that we have, this is very unusual. It’s very, very distinctive changes, the frayed edges, the expansion. And it’s also slightly bowing as well; the legs and the arms bow because the bone itself is not strong enough so you’ve got the weight of the body and it pushes it down.

Can’t sustain the weight.

So we’ve done isotopic studies of both of these and that’s shown that they’re having breast milk either from their mother or perhaps through a wet nurse and what’s that--

Wow.

--and so if the mother is healthy, she should have sufficient vitamin D passing through her milk to her child to protect the child. And also when they’re born, they have, obviously, you know, sufficient levels of vitamin D. So what this is showing us is that their mums are very, very ill.

I see.

Yeah.

Oh, so the child is actually telling us about the mother’s health.

Yeah.